Chapter Text
The evening of Annie Edison’s twenty-first birthday the study group celebrated with a trip to a bar, because it was a tradition. They’d done it for Troy’s twenty-first, the year before, and just because Annie was the only member of the group who hadn’t turned twenty-one yet didn’t mean it wasn’t a tradition that needed to be honored for the second and final time.
It wasn’t even a big deal. They went to bars sometimes. Annie Edison had been drinking for years. About two years, but still, she could say years. She was a drinker. She didn't drink much . She drank socially. Now that she was legally of age and could, like, go to liquor stores herself for herself, maybe she would drink more. Red wine. Scotch. Fun drinks that ended in -tini and had little paper umbrellas in them. The sky was, as they said, the limit.
A little over two hours into the evening, Britta was down at the other end of the bar with Troy and Abed; she and Troy were trying to help Abed win the bar trivia machine game thing. A long mirror ran the length of the bar, and it looked like there were two Brittas and two Troys, turned away from one another. Abed wasn’t quite in the frame of the mirror.
Shirley had been making noises about needing to get home to her kids, and Pierce seemed sleepy, but neither had left yet. Jeff had followed the group's center of gravity to the trivia machine but then sidled away and was currently engaged in a conversation with Shirley about some television show Annie had never heard of that had Dustin Hoffman as some kind of horse veterinarian investigating mysterious horse deaths, or something.
In the privacy of the ladies' room, Annie took a deep breath and leaned against the arguably clean wall opposite the mirrors. The girl in the mirror didn't look different than she had yesterday. She was dressed a little more formally, with one of her nicer dresses and a wrap, but not so formally that anybody had noticed. Annie tried to evaluate the girl in the mirror objectively. Not a girl, she told herself. A woman. She was by the standards of her people a woman.
"Annie? Are you all right?"
The girl in the mirror jumped a little. Shirley had followed her in, which Annie should have expected. "I'm fine, thanks Shirley. I just wanted to… I don't know, take a minute."
Shirley's face tightened almost imperceptibly as the older woman silently and swiftly evaluated Annie's level of intoxication. Sober enough, apparently, given the way she nodded. "Okay, sure… you aren't upset about the cake, are you?" The highlight of the pre-meeting, in the study room, had been the ice cream cake Troy and Abed had surprised her with, which was adorned with a little red plastic phone booth and a handful of little plastic people and happy birthday geneva in loose blue icing-script. "I told them I thought it was a cute idea."
"It was cute. It was," Annie quickly agreed. "I mean, I'm not as big a fan of Inspector Spacetime as they are, but it was nice."
Shirley nodded again, her expression quizzical.
"I was… it's stupid. I was thinking about, um, Jeff." Annie regretted saying it aloud as soon as the words escaped her. Maybe she should have stopped at one margarita. She didn’t feel drunk. Correction: she hadn’t felt drunk until she tried to check herself.
The girl in the mirror twisted her hands together, flustered, embarrassed. "I was thinking I could… I'm an adult now, but…" She shook her head again. "It's stupid."
Annie had expected Shirley to respond with a small scowl and a harsh tone, but instead the older woman smiled. "Well, we're all allowed to be stupid sometimes."
The girl in the mirror was visibly nonplussed.
"You kids are all always making googly-eyes at each other. You and Jeff, Jeff and Britta, Britta and Troy, Troy and Abed, Abed and you, you're a damn love pentacle summoning horny demons, is what it sometimes seems like." Shirley sighed. "And you know, Jeff and I are about the same age."
"Aren't you three years older—"
"Two and a half!" For a moment Shirley's tone had the hard edge Annie had been expecting. But then she softened again. "But he's basically emotionally sixteen… I tell you, I'd feel left out except I never want to revisit being single again."
Annie nodded, unsure where Shirley was going with this. She might have tried to pull away but Shirley was between Annie and the exit.
"Time was, I used to think, oh, Jeff and Britta, there's a sullen white boy and a sullen white girl and they seem to like each other as friends, which is important, and then…" She shook her head. "I thought Jeff and Britta should get together. And you I wanted to see with Warren."
"Who?"
"Exactly." Shirley glanced heavenward. "He was in Chang's Spanish class, and the anthropology class. White boy, sat in the back, had a massive crush on you?"
Annie chuckled nervously. "Nobody ever had a massive crush on me..."
"I thought you'd be cute together. I suppose. You try to come up with ways to entertain yourself. Lord knows I try. You want to have some fun with Jeff, you have yourself some fun. You deserve fun. When I was your age I was already pregnant with Jordan. He's a good boy, I love him so much…" Shirley suddenly started to tear up.
Annie moved to comfort her, hugging the older woman. "Shirley? Are you okay? What's the matter?"
"I'm very drunk, Annie," Shirley said between sniffles. "I've already called a cab. This is the most I've drunk since we met. I love you, too. Not the same way I love Jordan. Well, kind of…"
"It's okay, Shirley," Annie assured her. "It's okay."
By the time Annie finished helping Shirley into her cab, Pierce had already left. Britta and Troy were having an animated discussion about something, it wasn't clear what, and next to them Abed had moved from the bar trivia machine to the video poker machine. Jeff was…
Annie scanned the bar. Had Jeff left, too? Apparently. She stood by the door for a moment, more miffed than she wanted to admit. She had just about made up her mind not to go sit by Abed and instead just head home. Declare the evening a victory, she wasn't going to 'have fun' with Jeff but that was fine… when she felt a hand clap her on the shoulder. She jumped.
"Hey, kiddo, were you leaving?" Jeff asked her. He'd approached from behind like some kind of leaving-the-men's-room ninja. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the girl in the mirror jump. Next to the man looming over her she looked tiny and underage. “Sorry,” Jeff continued, “didn’t mean to startle you.”
"I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Um, yeah…" Annie's will to leave the bar evaporated under the red heat of Jeff's very mildly expressed disappointment.
Seeing her waver, Jeff grinned. “How about one more drink before you go? I’ll buy. It can be your birthday present. I didn’t get you anything else.” Nobody had. Annie hadn’t been disappointed, because she hadn’t expected anything. Nobody else got presents from the group on their birthdays either. They just didn’t do that, collectively. She hadn't been secretly hoping for something more, because that would have been silly.
“Okay, but is that going to create a precedent where I have to buy you a drink on your birthday?” Annie hoped she sounded playful, rather than hopeful. She’d had enough to drink already but one more would hurt.
He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll create a precedent under which you get to buy me a drink on my birthday. There’s really only one way to be sure.”
So they went to the bar, and Jeff ordered two scotches from the long-haired, bearded bartender, and they each took one, and when she held hers out he rolled his eyes and clinked his to it, and then they each took a sip and ugh scotch still tasted awful. She tried not to make a face. Behind the bar, the girl in the mirror almost succeeded and the man looming over her definitely noticed.
“You want something else?” Jeff asked her. “Another margarita, maybe?”
“No, no, that’s okay.” Annie took another sip of the scotch. Ugh scotch. “It’s an acquired taste, right? Like coffee. When I was a little kid I hated coffee, but in sixth grade—“
“You started drinking coffee in sixth grade?” Jeff sounded incredulous.
“Just one cup in the morning.” Annie raised her glass towards her lips, tried to make herself take a third sip of the scotch, failed, lowered it again. “Mom had this automatic coffee maker so when we woke up there it was… When did you start drinking coffee? Second year of the law school you didn’t go to?”
“I dunno. Not grade school. Listen, there’s no point in wasting good scotch…” Jeff plucked her glass out of her hand and emptied it into his own. “You were very clearly not enjoying that. It pained me to watch. I’ll buy you something else, whatever you want.”
Annie tried to summon indignation but it didn’t come. Instead she just felt relieved. “Okay. Okay. Um, would you get me an appletini?”
“An appletini?” He sounded shocked she would even suggest such a thing. “No, I’m not going to get you an appletini.”
She considered biting her lip and widening her eyes and saying please , but no, she was a grown-up now. The girl — the woman in the mirror was the huge man’s equal, after all, she didn’t need to wheedle and beg him. “Fine,” she said carelessly, flipping her hair back and looking away. “Is a screwdriver acceptable?”
He grimaced, like he regretted not just letting her choke down the scotch. “Sure, whatever you want. Just, an appletini, you know? You might as well order a banana daiquiri.”
“Ooh, I’ve never had a banana daiquiri,” Annie said, turning back to look up at him. “Are they good? I’ll try that.”
He chuckled weakly. “I would be shocked if Jethro Tull over there has the fixings, either for a banana daiquiri or a not-shitty appletini.” Jeff indicated the bartender with a quick tilt of his head. “Sorry I mentioned it. Listen, on my birthday we’ll find a tiki bar or a TGIFriday’s or whatever and you can order us both banana daiquiris, okay?”
She smiled at that. “Okay. Although, who knows, maybe by then I’ll have developed a taste for whiskey. Yummy dirt flavor. Liquor for grown-ups like myself.”
He seemed slightly relieved, like he’d realized he’d stepped in it with the appletini thing and was glad to have evaded the minefield. “So, changing the subject, hey, you’ve been living with Troy and Abed for almost four months now.”
“I have. It’s been great. No regrets.”
“That’s not what you were texting me at one AM…”
“Yes, yes, but that was just the one time!” Annie scoffed. “One time they decided midnight was the time to start a rave in our living room. Which is also their bedroom, yes, but couldn’t they have just used the dreamatorium? It’s soundproofed for a reason!”
Jeff raised an eyebrow. “It is?”
“Yes. Not well. I tried.” Annie’s bedroom was on the opposite side of the apartment from the dreamatorium, at least. “But mostly it’s been great. You know the guys, they’re great.”
“We used to hang out more,” Jeff said reflectively. “Me and Troy and Abed, I mean. When they moved in together they shifted their shenanigans to off-campus.”
“Are you disappointed?” Annie was charmed. “Aw, you miss them? We should have you over more. Britta’s over all the time, you know she lives five minutes away and she says her place has too many cats to study in.”
Jeff chuckled. “I see enough of you kids,” he said, looking away.
“Kids? Jeffrey Winger.” She admonished the back of his head. “Need I remind you that I am twenty-one years old now? Fully adult. Entirely grown-up. Ripe and ready,” she said, and immediately regretted it. “Mature,” she added, trying to cover.
“Oh, I know,” Jeff said, a little too quickly.
There was a few seconds of awkward silence. Annie found herself staring at the couple in the mirror. The man and the woman. The man was looking off to the side, away from the woman in the mirror, towards a mute television with a car commercial on it. Then she looked away as he glanced her way, and then the glance became a look, or a stare, and anyway the reflection of Jeff was looking at her with… some kind of expression and she was kind of looking nowhere in particular, maybe down towards Troy and Abed and Britta, and pretending not to notice him looking at her.
Suddenly she felt drunk, hyper-aware that the alcohol in her system was depressing her inhibitions and slowing her reaction time. And Jeff was yummy, which was a word she would never use to describe him sober. And she’d just had a personal breakthrough about how Jeff being yummy wasn’t a big deal, she wasn’t secretly in love with him, she just wanted to be wanted, and still, he was right there, smiling at her…
Annie realized she and Jeff were making eye contact again. When did that happen? Definitely she’d had too much to drink. She should go home before she did something stupid.
Instead she scooted slightly towards him on her barstool, and broke eye contact so she could rest her head on his shoulder. He probably looked surprised but she’d closed her eyes. “You should come over more,” she said then. “I’d like to see more of you. If you’re waiting for an invitation, this is me inviting you…”
He put his arm around her, slipping it out from between them so she could snuggle up into him. Maybe not “so” she could do that, but she did it a little, anyway.
“Annie,” he murmured, almost too quiet for her to hear.
“Would you like to go now?” she asked him, barely aware she was going to speak before the words were slipping out. But then there was no stopping them. “Or, you know, Troy and Abed and probably Britta are going to relocate to our living room sometime, we could go to your place. Hang out for a while.”