Bound to the Tracks of the Train (part 3/5) | 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.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
This high lasts longer than the previous one, feels deeper. Britta cleans the entire apartment from top to bottom and makes Jeff reach the high spots and move the couch so she can vacuum underneath. She throws out old clothes and replaces them with new, nice things. She opens all the windows and lets summer in, mixes fun cocktails at dinner with ingredients like coconut rum and pineapple juice. She spends a day with Annie at the public pool, laying on beach towels and flipping through trashy gossip rags, listening contently as Annie prattles on about her upcoming move to Colorado Springs, grateful not to have to contribute anything about her own life.
She takes a chunk of money and invites Annie and Shirley out for a spa day, pays for everything, even the chocolate bath and the seaweed wrap and the pedicures, despite her personal stances on each. (Although, and maybe she won’t admit this out loud but, throwing a bunch of money away so underpaid workers can pamper the shit out of you really is all it’s cracked up to be.)
Jeff treats Troy and Abed to the movies, tagging along for midnight openings of every summer blockbuster. He comes home exhausted and complaining of stomach aches from too much popcorn and candy and Britta perches on the couch with her new pedicure and her muscles all relaxed and humming nicely from her massages and laughs at him. But a few weeks later Britta gets sunburnt pretty bad and suffers through Jeff’s taunts as he rubs aloe into her skin.
The one thing she can’t get over is how easy the whole thing was. The police called that evening and said they found her car abandoned with no damage near the bank and assume whoever stole it also robbed the bank. They let Britta pick it up the next day after not finding any fingerprints-“The perps must have been wearing gloves,” they tell her as she nods interestedly with wide, grateful eyes-and there’s an article about the whole thing in the newspaper saying they have no leads. So she and Jeff sit on a pile of money, half of it hidden throughout the apartment, and they pay their bills and nothing happens.
One day Britta and Jeff are at the mall and they exchange a glance and that’s that, a pair of sneakers ends up in Britta’s purse. And no one gives them any trouble, probably because they’re unassuming white people, and they leave the mall with a bunch of new things they didn’t pay a dime for.
It’s a new way to keep that adrenaline rush going and soon they’re stealing from every store in the tri-county area. They learn about security cameras and alarm systems and how to dismantle ink tags without making them erupt or ripping the clothes. They stop dressing like bums without jobs and start dressing like... well, like they used to dress, only Britta slightly better with non-homemade shorts and nice tops and expensive, skimpy bathing suits.
And it’s not like at the bank, when her brain fogged up and she wasn’t aware of what was going on. Now everything is sharp and precise and Britta knows exactly what she’s doing. And it feels good, feels right, feels natural. Each time they make it past a barrier Britta feels a lightening in her chest and she knows Jeff feels it, too, because they’re all over each other in the car, hands everywhere, and whoever drives home drives with the gas pedal on the floor. It’s a lightening that somehow goes hand in hand with the darkness Britta feels settle into her bones. This is who she is.
They try not to flaunt the money, though, try not to buy their friends too many things. When Annie puts down a shirt at the mall claiming it’s too expensive, Britta hums in agreement instead of offering to get it for her or shrugging at the price.
It’s late August when Abed calls and says he and Troy are throwing a going-away dinner party for Annie. “It’s really important that you and Jeff are here,” he tells Britta. “Also we’re putting you in charge of the beverages.”
When they show up at Troy/Abed/Annie’s apartment, arms laden with bottles of soda and wine, Shirley looks solemn and Annie wrings her hands nervously and Troy looks like he’s going to cry. Abed takes the drinks from Britta and makes a big show of arranging them neatly on the kitchen counter.
“Jeez,” Jeff says. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing!” Shirley says, too much forced brightness to be convincing. “Let’s eat, okay? I made roast chicken and a nice salad and vegetables and mashed potatoes.”
“I love mashed potatoes!” Troy exclaims in a weird voice.
Annie shoots him a look and then smiles sweetly at Britta. “Thanks for bringing the drinks.”
“No problem,” Britta answers uneasily.
They sit down to eat and after a few minutes of passing dishes around and filling wine glasses it all evens out and conversation eases. Whatever was bothering everyone before she and Jeff got there seems to have gone away, for which Britta is glad. She misses her friends, sitting with them each day in the study room. They sit around the table in the same formation as they used to in the study room, whether consciously or not, and for a second she imagines going back, but then remembers it would just be her, Troy, and Abed; Shirley and Annie have graduated. Three bachelor’s degrees in the room, and two more on the way. She’s the furthest from earning one.
After dinner, Shirley passes around her cell phone so everyone can coo over pictures of Ben, who is suddenly two years old and unrecognizable from the baby Britta delivered in a Greendale classroom. Jeff gives her a look she can’t define as she smiles at the pictures and passes the phone to her right, to Abed.
“What?” she asks quietly.
He shakes his head and takes another sip of wine. She shrugs and turns back to her plate of strawberry pie but catches Annie watching the two of them curiously.
Britta volunteers to help Shirley and Troy with the dishes as Jeff, Annie, and Abed clear and wipe down the table. Shirley washes and Britta dries and Troy puts away, still looking anxious, plates almost slipping from his grasp.
“So how are you doing, Britta?” Shirley asks quietly, her voice mostly muffled by the running water.
“I’m okay,” Britta says. “Why is everyone acting so weird?”
Shirley scrubs harder, pointedly not meeting Britta’s eyes. “It’s just a little strange, you know, with Annie leaving.” It’s a lie and Britta knows it, but she decides not to press the issue.
“You’re okay, though? Everything’s fine?” Shirley asks again. “Okay with you and Jeff?”
Troy begins whistling and Britta can’t help but roll her eyes at him before turning back to Shirley. “It’s good. Me and Jeff are good. We’re not together, like I told you before. We’re just... we’re friends.”
“Friends who live together and sleep together,” Shirley says.
Britta shrugs. “Yeah. But it works for us.”
“As long as you know what you’re doing.” Shirley passes her a pan. “I worry about you sometimes, Britta. We all do.”
Troy places a hand on her arm and nods. “We want you to be happy.”
Britta smiles and grasps his hand, squeezing gently. It feels familiar but off somehow, as if his hand is the same but hers has changed. She misses him, but the way things used to be before she thought dating him would be a good idea. And it wasn’t, it was kind of a terrible idea, because neither of them wanted it bad enough. But despite the fact that their breakup was mostly amicable and they told each other it wouldn’t be weird, it was, because of course it was, it’s never not weird. So she feels like she lost a friend, and when you lose Troy you lose Abed and her relationship with Shirley and Annie-despite spending time with them this summer-is strained and Pierce is off with Gilbert at some beach-front property living his life the way Britta should be living hers and all she has is Jeff. It’s like the two of them are on an island and they used to live in a bustling city but their friends are still there and they left and someone knocked down the bridge they used to take to get back and forth so now they can never get back.
“I’m fine, really,” she says. “I appreciate you guys worrying about me. I do. But everything’s good.”
She pulls her hand from Troy’s and goes back to drying. She wants, for a moment, to tell them everything but she’s not sure how to articulate the fact that these are good things that are happening, not bad, and they don’t make her not okay but happy, so deliriously happy and whole. So she stays quiet and the three of them work in silence.
She dares a glance to Jeff, who is listening to Abed and Annie talk but looks uncomfortable. She guesses he’s getting the same concerned third-degree that she just got, because he keeps shifting in his seat. He turns and catches her eyes and gives her the same look he gave her after dinner. She’s still not sure what it means so she smiles and breaks his gaze.
After the dishes are done and the kitchen is probably cleaner than it’s been since the day Troy and Abed moved in, Annie asks if they can all sit back down at the table. Britta thinks she’s about to give a sappy speech about moving away. There’s a going-away gift in Britta’s purse, a necklace she stole from a department store last week.
When they’re seated, fresh glasses of wine or soda in front of them, Annie stands up nervously and clears her throat. “Okay. Basically, for the last few months we’ve all-”
“This is an intervention!” Troy blurts out loudly, then claps his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”
Annie glares at him. “Troy.”
“An intervention?” Jeff asks. “For who?”
Annie looks helplessly around the room. “Um, well-”
“For you and Britta,” Abed interrupts. “We think you’re going down a slippery slope.”
“What?” Britta’s heart sputters and she tries really hard not to turn to look at Jeff, as if that will give it all away. “What are you even talking about?”
“Jeff, you graduated almost a year ago. Are you even looking for jobs anymore?” Shirley asks. “Britta, you dropped out just shy of graduating. And the two of you aren’t even doing anything with your lives. It’s not healthy.”
“Shirley, we’re perfectly healthy,” Jeff says.
“How are you paying your bills?” Annie asks. “Britta, how did you afford that spa day? You’re wearing a new skirt. How did you pay for it?”
“You paid for all our movie tickets, Jeff,” Abed adds. “And we always get the jumbo bottomless popcorn. That’s expensive.”
Britta feels like she’s going to throw up. She takes a few quick, deep breaths. “Since when are you guys in charge of our finances? And I told you, I got that spa package as a gift.”
“Some weird things happened at the Transfer Dance,” Troy says. “You two came, stayed for five minutes, and then disappeared. And the AC broke and everyone’s tires were slashed and everyone got drunk.”
“And Leonard won Transfer Queen!” Annie exclaims.
“We stopped by to see you guys!” Britta says. “Shirley and Annie, it was your final Greendale event!”
“Where did you guys go if you weren’t the ones spiking the punch?” Abed asks.
“We were fucking in the study room, is that what you want to hear?” Jeff yells and the room goes silent.
Troy and Annie exchange uncomfortable looks and Britta sighs. “Look, guys. I know things have been weird since we’re not all at Greendale anymore. But Jeff and I are fine. We are. And we’re all still friends and we love each other and that’s what matters, right?”
“Did you guys rob the bank?” Annie asks quietly.
Britta digs her nails into her palm so hard it breaks the skin and she can feel the blood pool. “What?”
“The credit union,” Shirley says. “You said they found your car in the alley next to it.”
“Yeah, because my car was stolen. I called the police that day,” Britta says, trying to keep her voice even.
“There was no evidence at all as to who did it. But they did find a single purple hair. Synthetic,” Abed says.
“Neither of us has purple hair,” Jeff says.
“Britta used to,” Troy says in a small voice.
There’s another pause.
“The two of you,” Shirley starts slowly, “have always had your own thing going on. You say you’re just friends, and what you do is your business. But this love you have for each other is toxic and if you continue to cling to each other like you are, it’s going to destroy you both. We love you and we don’t want that for you.”
Abed, Annie, and Troy look at the table, pointedly not meeting anyone’s eyes. Shirley, however, is looking right at them, across the table, and Britta’s never understood it when people or books say that one look can go right through your bones until now.
“I think we should go,” Jeff says. He stands up and Britta follows suit. She feels like she should say something but she doesn’t; just grabs her purse off the floor and they leave, closing the door behind them.
When they get back home, Britta kicks off her shoes and flops face-down onto the couch. Jeff sinks to the floor, his back pressed against the couch, his head thrown back to rest on Britta’s ankles.
“So, that happened,” he says.
“I don’t even know what to think right now,” she mutters into a pillow. “They just flat-out think we robbed the bank.”
“To be fair,” Jeff says, “we totally did.”
She kicks him. “Duh doy. But still. I would never accuse any of them of robbing a bank.”
“We did a good job of covering.”
“I think so.”
She closes her eyes and suddenly she’s really tired. She can’t stop picturing Shirley’s face, disappointed and concerned.
“Do you think Shirley was right?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I did plenty of bad things before I ever met you.”
“Me, too.”
“Is it possible for two people to bring out the best and the worst in each other at the same time?”
“Maybe. I think that’s how we are.”
He’s quiet and then: “Hey. I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’m not... I’m not in love with you.”
She waits: waits for her bones to turn to jelly before hardening in anger, waits for her heart to break, waits for the urge to run. But it never comes. She doesn’t feel anything, really, because she knows he didn’t say it to hurt her.
“I’m not in love with you, either.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “You’re my best friend and you’re the one I want to be with. But I don’t think I can be in love with someone. Anyone.”
“Okay. I don’t want anything you can’t give me.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know. This. What we already have.”
“When you put the word love on it everything gets ruined.”
“So don’t.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“I’m fine.”
It’s the truth, because she understands everything he’s not saying. There’s something inside her-maybe the part he saw from the start that makes her off somehow-that lets her know she too might never be able to love someone in the full, irrevocable way you’re supposed to love someone. Even if that someone is Jeff.
She turns over so she’s on her back and nudges him with her foot. “Come up here.”
“We both can’t fit. Your couch is too small.”
“You’re just too big.” She sits up and makes room for him, waits for him to stretch out as much as he can before crawling over him. She closes her eyes and listens to his heart, lets it serve as the rhythm to her worries about her friends. Annie’s moving in a week, only an hour away, but Britta wonders how long it’ll be before it’s out of sight, out of mind. They haven’t heard from Pierce in months.
“We’ll call them tomorrow,” Jeff says, as if he can hear her thoughts. “We can apologize, thank them for being worried about us. Give Annie that gift you got her.”
“It’ll be fine, right?”
He sweeps her hair off her neck and runs his fingers over her skin. She shivers a little and burrows further into him, the buttons of his shirt imprinting themselves into her cheek. “You know how they are. They’re mad for like a day and then it’s like it never happened.”
She nods.
“For what it’s worth,” he says. “I don’t think you’re toxic. I don’t think we’re toxic. And I don’t think we’re going to destroy each other.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“I have an idea. But I don’t want to talk about it until I have it fully-formed. Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” she says around a yawn. “That’s okay.” She wonders what it is, if it’s in the same vein as the bank robbery, of stealing everything in sight. But she doesn’t push because that’s not what they do anymore. It’s a give and take, somehow simultaneously more and less healthy than they’ve ever been.
PART IV
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.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
This high lasts longer than the previous one, feels deeper. Britta cleans the entire apartment from top to bottom and makes Jeff reach the high spots and move the couch so she can vacuum underneath. She throws out old clothes and replaces them with new, nice things. She opens all the windows and lets summer in, mixes fun cocktails at dinner with ingredients like coconut rum and pineapple juice. She spends a day with Annie at the public pool, laying on beach towels and flipping through trashy gossip rags, listening contently as Annie prattles on about her upcoming move to Colorado Springs, grateful not to have to contribute anything about her own life.
She takes a chunk of money and invites Annie and Shirley out for a spa day, pays for everything, even the chocolate bath and the seaweed wrap and the pedicures, despite her personal stances on each. (Although, and maybe she won’t admit this out loud but, throwing a bunch of money away so underpaid workers can pamper the shit out of you really is all it’s cracked up to be.)
Jeff treats Troy and Abed to the movies, tagging along for midnight openings of every summer blockbuster. He comes home exhausted and complaining of stomach aches from too much popcorn and candy and Britta perches on the couch with her new pedicure and her muscles all relaxed and humming nicely from her massages and laughs at him. But a few weeks later Britta gets sunburnt pretty bad and suffers through Jeff’s taunts as he rubs aloe into her skin.
The one thing she can’t get over is how easy the whole thing was. The police called that evening and said they found her car abandoned with no damage near the bank and assume whoever stole it also robbed the bank. They let Britta pick it up the next day after not finding any fingerprints-“The perps must have been wearing gloves,” they tell her as she nods interestedly with wide, grateful eyes-and there’s an article about the whole thing in the newspaper saying they have no leads. So she and Jeff sit on a pile of money, half of it hidden throughout the apartment, and they pay their bills and nothing happens.
One day Britta and Jeff are at the mall and they exchange a glance and that’s that, a pair of sneakers ends up in Britta’s purse. And no one gives them any trouble, probably because they’re unassuming white people, and they leave the mall with a bunch of new things they didn’t pay a dime for.
It’s a new way to keep that adrenaline rush going and soon they’re stealing from every store in the tri-county area. They learn about security cameras and alarm systems and how to dismantle ink tags without making them erupt or ripping the clothes. They stop dressing like bums without jobs and start dressing like... well, like they used to dress, only Britta slightly better with non-homemade shorts and nice tops and expensive, skimpy bathing suits.
And it’s not like at the bank, when her brain fogged up and she wasn’t aware of what was going on. Now everything is sharp and precise and Britta knows exactly what she’s doing. And it feels good, feels right, feels natural. Each time they make it past a barrier Britta feels a lightening in her chest and she knows Jeff feels it, too, because they’re all over each other in the car, hands everywhere, and whoever drives home drives with the gas pedal on the floor. It’s a lightening that somehow goes hand in hand with the darkness Britta feels settle into her bones. This is who she is.
They try not to flaunt the money, though, try not to buy their friends too many things. When Annie puts down a shirt at the mall claiming it’s too expensive, Britta hums in agreement instead of offering to get it for her or shrugging at the price.
It’s late August when Abed calls and says he and Troy are throwing a going-away dinner party for Annie. “It’s really important that you and Jeff are here,” he tells Britta. “Also we’re putting you in charge of the beverages.”
When they show up at Troy/Abed/Annie’s apartment, arms laden with bottles of soda and wine, Shirley looks solemn and Annie wrings her hands nervously and Troy looks like he’s going to cry. Abed takes the drinks from Britta and makes a big show of arranging them neatly on the kitchen counter.
“Jeez,” Jeff says. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing!” Shirley says, too much forced brightness to be convincing. “Let’s eat, okay? I made roast chicken and a nice salad and vegetables and mashed potatoes.”
“I love mashed potatoes!” Troy exclaims in a weird voice.
Annie shoots him a look and then smiles sweetly at Britta. “Thanks for bringing the drinks.”
“No problem,” Britta answers uneasily.
They sit down to eat and after a few minutes of passing dishes around and filling wine glasses it all evens out and conversation eases. Whatever was bothering everyone before she and Jeff got there seems to have gone away, for which Britta is glad. She misses her friends, sitting with them each day in the study room. They sit around the table in the same formation as they used to in the study room, whether consciously or not, and for a second she imagines going back, but then remembers it would just be her, Troy, and Abed; Shirley and Annie have graduated. Three bachelor’s degrees in the room, and two more on the way. She’s the furthest from earning one.
After dinner, Shirley passes around her cell phone so everyone can coo over pictures of Ben, who is suddenly two years old and unrecognizable from the baby Britta delivered in a Greendale classroom. Jeff gives her a look she can’t define as she smiles at the pictures and passes the phone to her right, to Abed.
“What?” she asks quietly.
He shakes his head and takes another sip of wine. She shrugs and turns back to her plate of strawberry pie but catches Annie watching the two of them curiously.
Britta volunteers to help Shirley and Troy with the dishes as Jeff, Annie, and Abed clear and wipe down the table. Shirley washes and Britta dries and Troy puts away, still looking anxious, plates almost slipping from his grasp.
“So how are you doing, Britta?” Shirley asks quietly, her voice mostly muffled by the running water.
“I’m okay,” Britta says. “Why is everyone acting so weird?”
Shirley scrubs harder, pointedly not meeting Britta’s eyes. “It’s just a little strange, you know, with Annie leaving.” It’s a lie and Britta knows it, but she decides not to press the issue.
“You’re okay, though? Everything’s fine?” Shirley asks again. “Okay with you and Jeff?”
Troy begins whistling and Britta can’t help but roll her eyes at him before turning back to Shirley. “It’s good. Me and Jeff are good. We’re not together, like I told you before. We’re just... we’re friends.”
“Friends who live together and sleep together,” Shirley says.
Britta shrugs. “Yeah. But it works for us.”
“As long as you know what you’re doing.” Shirley passes her a pan. “I worry about you sometimes, Britta. We all do.”
Troy places a hand on her arm and nods. “We want you to be happy.”
Britta smiles and grasps his hand, squeezing gently. It feels familiar but off somehow, as if his hand is the same but hers has changed. She misses him, but the way things used to be before she thought dating him would be a good idea. And it wasn’t, it was kind of a terrible idea, because neither of them wanted it bad enough. But despite the fact that their breakup was mostly amicable and they told each other it wouldn’t be weird, it was, because of course it was, it’s never not weird. So she feels like she lost a friend, and when you lose Troy you lose Abed and her relationship with Shirley and Annie-despite spending time with them this summer-is strained and Pierce is off with Gilbert at some beach-front property living his life the way Britta should be living hers and all she has is Jeff. It’s like the two of them are on an island and they used to live in a bustling city but their friends are still there and they left and someone knocked down the bridge they used to take to get back and forth so now they can never get back.
“I’m fine, really,” she says. “I appreciate you guys worrying about me. I do. But everything’s good.”
She pulls her hand from Troy’s and goes back to drying. She wants, for a moment, to tell them everything but she’s not sure how to articulate the fact that these are good things that are happening, not bad, and they don’t make her not okay but happy, so deliriously happy and whole. So she stays quiet and the three of them work in silence.
She dares a glance to Jeff, who is listening to Abed and Annie talk but looks uncomfortable. She guesses he’s getting the same concerned third-degree that she just got, because he keeps shifting in his seat. He turns and catches her eyes and gives her the same look he gave her after dinner. She’s still not sure what it means so she smiles and breaks his gaze.
After the dishes are done and the kitchen is probably cleaner than it’s been since the day Troy and Abed moved in, Annie asks if they can all sit back down at the table. Britta thinks she’s about to give a sappy speech about moving away. There’s a going-away gift in Britta’s purse, a necklace she stole from a department store last week.
When they’re seated, fresh glasses of wine or soda in front of them, Annie stands up nervously and clears her throat. “Okay. Basically, for the last few months we’ve all-”
“This is an intervention!” Troy blurts out loudly, then claps his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”
Annie glares at him. “Troy.”
“An intervention?” Jeff asks. “For who?”
Annie looks helplessly around the room. “Um, well-”
“For you and Britta,” Abed interrupts. “We think you’re going down a slippery slope.”
“What?” Britta’s heart sputters and she tries really hard not to turn to look at Jeff, as if that will give it all away. “What are you even talking about?”
“Jeff, you graduated almost a year ago. Are you even looking for jobs anymore?” Shirley asks. “Britta, you dropped out just shy of graduating. And the two of you aren’t even doing anything with your lives. It’s not healthy.”
“Shirley, we’re perfectly healthy,” Jeff says.
“How are you paying your bills?” Annie asks. “Britta, how did you afford that spa day? You’re wearing a new skirt. How did you pay for it?”
“You paid for all our movie tickets, Jeff,” Abed adds. “And we always get the jumbo bottomless popcorn. That’s expensive.”
Britta feels like she’s going to throw up. She takes a few quick, deep breaths. “Since when are you guys in charge of our finances? And I told you, I got that spa package as a gift.”
“Some weird things happened at the Transfer Dance,” Troy says. “You two came, stayed for five minutes, and then disappeared. And the AC broke and everyone’s tires were slashed and everyone got drunk.”
“And Leonard won Transfer Queen!” Annie exclaims.
“We stopped by to see you guys!” Britta says. “Shirley and Annie, it was your final Greendale event!”
“Where did you guys go if you weren’t the ones spiking the punch?” Abed asks.
“We were fucking in the study room, is that what you want to hear?” Jeff yells and the room goes silent.
Troy and Annie exchange uncomfortable looks and Britta sighs. “Look, guys. I know things have been weird since we’re not all at Greendale anymore. But Jeff and I are fine. We are. And we’re all still friends and we love each other and that’s what matters, right?”
“Did you guys rob the bank?” Annie asks quietly.
Britta digs her nails into her palm so hard it breaks the skin and she can feel the blood pool. “What?”
“The credit union,” Shirley says. “You said they found your car in the alley next to it.”
“Yeah, because my car was stolen. I called the police that day,” Britta says, trying to keep her voice even.
“There was no evidence at all as to who did it. But they did find a single purple hair. Synthetic,” Abed says.
“Neither of us has purple hair,” Jeff says.
“Britta used to,” Troy says in a small voice.
There’s another pause.
“The two of you,” Shirley starts slowly, “have always had your own thing going on. You say you’re just friends, and what you do is your business. But this love you have for each other is toxic and if you continue to cling to each other like you are, it’s going to destroy you both. We love you and we don’t want that for you.”
Abed, Annie, and Troy look at the table, pointedly not meeting anyone’s eyes. Shirley, however, is looking right at them, across the table, and Britta’s never understood it when people or books say that one look can go right through your bones until now.
“I think we should go,” Jeff says. He stands up and Britta follows suit. She feels like she should say something but she doesn’t; just grabs her purse off the floor and they leave, closing the door behind them.
When they get back home, Britta kicks off her shoes and flops face-down onto the couch. Jeff sinks to the floor, his back pressed against the couch, his head thrown back to rest on Britta’s ankles.
“So, that happened,” he says.
“I don’t even know what to think right now,” she mutters into a pillow. “They just flat-out think we robbed the bank.”
“To be fair,” Jeff says, “we totally did.”
She kicks him. “Duh doy. But still. I would never accuse any of them of robbing a bank.”
“We did a good job of covering.”
“I think so.”
She closes her eyes and suddenly she’s really tired. She can’t stop picturing Shirley’s face, disappointed and concerned.
“Do you think Shirley was right?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I did plenty of bad things before I ever met you.”
“Me, too.”
“Is it possible for two people to bring out the best and the worst in each other at the same time?”
“Maybe. I think that’s how we are.”
He’s quiet and then: “Hey. I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’m not... I’m not in love with you.”
She waits: waits for her bones to turn to jelly before hardening in anger, waits for her heart to break, waits for the urge to run. But it never comes. She doesn’t feel anything, really, because she knows he didn’t say it to hurt her.
“I’m not in love with you, either.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “You’re my best friend and you’re the one I want to be with. But I don’t think I can be in love with someone. Anyone.”
“Okay. I don’t want anything you can’t give me.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know. This. What we already have.”
“When you put the word love on it everything gets ruined.”
“So don’t.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“I’m fine.”
It’s the truth, because she understands everything he’s not saying. There’s something inside her-maybe the part he saw from the start that makes her off somehow-that lets her know she too might never be able to love someone in the full, irrevocable way you’re supposed to love someone. Even if that someone is Jeff.
She turns over so she’s on her back and nudges him with her foot. “Come up here.”
“We both can’t fit. Your couch is too small.”
“You’re just too big.” She sits up and makes room for him, waits for him to stretch out as much as he can before crawling over him. She closes her eyes and listens to his heart, lets it serve as the rhythm to her worries about her friends. Annie’s moving in a week, only an hour away, but Britta wonders how long it’ll be before it’s out of sight, out of mind. They haven’t heard from Pierce in months.
“We’ll call them tomorrow,” Jeff says, as if he can hear her thoughts. “We can apologize, thank them for being worried about us. Give Annie that gift you got her.”
“It’ll be fine, right?”
He sweeps her hair off her neck and runs his fingers over her skin. She shivers a little and burrows further into him, the buttons of his shirt imprinting themselves into her cheek. “You know how they are. They’re mad for like a day and then it’s like it never happened.”
She nods.
“For what it’s worth,” he says. “I don’t think you’re toxic. I don’t think we’re toxic. And I don’t think we’re going to destroy each other.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“I have an idea. But I don’t want to talk about it until I have it fully-formed. Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” she says around a yawn. “That’s okay.” She wonders what it is, if it’s in the same vein as the bank robbery, of stealing everything in sight. But she doesn’t push because that’s not what they do anymore. It’s a give and take, somehow simultaneously more and less healthy than they’ve ever been.
PART IV