Bound to the Tracks of the Train (Part 1/5) | Community | Jeff/Britta
Bound to the Tracks of the Train
Jeff/Britta
~26,400 words total
Jeff struggles with life post-grad. Britta feels suffocated by Greendale. Just because they're good-looking doesn't make them villains. Until it does.
This was written for Het Big Bang 2013. A few things you should know before you begin: this story contains the "graphic depictions of violence" warning because I believe it's better to over-warn than under-warn. Basically, the violence isn't that graphic or descriptive, but it is there, so if you have any hesitations about reading it, please feel free to talk to me about it!
I began planning and writing this before Advanced Intro to Finality aired, and so I basically picked and chose which elements from that episode to include. You'll notice that Jeff mentions his Darkest Timeline daydream, but he isn't offered the job with his old firm, and also the group takes the second semester of Cornwallis's History class instead of astrology or whatever they're taking in season five. Pierce is also gone, although I had to write him off myself since the show didn't do it for me! As far as the timeline goes, I adjusted season four's wonky timeline in order to fit a more real-world version; so Jeff graduated in December 2012 instead of... who knows, really.
Lastly, THANK YOU to Libby for your encouragement and support and help, as well as for fielding "does this make sense?" text messages, putting up with me blathering about this for the last three-plus months, and generally being an A+ human and friend. I love you! Please get your puppy pics ready.
Check out beautiful, beautiful art for this story here!
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
This is how it begins:
You see, three and a half years feels like a lifetime but it’s really just the blink of an eye, certainly not long enough for people to forget. So when Jeff graduates and mails out his resume, makes phone calls, and sends emails, nothing happens. Well, not exactly nothing. He does get responses, mostly consisting of pitiful tones and flowery language: “You’re a great lawyer, Jeff, but after what happened, we’re unable to take the risk.”
Because he’s a risk now. He’s something people and firms avoid like the plague. He calls in every favor he thought he had but December turns to January turns to February turns to March and he spends his days at Greendale still, hunkered down on the couch in the back of the study room and surviving off the free sandwiches Shirley supplies him with.
Being a lawyer is the only thing he knows how to do. It’s all he’s ever wanted to do, really, to stand in front of the jury and use big words and emphasize all the right syllables. It’s what he’s good at.
(The fact that the only thing he’s good at is bullshitting people does not escape his radar. However, after almost four years, Jeff’s pretty much over the whole self-discovery arc.)
So… all that, all the mental breakdowns and the ridiculous themed dances and the paintballs to the chest and the alternate timelines, all he has to show for it is a piece of paper and a dent in the study room couch from his ass. He thought he’d have it all but he doesn’t; he sits with his phone clutched in his fist, willing it to vibrate, but when it does it’s always either another rejection or a call from his mother because she hasn’t heard from him. She doesn’t know the half of it and he can’t bring himself to tell her. So her calls go to voicemail and they pile up next to the standard “We’re sorry, Mr. Winger, but we’ve decided to go in another direction.”
The group reassures him, tells him there are a lot of other things he can do while he’s waiting for someone else to fuck up even worse so he looks good by comparison. Well, they don’t add the second part-he adds it himself, because really, that’s what he’s waiting for. He wakes up every morning wondering if today is the day Alan’s going to get caught doing coke in the bathroom of the courthouse. He just needs someone, anyone, to make a mistake so they need him, so they call him and say, “Please, Jeff, we have this case and no one can take it but you.”
Because even at Greendale, Jeff’s not needed anymore. The group assembles around the table each day and suddenly the head has flipped and Troy’s sitting at it. They joke and they laugh and they sit through the second semester of Cornwallis’s history class without a beat. He once thought he was the thread that connected them all but as they put the finishing touches on their Great Depression diorama they don’t seem very threadless. They seem to have forgotten him, in the corner on the couch, headphones over his ears as he pretends to be listening to music but is actually eavesdropping.
And suddenly, he has nothing. He had thought the day he was disbarred was rock bottom. But at least then he’d been under the delusion he had somewhere to go. Jeff feels so stupid because he kept going for so long thinking once he got that degree he’d be all set. He let the lull of Greendale fool him into thinking he was a big shot.
And now he sits, every day, feeling himself waste away. He was always delusional enough to believe he’d been destined for more than this but every bad decision he’s ever made plays for him on the backs of his eyelids and the group’s laughs are like needles in his skin. It’s over; it was over eight years ago when he decided to do this, it was over the day his father left, it was over the day he was born, because if you cut Jeff Winger open his insides are probably all black.
The thing that’s been keeping Britta going is an overwhelming need to prove everyone wrong. “I’ll be a great therapist,” she repeats as a mantra every morning as she drags herself out of bed to go to class and study group and duck her head as everyone ridicules her. But suddenly there are only six weeks left in the semester and she should be on track to graduating but the thing they don’t tell you is that when you stumble around until your third year of school before choosing a major, you’re going to be there for a while.
It’s the longest Britta’s been in one place since she was a teenager and she’s starting to feel suffocated by the routine, by seeing the same buildings and streets every morning on her drive to school. She dreams that the arms on her chair in the study room turn to ropes and tie her down, binding her forever to Greendale and a life she’s not sure she wants anymore. She’s restless, shakes her leg while she sits and taps her pen against her notebook so loud that Annie huffs and scoffs and Abed starts stealing her pens at the beginning of the hour.
She stays late in the study room sometimes, psych notes spread around her, and she remembers the day she told the group about her new major and they all laughed at her. She thinks about grad school and not getting in or getting in and then settling into a nine-to-five and paying taxes and having an office with a leather chair. She tries to picture herself sitting behind a desk and jotting notes on a legal pad while someone pays her to solve their problems when she can’t even figure out her own. She remembers trying to help Abed and gets embarrassed all over again because really?
She begins to regress: she starts smoking again, sitting in her parked car between classes, the window rolled down just a crack. She spends all her money on gum and mints and Febreeze but she knows how transparent she is to everyone else. They never say anything and Britta can’t tell if it’s because they really don’t notice or if they don’t care or if they pity her for whatever reason.
Everything is… off. Everyone else seems so confident in what they’re doing with their lives and everything is finally, finally falling into place for all of them. And Britta’s not going to deny them their happiness because she knows how hard they’ve all worked for it, but she can’t help but feel left behind. Shirley and Annie will graduate in May, Pierce is off living on an island his father part-owned, Troy and Abed have resigned themselves to another semester of Greendale to focus on completing their degrees. The smile she wears begins to crack at the edges and on the weekends she sleeps in later and later, not waking up until the sun begins to slowly disappear, because faking it every day is getting exhausting.
And then:
One day in mid-April Britta cuts class to sit on the couch with Jeff, who slumps with his laptop balanced on his stomach. He claims to be looking for jobs but he’s really watching The Powerpuff Girls on Netflix. It’s a little embarrassing, Britta thinks.
“Why are you here every day?” she asks.
On screen, Buttercup is scowling with her arms crossed over her chest and Britta looks down to see herself in the same pose. She sits on her hands instead.
“Because if I wander into the cafeteria later Shirley will give me a tuna wrap and I’m out of food at my place.”
He’s got a weird beard going on and his hair is mussed and his shirt is wrinkled and it reminds her of that time he got evicted and lived with Abed and reverted back to a nineteen year old.
“Don’t you have class?”
She shrugs and reaches over to turn up the volume. “Do you ever think life would just be easier if someone spilled Chemical X on you and you could just be a superhero and not have to worry about school or jobs or people liking you?”
“You’d be Buttercup,” he says, reaching over to poke her leg.
“Yeah, well, you’d be Blossom,” she retorts. “All pretentiousness and big speeches.”
“Are you flunking out?”
“I dropped one of my classes,” she admits. “Don’t tell the group.”
The episode ends and Netflix counts down to the next one. Jeff closes the laptop and turns to Britta. “Wanna go have sex?”
So they start sleeping together again; only, this time it’s different because Britta didn’t tell him she loved him in a room full of people months before and whatever was between them last semester has cooled. Instead of rules and code names and tiptoeing around a minefield of feelings, it’s just the two of them having sex and eating take-out he scams from Shirley’s and slowly making their way through every episode of The Powerpuff Girls. She keeps skipping classes until some days she doesn’t even bother going to Greendale at all and she and Jeff stay in bed and smoke weed and don’t get dressed.
There's less of a sharpness now-it's smoother and easier and rounder, curves where it once was angles. There's nothing to prove anymore, not to each other or themselves. It's simple and Britta likes this version more than the first. She got off on sneaking around once upon a time but now she just gets off on him, on the familiarity and the comfort and his mouth and hands.
On the days she doesn’t go to school at all, Annie and Shirley come by to make sure she’s still alive. They wrinkle their noses in disgust because Britta’s pretty sure the apartment reeks of weed and body odor, but they very politely don’t say anything about Jeff on her couch in boxers and a t-shirt.
She withdraws from the rest of her classes and suddenly her transcript is littered with Incompletes. She can re-take classes in the summer or the fall if she wants. But right now, she’s not sure if she wants to or not; she feels kind of stuck.
They finish The Powerpuff Girls and Jeff’s beard is thick and ugly. It chafes on her face and her breasts and her thighs and one day she comes home from the grocery store with a razor and shaving cream, hoping he’ll get the hint. He doesn’t.
“I kinda like it,” he says as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the one walking around with beard burn all over your body,” she mutters. She’s in the shower using the razor because, hey, she paid for it, didn’t she? But it’s a men’s razor and she nicks her legs a dozen times and the water turns red as it swirls down the drain.
When she turns off the water he’s still standing at the mirror, examining himself, but it’s with less enthusiasm than he used to. She wraps a towel around her body and sits on the closed toilet lid, sticking band-aids to all her cuts.
“We should do something,” she says as she gathers up the band-aid wrappers and throws them away.
“Like what? There’s nothing I really want to do.”
“That’s what I mean. We used to want to do things. We had goals. We left the house every once in a while. Now I’m a two-time dropout and you have a beard. What happened to us?”
He shrugs. “What happened is that you and I were naïve. We thought we were doing the right thing but there is no right thing for us. You fuck up once you fuck up a million times. Me and you, we’re not cut out for all that.”
“For all what?”
“Success. Normalcy. We’re not the heroes. We’re not Blossom and Buttercup.”
“Okay, that’s a lot we have to unpack,” she says. “I think I need clothes for this conversation. And we probably shouldn’t have it in the bathroom.”
There’s an urge-small, tiny, something she thought she’d never feel again-to sit down and psycho-analyze him. A beam of hope springs up inside of her: her friend is in some sort of bad mental state and she can help. This will be like Thanksgiving but better. She’ll really help instead of just accidentally help.
But as she shrugs on a t-shirt and sweatpants, mindful of her still-bleeding legs, she starts to think about his words and how-even if she’s not entirely sure what they mean yet-he might ultimately be right.
She finds him sprawled out on the couch in the living room. He’s on his phone, fingers moving almost lazily over the keys. She can’t help wonder, the way she always does whenever she sees him with a phone in hand now, if he’s texting no one.
“What did you mean?” she asks as she sits in the chair opposite him. “We’re not cut out for normalcy?”
He nods. “Or getting what we want. We spent this whole time thinking that if we worked hard we’d succeed. Haven’t you worked hard these last four years? Put everything into your psych classes and stayed up late studying for tests and writing papers?”
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Well, maybe not everything, but I’ve tried.”
“And where has it gotten you? Right back where you started.”
“But what about you? You did it all legit this time. You made it through Greendale. You got your degree.”
He scratches his beard and it makes a horrible sound. “Yeah, well, look where I am now. No one in a fifty mile radius will hire me.”
“So leave,” she shrugs. “There’s a great big world out there outside of Greendale. You don’t have to stay here forever.”
He shoots her a look as if that suggestion is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. She’s not sure if it’s because of the group and his inability to move on from them and Greendale, but he makes it pretty clear that he won’t be moving away anytime soon. So she shrugs again.
“Okay, so you messed up. You made a mistake and now you’re paying for it,” she says. “But what about me? What the hell did I do?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way-”
“Too late.”
“-but there’s something about you… I’m not sure what it is. Something that happened to you that you don’t want to tell me. And that’s fine, it’s whatever, but something happened to you and it made you…”
Britta begins to feel a little nauseous because it’s just like Jeff Winger to pinpoint her entire existence in one depressed epiphany. “Made me what?” she asks, even though she doesn’t want to know. It’s like that time Abed imagined her as a robot, and then a few weeks later Annie accused her of not reacting to anything appropriately. She knows there’s tar and sparking wires where her heart is supposed to be, but she’s tried her entire life to fool other people into imagining she’s whole.
“Hard. Off, somehow. Honestly, it’s probably why I like you so much.”
“Like me?”
He makes a vague gesture with his hands. “You know. Me and you. We’re kind of... a team.”
She pulls her legs up underneath her and the cat jumps onto the arm of the chair. She strokes Daniel’s fur and he purrs into her hand. “You know exactly how to make me feel like shit about myself and like you care about me all in the same breath.”
He smirks at her from under his beard and she rolls her eyes and smirks back.
They sit in silence then, Jeff on his phone and Britta with the cat, and she wonders if what he said is true. She’s managed to put that birthday party behind her as best as she knew how, but he pops into her mind every once in a while, his yellowing teeth and beady eyes and greasy hair. He’d taken off the head part of the costume after she came into the back room and he smelled like the bourbon and Cokes her grandfather used to drink and to this day, even the bottle of Jim Beam makes Britta break into a cold sweat. Sometimes she dreams about it, about her frustrated tears in the manager’s office and how she was so mad at herself for crying because she believed that was the reason no one was taking her seriously.
And maybe that was when it all started. When her dad led her out of the restaurant, his grip too tight on her hand, the guy had the audacity to wink at her from the window. So she went home and hid under the covers for five days, missing out on Halloween, and her princess costume hung unworn in the closet and her mother complained about how much it cost. When she emerged from bed she started drawing flaming meteors on her jeans and her friends stopped talking to her. And her teachers labeled her a problem child because she took a week-long vow of silence and refused to do her homework. And her parents wrote her off as being unnecessarily rebellious and she dyed her hair every color of the rainbow and slept with boys who called her names. And she dropped out of high school and ran away the first chance she got.
She’s never told Jeff any of this and he’s never asked. She thought he might, back on Thanksgiving, when she found out more about him than she’d ever bargained for. But one thing she’ll say about Jeff Winger: he’s never pushed. Even now, he scrolls through his phone lazily and he knows there’s something, but he’ll never come straight out and ask her what it is. She knows he’ll listen if she chooses to tell him, but he’s not going to press the issue. And Britta’s pretty grateful for that.
And so:
The rest of the group makes an effort to include Jeff and Britta in their off-campus activities, but when Jeff and Britta show up at Troy, Abed, and Annie’s for dinner or movie nights, it’s always a little strained, as though there’s a line dividing the four of them and the two of them. So sometimes Troy calls Jeff and invites him to guys’ night and Britta knows Annie is the one behind it because Britta gets calls about mall trips or coffee dates with her and Shirley. It’s as if the rest of the group can only handle Jeff and Britta one-on-one, as if both of them together is too much, too sad, too something they don’t know how to deal with.
The semester is about to end when Annie calls Britta and asks her if she’s free on Saturday. “The Transfer Dance is next week, and since it’s my last big Greendale hurrah, I want to look nice,” Annie says. “Would you go shopping with me and help me pick something out?”
On the list of words Britta could go the rest of her life never hearing again, transfer and dance are way up at the top. But she says yes anyway and Annie lets out an adorable squeal and chatters on a little bit about also grabbing lunch and all the stores they can go to. Once upon a time Britta and Annie were friends and they spent their Saturdays at the mall. They gossiped about the study group and Britta reluctantly admitted that she’d seen way more romantic comedies than she let on. So they saw Valentine’s Day one Friday night, gorging themselves on popcorn and Hershey’s bars and on the ride home Britta told Annie stories about bad dates she’d gone on until they were both hunched over, laughing, tears blurring their vision.
But then boys got in the way (or, boy, singular; or, man, because Jeff would not take kindly to being referred to as a boy, and really, calling him a boy after fucking him every night makes Britta skin crawl a little) and Britta became the sort of girl she always hated because she was once all about female empowerment and the importance of female friendships but then one of her closest female friends (okay, one of her only two female friends) kissed a guy she liked and that was the end of that. So if Annie is calling and asking Britta for her help instead of Shirley, that means Annie wants to form a truce of some sort or maybe she’s just concerned about Britta’s sudden reclusiveness. Either way, Britta agrees to spend her Saturday in department store dressing rooms dodging questions about her life.
When she hangs up the phone Jeff gives her a look but he doesn’t say anything.
“I’m going shopping with Annie on Saturday,” she says after a few minutes of silence.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table picking at leftover Chinese food from the night before. They haven’t left the apartment in three days.
“She wants me to help her find a dress for the Transfer Dance.”
“She’s going to that?” Jeff asks.
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t gone since... you know.”
“Me neither.”
He sets his fork down on the table and pushes his chair back a little. He’s silent, like he is a lot of the time now, as if he used up all his words earning that useless bachelor’s degree. So she slides out of her chair and walks around the table before settling in his lap. His arm comes around her waist and he runs his fingers along the band of her sweatpants.
She leans down to kiss him and he tastes like soy sauce. When she pulls back it’s in his beard and she dabs at it with her fingertips. “You should really shave this thing. I miss your chin.”
“Tell you what,” he says, tightening his grip on her slightly. “I’ll shave it off when something significant happens.”
“Like what?” she laughs.
He shrugs. “We’ll know when it happens.”
“What kind of significant are we talking? Like, a blowjob at the kitchen table significant or winning the lottery significant?”
“Well, I was thinking more along the lines of lottery, but I wouldn’t say no to a kitchen blowjob.”
She turns to the table and spears a snow pea on his fork. “You already kind of did.” She pops the pea in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “I still haven’t completely forgiven you for that whole thing, you know.”
She doesn’t specify but she doesn’t have to. “I know,” he says. He takes the fork from her and gets himself a piece of chicken. “See what I told you, though? If we were good people, that wouldn’t have happened to us.”
The Transfer Dance is not something they talk about and it’s not something Britta likes to think about. But she carries it with her, another piece of baggage on her luggage cart. Each time she makes a stupid decision she tries hard not to dwell on it but she usually does; she spent the entire summer thinking of what would have happened if she hadn’t done it. Maybe Jeff is right, maybe if she was a normal, good person, it wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have felt so unnecessarily competitive and she would have acted on her feelings for Jeff in a mature, appropriate way.
“We should take it back.”
“Uh, Jeff, I think we already did that. And it ended with you in the health center covered in urine.”
“No, not like that.” He grabs his beer off the table and takes a sip before handing it to her. “I mean we crash the dance and we make it ours.”
“What are we, twelve?” She downs rest of the beer. “No one would care if we went, so is that even crashing?”
His fingers dip beneath her waistband and brush along her hipbone. “If we go and mess everything up, rig the Transfer Queen vote, whatever, then it can’t hurt us anymore. It doesn’t matter because we win in the end.” His fingers move lower, play against the front of her panties, and she bites her lip.
She shifts a little to allow him better access. He leans his face in close, his breath mixing with hers, as he nudges her panties to the side and slides into her, one finger at a time. “Aren’t you tired of all this, Britta?” he asks lowly. “Tired of trying so hard and getting nowhere?”
“Yes,” she gasps. She wraps her arms around his neck and fists his shirt with her free hand. The empty beer bottle dangles in her other.
His fingers curl in and out of her and his thumb works at her clit. His mouth moves against her neck, tongue and lips and teeth, and she can feel him, growing hard against her.
“We’re bad people, you and me,” he says into her collarbone. “We’ve tried so hard to fake it but it’s caught up to us. We should just embrace it, don’t you think?”
She bucks her hips up to meet his hand and her stomach begins to clench and tighten because his words shouldn’t affect her so. She should get up and tell him to leave, that he’s being ridiculous, but she can’t because she knows it’s true. Her hand moves from his shirt into his hair, where she scratches at his scalp, digs her nails in hard enough to draw blood.
“We’re never going to be the heroes. Crash the dance with me. Be my partner in crime.”
Her muscles contract against his fingers and the bottle slips out of her hand and falls to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. She kisses him roughly, moaning into his mouth, their teeth clanking together. His blood is caked underneath her fingernails.
As she comes down from her orgasm their kisses slow until he pulls away, brings his fingers up to his mouth, and sucks them clean. “I think you owe me a kitchen blowjob now.”
She stands on shaky legs and starts to walk away. “Beard,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ll go to the dance, by the way. Clean this mess up.”
She steps on a few shards of glass on her way out of the kitchen and she can feel the blood start to pool beneath her skin. In the bathroom, she pulls the glass out of her feet and then stares into the mirror before she gets in the shower. Her cheeks are flushed and her hair’s a mess, but there’s something new behind her eyes. Or, something old. Something she’d hidden for years. Reflected back at her is her eleven year old self, scared and angry. She strips off her clothes and steps under the water and it’s as hot as it was the night of her eleventh birthday.
Britta’s glad she offered to drive because it gives her something to do while the car is filled only with noise from the radio. She keeps her eyes firmly on the road ahead of her but she can see Annie out of the corner of her eye, fidgeting and crossing and uncrossing her legs. They haven’t exchanged more than “how are you”s and they’re only a few blocks from the mall.
When Britta pulls into the parking lot, she turns the ignition off and gives Annie a hesitant smile. Annie returns it, her mouth stretching into a warm grin.
“Thanks for coming with me, Britta. I really miss you.”
They sift through racks of dresses and Annie fills Britta in on what’s been going on at Greendale, how she and Shirley are going to be co-valedictorians at graduation, how Abed and Troy are staying for another semester, how they’re all managing As in Cornwallis’s class. Britta feels like Greendale is a different world, like her days there were only a dream.
“So, what have you been up to?” Annie asks carefully. She holds a blue dress up for inspection and then shakes her head and puts it back.
“Just... trying to figure it all out, I guess,” Britta says with a shrug. “This would look nice on you.”
Annie takes the black dress and very obviously pretends to consider it. “It would look better on you, I think. How are things with, uh, you and Jeff?”
“Fine, I guess. We’re not, like, together or anything.”
“Oh,” Annie says. “I’m going to try these on. Will you wait outside?”
“Sure.” Britta takes a seat on the floor outside of Annie’s dressing room and draws patterns in the carpet with her finger. She wonders what would happen if she told Annie she needed a dress, too. She’ll have to come back another day; she and Jeff decided not to tell anyone about their plans.
“So, um, when you say you and Jeff aren’t together, what does that mean exactly?” Annie asks over the rustle of clothes. The door opens and she steps out in a pink dress that’s way too frumpy. Britta shakes her head and wrinkles her nose.
“It means that he’s always on my couch and we… sleep together.” Annie bites her lip a little and Britta sighs and her shoulders slump. “Look, we’ve never really talked about this, but I know you and Jeff... well, I don’t want to fight with you about boys anymore. I hope this whole thing doesn’t bother you but we’re both just going through some stuff right now. We’re not getting married or having babies or buying a house or whatever.”
Annie slides down so she’s sitting on the floor next to Britta. The ugly pink dress fans around her. “I’m not going to end up with Jeff,” she says. “And you know? I don’t really want to. So I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t as much as it would have a year ago. And not enough for it to get in the way of our friendship.”
“Really?”
“Really! I’m leaving anyway, you know. I got into the master’s program at UC Colorado Springs and I’m going to get my Forensics degree and I’m going to start a life for myself.”
“That’s really great, Annie! Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” Annie says, smiling. Then her face turns serious. “What are you going to do now?”
Britta watches as a woman in her fifties locks herself in a dressing room, giving the two of them a strange look as she does. “I don’t know,” she mutters.
“What about being a therapist?”
“It’s not that easy anymore.” Britta doesn’t know if she can explain it to Annie, the thing inside of her that finds it all so restricting, the part of her that knows she’s not cut out for a life of helping others when she still hasn’t found a way to help herself. She thinks back to Jeff’s words and shivers a little bit, because they were all so true, and the worst part was that she knew it, maybe all along. And maybe a part of her-the part of her who is petty and mean and cruel, the part of her she’s ashamed of-likes that she has this connection with someone, with Jeff, because it’s something that no one will take away from her, not even Annie. Especially not Annie.
“I don’t know how to act around you anymore,” Annie admits.
Britta pats her leg. “You know what, Annie? I don’t know how to act around me anymore either.”
That night, Jeff’s breathing is just starting to even out when Britta asks, “Do you think I could do it?”
“Do what?” he asks sleepily.
“Go back to school and become a therapist.”
“Of course I think you could do it. But I don’t think you’d be happy.”
“How did it go from being everything I ever wanted to something I know I wouldn’t be able to stand?”
He curls his fingers around her hip and tugs her a bit closer. “Because things always sound good until you have them.”
“Is that how you felt about me and you?” She’s glad her back is to him because this is a question she can only ask him when he can’t see her face. There aren’t too many of those anymore.
“Me and you, unsurprisingly, are the exception to the rule. We’re always better than we sound.”
She laughs a little. “It’s you, you know. You’re the one that makes me weird.”
“Mmm, sweetheart, you know just what to say,” he drawls. “Now go to sleep.”
His lips brush against her hair and she pushes back into his chest a little further, burrowing under his chin. She listens as his heartbeat slows and she feels a twisted sort of solace in not moving toward something for the first time in years, in moving backward instead, of knowing that-for now, at least-she isn’t alone in all of it.
PART II
Jeff/Britta
~26,400 words total
Jeff struggles with life post-grad. Britta feels suffocated by Greendale. Just because they're good-looking doesn't make them villains. Until it does.
This was written for Het Big Bang 2013. A few things you should know before you begin: this story contains the "graphic depictions of violence" warning because I believe it's better to over-warn than under-warn. Basically, the violence isn't that graphic or descriptive, but it is there, so if you have any hesitations about reading it, please feel free to talk to me about it!
I began planning and writing this before Advanced Intro to Finality aired, and so I basically picked and chose which elements from that episode to include. You'll notice that Jeff mentions his Darkest Timeline daydream, but he isn't offered the job with his old firm, and also the group takes the second semester of Cornwallis's History class instead of astrology or whatever they're taking in season five. Pierce is also gone, although I had to write him off myself since the show didn't do it for me! As far as the timeline goes, I adjusted season four's wonky timeline in order to fit a more real-world version; so Jeff graduated in December 2012 instead of... who knows, really.
Lastly, THANK YOU to Libby for your encouragement and support and help, as well as for fielding "does this make sense?" text messages, putting up with me blathering about this for the last three-plus months, and generally being an A+ human and friend. I love you! Please get your puppy pics ready.
Check out beautiful, beautiful art for this story here!
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
This is how it begins:
You see, three and a half years feels like a lifetime but it’s really just the blink of an eye, certainly not long enough for people to forget. So when Jeff graduates and mails out his resume, makes phone calls, and sends emails, nothing happens. Well, not exactly nothing. He does get responses, mostly consisting of pitiful tones and flowery language: “You’re a great lawyer, Jeff, but after what happened, we’re unable to take the risk.”
Because he’s a risk now. He’s something people and firms avoid like the plague. He calls in every favor he thought he had but December turns to January turns to February turns to March and he spends his days at Greendale still, hunkered down on the couch in the back of the study room and surviving off the free sandwiches Shirley supplies him with.
Being a lawyer is the only thing he knows how to do. It’s all he’s ever wanted to do, really, to stand in front of the jury and use big words and emphasize all the right syllables. It’s what he’s good at.
(The fact that the only thing he’s good at is bullshitting people does not escape his radar. However, after almost four years, Jeff’s pretty much over the whole self-discovery arc.)
So… all that, all the mental breakdowns and the ridiculous themed dances and the paintballs to the chest and the alternate timelines, all he has to show for it is a piece of paper and a dent in the study room couch from his ass. He thought he’d have it all but he doesn’t; he sits with his phone clutched in his fist, willing it to vibrate, but when it does it’s always either another rejection or a call from his mother because she hasn’t heard from him. She doesn’t know the half of it and he can’t bring himself to tell her. So her calls go to voicemail and they pile up next to the standard “We’re sorry, Mr. Winger, but we’ve decided to go in another direction.”
The group reassures him, tells him there are a lot of other things he can do while he’s waiting for someone else to fuck up even worse so he looks good by comparison. Well, they don’t add the second part-he adds it himself, because really, that’s what he’s waiting for. He wakes up every morning wondering if today is the day Alan’s going to get caught doing coke in the bathroom of the courthouse. He just needs someone, anyone, to make a mistake so they need him, so they call him and say, “Please, Jeff, we have this case and no one can take it but you.”
Because even at Greendale, Jeff’s not needed anymore. The group assembles around the table each day and suddenly the head has flipped and Troy’s sitting at it. They joke and they laugh and they sit through the second semester of Cornwallis’s history class without a beat. He once thought he was the thread that connected them all but as they put the finishing touches on their Great Depression diorama they don’t seem very threadless. They seem to have forgotten him, in the corner on the couch, headphones over his ears as he pretends to be listening to music but is actually eavesdropping.
And suddenly, he has nothing. He had thought the day he was disbarred was rock bottom. But at least then he’d been under the delusion he had somewhere to go. Jeff feels so stupid because he kept going for so long thinking once he got that degree he’d be all set. He let the lull of Greendale fool him into thinking he was a big shot.
And now he sits, every day, feeling himself waste away. He was always delusional enough to believe he’d been destined for more than this but every bad decision he’s ever made plays for him on the backs of his eyelids and the group’s laughs are like needles in his skin. It’s over; it was over eight years ago when he decided to do this, it was over the day his father left, it was over the day he was born, because if you cut Jeff Winger open his insides are probably all black.
The thing that’s been keeping Britta going is an overwhelming need to prove everyone wrong. “I’ll be a great therapist,” she repeats as a mantra every morning as she drags herself out of bed to go to class and study group and duck her head as everyone ridicules her. But suddenly there are only six weeks left in the semester and she should be on track to graduating but the thing they don’t tell you is that when you stumble around until your third year of school before choosing a major, you’re going to be there for a while.
It’s the longest Britta’s been in one place since she was a teenager and she’s starting to feel suffocated by the routine, by seeing the same buildings and streets every morning on her drive to school. She dreams that the arms on her chair in the study room turn to ropes and tie her down, binding her forever to Greendale and a life she’s not sure she wants anymore. She’s restless, shakes her leg while she sits and taps her pen against her notebook so loud that Annie huffs and scoffs and Abed starts stealing her pens at the beginning of the hour.
She stays late in the study room sometimes, psych notes spread around her, and she remembers the day she told the group about her new major and they all laughed at her. She thinks about grad school and not getting in or getting in and then settling into a nine-to-five and paying taxes and having an office with a leather chair. She tries to picture herself sitting behind a desk and jotting notes on a legal pad while someone pays her to solve their problems when she can’t even figure out her own. She remembers trying to help Abed and gets embarrassed all over again because really?
She begins to regress: she starts smoking again, sitting in her parked car between classes, the window rolled down just a crack. She spends all her money on gum and mints and Febreeze but she knows how transparent she is to everyone else. They never say anything and Britta can’t tell if it’s because they really don’t notice or if they don’t care or if they pity her for whatever reason.
Everything is… off. Everyone else seems so confident in what they’re doing with their lives and everything is finally, finally falling into place for all of them. And Britta’s not going to deny them their happiness because she knows how hard they’ve all worked for it, but she can’t help but feel left behind. Shirley and Annie will graduate in May, Pierce is off living on an island his father part-owned, Troy and Abed have resigned themselves to another semester of Greendale to focus on completing their degrees. The smile she wears begins to crack at the edges and on the weekends she sleeps in later and later, not waking up until the sun begins to slowly disappear, because faking it every day is getting exhausting.
And then:
One day in mid-April Britta cuts class to sit on the couch with Jeff, who slumps with his laptop balanced on his stomach. He claims to be looking for jobs but he’s really watching The Powerpuff Girls on Netflix. It’s a little embarrassing, Britta thinks.
“Why are you here every day?” she asks.
On screen, Buttercup is scowling with her arms crossed over her chest and Britta looks down to see herself in the same pose. She sits on her hands instead.
“Because if I wander into the cafeteria later Shirley will give me a tuna wrap and I’m out of food at my place.”
He’s got a weird beard going on and his hair is mussed and his shirt is wrinkled and it reminds her of that time he got evicted and lived with Abed and reverted back to a nineteen year old.
“Don’t you have class?”
She shrugs and reaches over to turn up the volume. “Do you ever think life would just be easier if someone spilled Chemical X on you and you could just be a superhero and not have to worry about school or jobs or people liking you?”
“You’d be Buttercup,” he says, reaching over to poke her leg.
“Yeah, well, you’d be Blossom,” she retorts. “All pretentiousness and big speeches.”
“Are you flunking out?”
“I dropped one of my classes,” she admits. “Don’t tell the group.”
The episode ends and Netflix counts down to the next one. Jeff closes the laptop and turns to Britta. “Wanna go have sex?”
So they start sleeping together again; only, this time it’s different because Britta didn’t tell him she loved him in a room full of people months before and whatever was between them last semester has cooled. Instead of rules and code names and tiptoeing around a minefield of feelings, it’s just the two of them having sex and eating take-out he scams from Shirley’s and slowly making their way through every episode of The Powerpuff Girls. She keeps skipping classes until some days she doesn’t even bother going to Greendale at all and she and Jeff stay in bed and smoke weed and don’t get dressed.
There's less of a sharpness now-it's smoother and easier and rounder, curves where it once was angles. There's nothing to prove anymore, not to each other or themselves. It's simple and Britta likes this version more than the first. She got off on sneaking around once upon a time but now she just gets off on him, on the familiarity and the comfort and his mouth and hands.
On the days she doesn’t go to school at all, Annie and Shirley come by to make sure she’s still alive. They wrinkle their noses in disgust because Britta’s pretty sure the apartment reeks of weed and body odor, but they very politely don’t say anything about Jeff on her couch in boxers and a t-shirt.
She withdraws from the rest of her classes and suddenly her transcript is littered with Incompletes. She can re-take classes in the summer or the fall if she wants. But right now, she’s not sure if she wants to or not; she feels kind of stuck.
They finish The Powerpuff Girls and Jeff’s beard is thick and ugly. It chafes on her face and her breasts and her thighs and one day she comes home from the grocery store with a razor and shaving cream, hoping he’ll get the hint. He doesn’t.
“I kinda like it,” he says as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the one walking around with beard burn all over your body,” she mutters. She’s in the shower using the razor because, hey, she paid for it, didn’t she? But it’s a men’s razor and she nicks her legs a dozen times and the water turns red as it swirls down the drain.
When she turns off the water he’s still standing at the mirror, examining himself, but it’s with less enthusiasm than he used to. She wraps a towel around her body and sits on the closed toilet lid, sticking band-aids to all her cuts.
“We should do something,” she says as she gathers up the band-aid wrappers and throws them away.
“Like what? There’s nothing I really want to do.”
“That’s what I mean. We used to want to do things. We had goals. We left the house every once in a while. Now I’m a two-time dropout and you have a beard. What happened to us?”
He shrugs. “What happened is that you and I were naïve. We thought we were doing the right thing but there is no right thing for us. You fuck up once you fuck up a million times. Me and you, we’re not cut out for all that.”
“For all what?”
“Success. Normalcy. We’re not the heroes. We’re not Blossom and Buttercup.”
“Okay, that’s a lot we have to unpack,” she says. “I think I need clothes for this conversation. And we probably shouldn’t have it in the bathroom.”
There’s an urge-small, tiny, something she thought she’d never feel again-to sit down and psycho-analyze him. A beam of hope springs up inside of her: her friend is in some sort of bad mental state and she can help. This will be like Thanksgiving but better. She’ll really help instead of just accidentally help.
But as she shrugs on a t-shirt and sweatpants, mindful of her still-bleeding legs, she starts to think about his words and how-even if she’s not entirely sure what they mean yet-he might ultimately be right.
She finds him sprawled out on the couch in the living room. He’s on his phone, fingers moving almost lazily over the keys. She can’t help wonder, the way she always does whenever she sees him with a phone in hand now, if he’s texting no one.
“What did you mean?” she asks as she sits in the chair opposite him. “We’re not cut out for normalcy?”
He nods. “Or getting what we want. We spent this whole time thinking that if we worked hard we’d succeed. Haven’t you worked hard these last four years? Put everything into your psych classes and stayed up late studying for tests and writing papers?”
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Well, maybe not everything, but I’ve tried.”
“And where has it gotten you? Right back where you started.”
“But what about you? You did it all legit this time. You made it through Greendale. You got your degree.”
He scratches his beard and it makes a horrible sound. “Yeah, well, look where I am now. No one in a fifty mile radius will hire me.”
“So leave,” she shrugs. “There’s a great big world out there outside of Greendale. You don’t have to stay here forever.”
He shoots her a look as if that suggestion is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. She’s not sure if it’s because of the group and his inability to move on from them and Greendale, but he makes it pretty clear that he won’t be moving away anytime soon. So she shrugs again.
“Okay, so you messed up. You made a mistake and now you’re paying for it,” she says. “But what about me? What the hell did I do?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way-”
“Too late.”
“-but there’s something about you… I’m not sure what it is. Something that happened to you that you don’t want to tell me. And that’s fine, it’s whatever, but something happened to you and it made you…”
Britta begins to feel a little nauseous because it’s just like Jeff Winger to pinpoint her entire existence in one depressed epiphany. “Made me what?” she asks, even though she doesn’t want to know. It’s like that time Abed imagined her as a robot, and then a few weeks later Annie accused her of not reacting to anything appropriately. She knows there’s tar and sparking wires where her heart is supposed to be, but she’s tried her entire life to fool other people into imagining she’s whole.
“Hard. Off, somehow. Honestly, it’s probably why I like you so much.”
“Like me?”
He makes a vague gesture with his hands. “You know. Me and you. We’re kind of... a team.”
She pulls her legs up underneath her and the cat jumps onto the arm of the chair. She strokes Daniel’s fur and he purrs into her hand. “You know exactly how to make me feel like shit about myself and like you care about me all in the same breath.”
He smirks at her from under his beard and she rolls her eyes and smirks back.
They sit in silence then, Jeff on his phone and Britta with the cat, and she wonders if what he said is true. She’s managed to put that birthday party behind her as best as she knew how, but he pops into her mind every once in a while, his yellowing teeth and beady eyes and greasy hair. He’d taken off the head part of the costume after she came into the back room and he smelled like the bourbon and Cokes her grandfather used to drink and to this day, even the bottle of Jim Beam makes Britta break into a cold sweat. Sometimes she dreams about it, about her frustrated tears in the manager’s office and how she was so mad at herself for crying because she believed that was the reason no one was taking her seriously.
And maybe that was when it all started. When her dad led her out of the restaurant, his grip too tight on her hand, the guy had the audacity to wink at her from the window. So she went home and hid under the covers for five days, missing out on Halloween, and her princess costume hung unworn in the closet and her mother complained about how much it cost. When she emerged from bed she started drawing flaming meteors on her jeans and her friends stopped talking to her. And her teachers labeled her a problem child because she took a week-long vow of silence and refused to do her homework. And her parents wrote her off as being unnecessarily rebellious and she dyed her hair every color of the rainbow and slept with boys who called her names. And she dropped out of high school and ran away the first chance she got.
She’s never told Jeff any of this and he’s never asked. She thought he might, back on Thanksgiving, when she found out more about him than she’d ever bargained for. But one thing she’ll say about Jeff Winger: he’s never pushed. Even now, he scrolls through his phone lazily and he knows there’s something, but he’ll never come straight out and ask her what it is. She knows he’ll listen if she chooses to tell him, but he’s not going to press the issue. And Britta’s pretty grateful for that.
And so:
The rest of the group makes an effort to include Jeff and Britta in their off-campus activities, but when Jeff and Britta show up at Troy, Abed, and Annie’s for dinner or movie nights, it’s always a little strained, as though there’s a line dividing the four of them and the two of them. So sometimes Troy calls Jeff and invites him to guys’ night and Britta knows Annie is the one behind it because Britta gets calls about mall trips or coffee dates with her and Shirley. It’s as if the rest of the group can only handle Jeff and Britta one-on-one, as if both of them together is too much, too sad, too something they don’t know how to deal with.
The semester is about to end when Annie calls Britta and asks her if she’s free on Saturday. “The Transfer Dance is next week, and since it’s my last big Greendale hurrah, I want to look nice,” Annie says. “Would you go shopping with me and help me pick something out?”
On the list of words Britta could go the rest of her life never hearing again, transfer and dance are way up at the top. But she says yes anyway and Annie lets out an adorable squeal and chatters on a little bit about also grabbing lunch and all the stores they can go to. Once upon a time Britta and Annie were friends and they spent their Saturdays at the mall. They gossiped about the study group and Britta reluctantly admitted that she’d seen way more romantic comedies than she let on. So they saw Valentine’s Day one Friday night, gorging themselves on popcorn and Hershey’s bars and on the ride home Britta told Annie stories about bad dates she’d gone on until they were both hunched over, laughing, tears blurring their vision.
But then boys got in the way (or, boy, singular; or, man, because Jeff would not take kindly to being referred to as a boy, and really, calling him a boy after fucking him every night makes Britta skin crawl a little) and Britta became the sort of girl she always hated because she was once all about female empowerment and the importance of female friendships but then one of her closest female friends (okay, one of her only two female friends) kissed a guy she liked and that was the end of that. So if Annie is calling and asking Britta for her help instead of Shirley, that means Annie wants to form a truce of some sort or maybe she’s just concerned about Britta’s sudden reclusiveness. Either way, Britta agrees to spend her Saturday in department store dressing rooms dodging questions about her life.
When she hangs up the phone Jeff gives her a look but he doesn’t say anything.
“I’m going shopping with Annie on Saturday,” she says after a few minutes of silence.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table picking at leftover Chinese food from the night before. They haven’t left the apartment in three days.
“She wants me to help her find a dress for the Transfer Dance.”
“She’s going to that?” Jeff asks.
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t gone since... you know.”
“Me neither.”
He sets his fork down on the table and pushes his chair back a little. He’s silent, like he is a lot of the time now, as if he used up all his words earning that useless bachelor’s degree. So she slides out of her chair and walks around the table before settling in his lap. His arm comes around her waist and he runs his fingers along the band of her sweatpants.
She leans down to kiss him and he tastes like soy sauce. When she pulls back it’s in his beard and she dabs at it with her fingertips. “You should really shave this thing. I miss your chin.”
“Tell you what,” he says, tightening his grip on her slightly. “I’ll shave it off when something significant happens.”
“Like what?” she laughs.
He shrugs. “We’ll know when it happens.”
“What kind of significant are we talking? Like, a blowjob at the kitchen table significant or winning the lottery significant?”
“Well, I was thinking more along the lines of lottery, but I wouldn’t say no to a kitchen blowjob.”
She turns to the table and spears a snow pea on his fork. “You already kind of did.” She pops the pea in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “I still haven’t completely forgiven you for that whole thing, you know.”
She doesn’t specify but she doesn’t have to. “I know,” he says. He takes the fork from her and gets himself a piece of chicken. “See what I told you, though? If we were good people, that wouldn’t have happened to us.”
The Transfer Dance is not something they talk about and it’s not something Britta likes to think about. But she carries it with her, another piece of baggage on her luggage cart. Each time she makes a stupid decision she tries hard not to dwell on it but she usually does; she spent the entire summer thinking of what would have happened if she hadn’t done it. Maybe Jeff is right, maybe if she was a normal, good person, it wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have felt so unnecessarily competitive and she would have acted on her feelings for Jeff in a mature, appropriate way.
“We should take it back.”
“Uh, Jeff, I think we already did that. And it ended with you in the health center covered in urine.”
“No, not like that.” He grabs his beer off the table and takes a sip before handing it to her. “I mean we crash the dance and we make it ours.”
“What are we, twelve?” She downs rest of the beer. “No one would care if we went, so is that even crashing?”
His fingers dip beneath her waistband and brush along her hipbone. “If we go and mess everything up, rig the Transfer Queen vote, whatever, then it can’t hurt us anymore. It doesn’t matter because we win in the end.” His fingers move lower, play against the front of her panties, and she bites her lip.
She shifts a little to allow him better access. He leans his face in close, his breath mixing with hers, as he nudges her panties to the side and slides into her, one finger at a time. “Aren’t you tired of all this, Britta?” he asks lowly. “Tired of trying so hard and getting nowhere?”
“Yes,” she gasps. She wraps her arms around his neck and fists his shirt with her free hand. The empty beer bottle dangles in her other.
His fingers curl in and out of her and his thumb works at her clit. His mouth moves against her neck, tongue and lips and teeth, and she can feel him, growing hard against her.
“We’re bad people, you and me,” he says into her collarbone. “We’ve tried so hard to fake it but it’s caught up to us. We should just embrace it, don’t you think?”
She bucks her hips up to meet his hand and her stomach begins to clench and tighten because his words shouldn’t affect her so. She should get up and tell him to leave, that he’s being ridiculous, but she can’t because she knows it’s true. Her hand moves from his shirt into his hair, where she scratches at his scalp, digs her nails in hard enough to draw blood.
“We’re never going to be the heroes. Crash the dance with me. Be my partner in crime.”
Her muscles contract against his fingers and the bottle slips out of her hand and falls to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. She kisses him roughly, moaning into his mouth, their teeth clanking together. His blood is caked underneath her fingernails.
As she comes down from her orgasm their kisses slow until he pulls away, brings his fingers up to his mouth, and sucks them clean. “I think you owe me a kitchen blowjob now.”
She stands on shaky legs and starts to walk away. “Beard,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ll go to the dance, by the way. Clean this mess up.”
She steps on a few shards of glass on her way out of the kitchen and she can feel the blood start to pool beneath her skin. In the bathroom, she pulls the glass out of her feet and then stares into the mirror before she gets in the shower. Her cheeks are flushed and her hair’s a mess, but there’s something new behind her eyes. Or, something old. Something she’d hidden for years. Reflected back at her is her eleven year old self, scared and angry. She strips off her clothes and steps under the water and it’s as hot as it was the night of her eleventh birthday.
Britta’s glad she offered to drive because it gives her something to do while the car is filled only with noise from the radio. She keeps her eyes firmly on the road ahead of her but she can see Annie out of the corner of her eye, fidgeting and crossing and uncrossing her legs. They haven’t exchanged more than “how are you”s and they’re only a few blocks from the mall.
When Britta pulls into the parking lot, she turns the ignition off and gives Annie a hesitant smile. Annie returns it, her mouth stretching into a warm grin.
“Thanks for coming with me, Britta. I really miss you.”
They sift through racks of dresses and Annie fills Britta in on what’s been going on at Greendale, how she and Shirley are going to be co-valedictorians at graduation, how Abed and Troy are staying for another semester, how they’re all managing As in Cornwallis’s class. Britta feels like Greendale is a different world, like her days there were only a dream.
“So, what have you been up to?” Annie asks carefully. She holds a blue dress up for inspection and then shakes her head and puts it back.
“Just... trying to figure it all out, I guess,” Britta says with a shrug. “This would look nice on you.”
Annie takes the black dress and very obviously pretends to consider it. “It would look better on you, I think. How are things with, uh, you and Jeff?”
“Fine, I guess. We’re not, like, together or anything.”
“Oh,” Annie says. “I’m going to try these on. Will you wait outside?”
“Sure.” Britta takes a seat on the floor outside of Annie’s dressing room and draws patterns in the carpet with her finger. She wonders what would happen if she told Annie she needed a dress, too. She’ll have to come back another day; she and Jeff decided not to tell anyone about their plans.
“So, um, when you say you and Jeff aren’t together, what does that mean exactly?” Annie asks over the rustle of clothes. The door opens and she steps out in a pink dress that’s way too frumpy. Britta shakes her head and wrinkles her nose.
“It means that he’s always on my couch and we… sleep together.” Annie bites her lip a little and Britta sighs and her shoulders slump. “Look, we’ve never really talked about this, but I know you and Jeff... well, I don’t want to fight with you about boys anymore. I hope this whole thing doesn’t bother you but we’re both just going through some stuff right now. We’re not getting married or having babies or buying a house or whatever.”
Annie slides down so she’s sitting on the floor next to Britta. The ugly pink dress fans around her. “I’m not going to end up with Jeff,” she says. “And you know? I don’t really want to. So I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t as much as it would have a year ago. And not enough for it to get in the way of our friendship.”
“Really?”
“Really! I’m leaving anyway, you know. I got into the master’s program at UC Colorado Springs and I’m going to get my Forensics degree and I’m going to start a life for myself.”
“That’s really great, Annie! Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” Annie says, smiling. Then her face turns serious. “What are you going to do now?”
Britta watches as a woman in her fifties locks herself in a dressing room, giving the two of them a strange look as she does. “I don’t know,” she mutters.
“What about being a therapist?”
“It’s not that easy anymore.” Britta doesn’t know if she can explain it to Annie, the thing inside of her that finds it all so restricting, the part of her that knows she’s not cut out for a life of helping others when she still hasn’t found a way to help herself. She thinks back to Jeff’s words and shivers a little bit, because they were all so true, and the worst part was that she knew it, maybe all along. And maybe a part of her-the part of her who is petty and mean and cruel, the part of her she’s ashamed of-likes that she has this connection with someone, with Jeff, because it’s something that no one will take away from her, not even Annie. Especially not Annie.
“I don’t know how to act around you anymore,” Annie admits.
Britta pats her leg. “You know what, Annie? I don’t know how to act around me anymore either.”
That night, Jeff’s breathing is just starting to even out when Britta asks, “Do you think I could do it?”
“Do what?” he asks sleepily.
“Go back to school and become a therapist.”
“Of course I think you could do it. But I don’t think you’d be happy.”
“How did it go from being everything I ever wanted to something I know I wouldn’t be able to stand?”
He curls his fingers around her hip and tugs her a bit closer. “Because things always sound good until you have them.”
“Is that how you felt about me and you?” She’s glad her back is to him because this is a question she can only ask him when he can’t see her face. There aren’t too many of those anymore.
“Me and you, unsurprisingly, are the exception to the rule. We’re always better than we sound.”
She laughs a little. “It’s you, you know. You’re the one that makes me weird.”
“Mmm, sweetheart, you know just what to say,” he drawls. “Now go to sleep.”
His lips brush against her hair and she pushes back into his chest a little further, burrowing under his chin. She listens as his heartbeat slows and she feels a twisted sort of solace in not moving toward something for the first time in years, in moving backward instead, of knowing that-for now, at least-she isn’t alone in all of it.
PART II