Chapter Text
He must look old. That’s what Jeff Winger thinks, standing in the study room alone, no noises except for the constant crickets outside chirping the minutes away. His beard is too long. His sweater is too worn out. His skin isn’t as smooth as it should be and his hair isn’t the same color it used to be.
He can almost see himself in the shiny reflection of the study room table. Why wouldn’t it be shiny? It wasn’t like anyone is still using it. He sees in the table all the days gone by. The memories come and gone. His eyes. That’s what stands out to him as he imagines a life with Annie. How he looks like both a lost child and an old man who had seen too much. Maybe he is both of those things.
He has too many problems. That’s why , he reminds himself. One of the reasons, at least, that he has to let her go. Even he admits that he has no idea what she wants. Probably isn’t an old man with empty eyes in a dark study room at a community college.
As if on cue, Annie Edison walks in the door. She could always be counted on to show up when he was thinking about her. Although, perhaps that was easy when he thought of her so often. Hardly ever not thinking of her. He meets her eyes, knowing he couldn’t tell her that.
“How’d you get in?” he asks. He doesn’t really care what the answer is. She had shown up. He didn’t even tell her where he was going. Perhaps there weren’t many places he would go. Perhaps that’s how sad his life is.
“I pulled the spare key so the dean would stop leaving it under the welcome mat.” Of course she did, Annie, the responsible one. He lets her continue. “You left… weirdly.”
“I know. There’s no normal way to do anything anymore,” he replies, and it is true enough. Did she hear her first sentence? And anyway, “weird” is a nice way to describe it. He isn’t totally collapsing emotionally. Just a little weird. She doesn’t seem convinced. She gives the smile she always gives when she doesn't believe him. Except it looks different this time, just slightly, so that only he, after seeing her smile that way so many times, can detect the trace of pity.
“You’re gonna be fine, you know,” she tells him. What does fine even mean? he wants to ask. He doesn’t. Because he only knows one sort of fine and he can’t imagine the thought of being it, not without her.
“I don’t want to be fine,” he admits, venturing further, now, into honesty. “I want to be 25 and heading out into the world. I want to fall asleep on a beach and be able to walk the next day, or stay up all night on accident. I want to wear a white t-shirt without looking like I forgot to get dressed. I want to be terrified of AIDS, I want to have an opinion about those boring ass Marvel movies. And I want those opinions to be of any concern to the people making them.” It is easy to want to be young considering the state of his life as an old person. Easy to want to be like her.
“Well, I want to live in the same home for more than a year, order wine without feeling nervous, have a resume full of crazy mistakes instead of crazy lies. I want stories and wisdom, perspective. I want to have so much behind me I'm not a slave to what's in front of me, especially these flavorless unremarkable Marvel movies.” He smiles at that, at least inside. He starts talking about Marvel movies. He is glad they agree. They agree on so much.
But that is it. She hit the nail on the head. She still needs to go out into the world. Meet the world. Find herself. She deserves that. As much as anyone he knew. And she isn’t going to find that at Greendale. She isn’t going to find that tied to a forty year old failed lawyer.
“There's pressures on me you don't have to live under, if you accept that you're older. And let the kid stuff go.”
Jeff can’t not respond to that. Let the kids go. He knows she is right. Well, he doesn’t know how he will accept that he is older. But he will let her go. Perhaps he already has.
He looks straight into her eyes. He always looked straight into her eyes when they talked. It was one of those things that made them a little more than just friends. “I let you go, Annie.”
She doesn’t know how to react to that. Perhaps she should have seen it coming. Or, perhaps, after so many years of lying to themselves, she thought they could hold up for one more day. But she deserves the truth. Or at least part of it. Deserves to know that he had lied back as a sophomore, telling her she was just a schoolgirl with a silly crush. Perhaps only if he told her the truth would letting her go really be letting her go.
“With my head,” he elaborated, “my hands.” He doesn’t know how to say what comes next. Nothing to do but try. “The heart,” and he is stuck. “Which cynics say is a code for penis,” but Jeff is as cynical as they come and he doesn’t mean penis. “Wants what it wants. But I let you go.”
Annie’s phone buzzed. “The others are coming,” she says. Of course they were . They were always masters of perfect timing. But maybe they actually were. Jeff has no idea what he was going to say next. Nothing he wants to say wouldn’t immediately contradict “I let you go.”
“I think you should kiss me goodbye or you might regret it for the rest of your life,” she says. He knows what she is doing. Letting him let her go. Or letting him let her let him let her go. Or maybe he doesn’t know what she is doing—maybe he just wants to kiss her.
“What about you?”
“I’ll regret the kiss for a week; I’m in my twenties. Who cares?” And he knows she is lying. She knows he knows. But if she says that, then he can let her go. Then they can put a nice bow on things, and she can go off to find herself and there will be no more forty year old community college professors preventing her from finding the world and finding herself.
Or maybe he is just rationalizing. Maybe he just wants to kiss her. He is good at rationalizing, having been a lawyer, after all. He never even saw any problem with it until he met her.
He kisses her. She tastes good, her lips so warm and soft on his. She smells good, too, and if he thought they had more time he might sniff her hair. He starts his hand on her chin, before placing it on her shoulder, where it had been so many times before. He has to bend down to kiss her. She looks deeply into his eyes as he pulls away, and his whole soul is open. She could see anything she wants to, and he hoped she sees that he is telling the truth that he let her go, or at least that he is trying the best he can.
He can’t help but think back to the Transfer Dance, the same dark school casting long shadows. The same desire to kiss her again and not stop. The same understanding that he needed to stop, and this time, even though he doesn’t feel creepy, he feels that even stronger. He has to let her go.
There would be time later to go back to that night, as he hears more voices entering the study room. Britta. Abed. Perhaps all his other friends.
“Ooh, are we interrupting,” Chang says, because what else could Chang be expected to say? Perhaps he is right, in a way. And he doesn’t make Jeff quite as mad as when Britta tells Chang to “stop being gross.”
“Are you guys doing an unauthorized finale in here? Not cool,” Abed says because of course that’s the kind of thing that Abed would say. That’s when Jeff knows that he is going to miss Abed. He looks briefly at Annie, trying to smile, even as he starts his response. He is going to miss Abed. He is going to see something every once in a while that makes him think of Abed, and he will get a little melancholy and hope his old friend is doing well. Thinking of missing Abed, though, makes him realize there are no words for what he is going to feel about Annie.
“Abed, I know it gives you comfort to see everything through that meta lens,” Jeff explains, “but we were just saying goodbye to the room.” They were saying goodbye to a lot more than the room. But it was a goodbye, and maybe that’s the part that counts.
“For season six,” Annie says. “Season seven, who knows? It’s out of our hands. Too many variables.”
Jeff smiles at that. He smiles that she is trying to make things okay. Take things one day at a time. And she is right, perhaps. No one knows what season seven will bring. But Jeff knows that she isn’t coming back. He won’t let her. But she won’t try. Once upon a time, he might have wondered what exactly she meant by that, and tried to keep her around to find out. But he let her go.
“Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool,” Abed says. “That was one cool for each season.”
“Wait, do it again,” Chang says. “I want to try something.” As Abed goes through the “cool”s, Chang farts during the fourth. “It’s an inside joke,” he explains.
Jeff smiles at the study group. “I’m going to miss you guys.” It’s true.
Then Frankie goes and asks them each to imagine season 7, and Abed makes his promise: “if you cut to it, it won’t come true.”
Jeff watches as each of his friends closes their eyes and pictures what season 7 will bring. He holds his gaze on Annie, wishing he could know what she was thinking, but also knowing he shouldn’t need to know. He let her go, after all.
He thinks about all the things he wants to come true. Not just for himself, but for Annie to find herself in the world, and for Abed to make it big in Hollywood. He thinks about what he might have hoped for before meeting the study group: a gang of hot, wide-eyes, red-haired women who were all dumb as bricks. A different man had made that wish, a man he no longer wanted to be, and so Jeff does what Abed said: he cuts to it.
Almost beyond Jeff’s control, the cutscene—the one that will never come true—shifts. “Eventually, you’ll leave and be replaced by new ones,” he tells his band of redheads, “and that’s something I’m equipped to handle now. I’m sort of a hero that way.”
He wants to think that with time, he can move on from everyone leaving. But his subconscious must know that that isn’t really what he wants. Because as hard as it is going to be without her, the alternative—for whatever to happen to make it not hard—seems worse. And he could never replace his Annie.
He was honest with Annie. It is only fair that he should be honest with the whole group. Even if it is mostly directed at Annie. “I love that I got to be with you guys. You saved my life, and changed it forever.” He looks at her while he says it. It is true of the whole group, but especially her. He doesn’t know what would be keeping him going if it hadn’t been for her. He supposed he will find out soon enough. He also knows that every memory with her will be cherished as long as he carries it. He wouldn’t give them up, not for the whole world. But what do you do when the best part of your life gets a forensics internship in DC?
That was the question for the future. This is Abed’s finale after all. And Jeff can’t think of two final words better than the ones he says: “thank you.”
Perhaps metaphorically, the group’s goodbye hug eventually has to end. Frankie is the first to pull away. Britta is the second. Jeff keeps his feet planted where they are. Even the dean pulls away, taking his hand off of Jeff’s back, before Jeff moves.
There are mumblings about going back to a bar somewhere as a group, but nothing is going to come of it. They have had enough excitement for one night. And anyway, it isn’t like Annie and Abed are leaving the next day. The group will have time to say goodbye. Jeff doesn’t contribute to that discussion; after what he had said, he is barely able to make it without crying.
Chang is the first to leave the room. He has to get home, he explains. It’s getting late. Everyone quickly starts humming a similar tune. The dean, then Abed, then Britta, then Frankie. That leaves just Jeff and Annie, but Jeff knows there is nothing left for them to say.
“I think I’m gonna head home now,” Annie explains, a similar story to the rest of the group.
“Drive safely. I’ll see you around,” Jeff says, which is more than he gave any of the others. Now that he is the only one left, his silence would have been much more noticeable.
A knowing look passes between Annie and Jeff. “You should head home, too, Jeff,” she says. Perhaps she is thinking of how she found him just a few moments earlier. Either way, she knows him too well. He almost smiles.
“I will make it home. Don’t worry about me.”
She gives him a look of concern, but makes no further objection as she walks out the study room doors, further out the library, and down the stairway out into the world. He is letting her go.
It’s just him alone in the study room now. Barely fifteen minutes have passed since Annie first found him like that, and yet it feels darker. Whatever trace of life it still carried must have disappeared when he let Annie go. Now it’s just a cold, empty study room at a community college, and now he’s just a forty-something year old man who has no place better to spend his nights.
Jeff thinks about all the memories he has in this study room. It’s where he first met—first brought into existence—the study group. It’s where he was first attracted to Annie while they prepared for the debate. It’s where they searched fruitlessly for Annie’s purple pen. He remembers how mad she got that day.
The study room is where they stayed up all night trying to make lab partnerships. It’s where Shirley and Andre got married. It’s what he and Shirley played foosball for. He remembers when the study room led the rest of the school to turn on them. It’s where Jeff held his graduation ceremony. And for the last two years, it’s where the group stuck together (somewhat) as the Save Greendale committee.
There are other moments Jeff remembers, too. Quieter, less momentous ones, the day to day life. Not studying for tests he had the next class. Joking around with his friends. Stolen glances with Annie that kept him going when he was feeling down. All in this room.
For the first time that night, Jeff starts really crying, tears coming down his face. So much happened in this room, and now it’s all over and it feels so sad and empty. Nothing lasts forever, Jeff tells himself.
With his key card as a professor, Jeff can get almost anywhere, and there’s no one else on campus, so Jeff decides to take a walk around campus.
He steps out into the library, and first remembers the time Troy and Abed were attracted to the same librarian. He remembers looking out at the wide range of books none of them ever read. Sometimes Annie read some of them. He walks down the staircase outside the library and remembers his first day in the study group, when the group had come to him on those stairs and let him back in.
At the bottom of the stairs, Jeff looks around the quad for his next destination. He sees the office and administration building and decides that it’s as good a destination as any. He takes a brief glance inside the dean’s office and thinks back to all the boring, dull administrative tasks that probably didn’t need to be performed. They don’t seem so horrible anymore, especially when he had someone with him. He remembers when Chang sat on a throne in this office and ruled the school with an iron fist, and he remembers when he was in this office and received a call from the ass-crack bandit. He remembers running to the dean’s office to grab imaginary hats for Troy and Abed. He takes a quick stop by his own office before looking into the teacher’s lounge, remembering their descent below into Borchert’s lab, and what he had learned there. Maybe learned isn’t the right word for what he had known almost since he first met her. Either way, he’s not committed enough to his reminiscing to descend into the lab, and he starts down the hallway to the main block of classrooms.
Along the way, he wonders what would have happened if he had told Annie what had happened in the lab. He had been engaged to Britta at the time, a decision he still cringes at the thought of. She probably would have told him she loved him, too. Maybe not. Maybe Jeff is just being narcissistic.
On the way to the classrooms, which are really in a separate building, he passes through a narrow connecting hallway, including the stairwell where he and Annie once cleaned out the black mold.
Thinking through the locations of their classrooms, Jeff moves first towards the bio lab. He remembers sharing a microscope with the rest of the group, and all the associated drama. He remembers when their yam was destroyed and Annie told him she was going to screw him in that lab. He dropped what he was doing, probably nothing important anyways, to go meet her. He knew, of course, that she wasn’t being serious. He just figured it must have been important for her to get him there like that.
The bio lab is even darker than it was that night. This time there are no yams steadily growing (or not growing) for eager students. The school year over means the yams have been packed up. Jeff realizes fog has formed from his breath on the bio lab window. He steps back and starts the walk towards the humanities side of the building. There must really be no one else in the building, or at least no one making any sound that Jeff can hear. The only sound is his footsteps against the floors, echoing into nothingness.
He finds their anthropology classroom, where after Professor Bauer tried to kill him, Duncan kept them entertained with a curated assortment of YouTube videos. It’s also where Ben was born. Walking out of that one, Jeff passes by his old locker from his days as a student. Once upon a time, he thought that having a school locker as old as he had been was so pathetic. Now, he would almost do anything for those days. He remembers the time he stopped by during the day to change his shirt. Annie was with him, of course. It might have mostly been for her benefit. He can still remember the bright pink top she was wearing.
She would have reciprocated his feelings if he had told her. He knows she would have. Even after Borchert’s lab, but especially during the years before then. There were a thousand different moments when he could have told her. But he hadn’t. It was for the best, he tells himself, though he struggles to remember why.
He comes to the Spanish classroom, back to the very beginning. Things had seemed so normal at first. Relatively, at least. No paintball games or rocket ships or timelines, and Chang was always strange, but at least he wasn’t a dictator. And Jeff hadn’t been in love with a girl 15 years younger than him. But normal doesn’t mean better. All the weirdness: he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
He steps back out onto the quad and looks out at Greendale’s buildings. There are so many, he wonders how long his stroll around campus will actually last. Not that he has anywhere to be. He could walk for weeks without missing anything. That’s not true: Annie’s around for another week, and even after saying his goodbye, he doesn want to miss that time.
Thinking about Borchert’s lab, Jeff figures that it only makes sense to step into Borchert Hall. He sees the olympic-sized swimming pool that only the dean would have thought made sense to buy. He sees the stand where he once argued that Britta hadn’t cheated, and then that she was insane. It’s a shorter stop, and back out on the quad, Jeff decides to head towards the dorms. Maybe some late stragglers sleeping there will make his walk less lonely.
No luck. As Jeff taps his concerningly powerful key card, he immediately realizes that he’s the only one in the building. None of the overnight students is as stuck in Greendale as Jeff is. That’s why he had to let Annie go, he remembers. Or at least one reason. He thinks about Annie as he remembers the blanket/pillow fort that Troy and Abed once laid out in this building. The first one, which he and Annie had scurried through as they uncovered the truth about Professor Professorson. He remembers when the blanket fell and it was just the two of them in their own soft, quiet world. He could have kissed her. She would have gone along with it, and more, she would have been thrilled. Perhaps he should have. But he let her go.
The one building Jeff’s key card won’t get him into appears to be the Student Health Center. A quick glance through the window is all he gets if he wants to think back to when he learned that his cholesterol was high, or to when Pierce faked a heart attack. With all the shenanigans they got into, he’s half surprised they weren’t in that place more.
There aren’t many buildings left, and so Jeff walks into the gymnasium. He didn’t do a lot of sports during his time at Greendale, but one memory from this place is clearer than almost any other. He still remembers the way her lips felt at the debate, the way she kissed him so urgently, so determined to win. He respected her determination. She said that he was horny and they won the debate. Horny, of course, he was, and he could barely think when she pulled away, but that didn’t begin to cover the depth of it. What that kiss would foreshadow. It was one of the two times he would kiss her. No, that’s incorrect , he thinks, remembering the kiss “goodbye” just a few hours ago. He wonders if perhaps three or four years earlier he couldn’t have just walked up to her and kissed her and they would be together today. He shakes his head. These could-have-beens are dangerous, but they’re so tempting.
With not many other places to walk, at least not at Greendale, Jeff enters the student lounge. It’s almost automatic now that the highlight reel starts playing. Playing pool while naked. Throwing an Oktoberfest celebration. All the countless conversations, inside jokes, pranks, that he never thought twice about. The times when he was feeling down, when he buried his face in school furniture, and his friends came to cheer him up. Now so many of those people have left. But at least he’s remembering things that actually happened. As long as he can keep himself in the real world, he is okay.
The real world , he thinks to himself as he walks directly into the cafeteria. He remembers all the real things that happened there. The first time he asked Britta to join the study group, which really meant the creation of the study group. The time they fought those bratty teenagers. The school election. Star Burns’s funeral. Shirley Sandwiches. Not to mention the countless dances, which no reasonable person could explain why a community college put on.
One dance in particular is at the front of Jeff’s mind as he walks out the front of the cafeteria. He can almost hear Britta and Slater telling him they love him. He can almost hear the awkward silence that fell over the dance as he walked out on both of them. At least it’s in the real world . Maybe he isn’t just remembering the silence, as after, the cafeteria as he finds it is dead quiet. Like the rest of campus, there’s no one there except Jeff. When he gets outside, standing on one corner of the quad, he hears a bird keeping him company. It sounds like it could be an owl, but it’s probably just a sparrow or something. Jeff doesn’t know birds.
Jeff knows he isn’t remembering the Tranny Dance for Britta and Slater, though. He knows that as he walks the exact path he walked that night. The path he walked to her. He recognizes the place almost immediately, and while he’s been here countless times since that night, most of them made it look unrecognizable under a bright daytime sky.
Jeff forces his legs away from his old path. He thinks standing in the place he once kissed her seems a little too pathetic. As opposed to walking alone around a community college deep into the night, reliving the good old days. He stares at that spot, seeing himself there kissing her, and feeling her lips on his. The kiss was softer, calmer, and more real than the one they had shared during the debate, but also more intense, promising than the kiss goodbye. He sits down on a bench and stares at that spot where he once stood, seeing himself so clearly kissing her, and he can’t possibly stop himself from thinking about what could have been.
She kissed him the first time. Or at least it was mostly her. They both leaned in, and the point where they met was closer to him than her. And she had started leaning in first.
He really was glad she was staying. He hadn’t just been saying that. He loved all of his friends, but she was the one who he really felt like he wanted to be around. Talk about Slater making him feel like he could be a better person, Annie actually succeeded in making him a better person.
“I wish I could live two lives. One of me would go with Vaughn, and one of me could stay here,” Annie had said. It was a nice thought. Abed would surely have a field day with it. Jeff knew how glad he was that she had decided to stay.
“Yeah,” he had agreed, “one of me could be back with Slater, and the other could try it with Britta. And then we could all get together for some weird foursome.”
Annie chuckled at that. He liked that sound. He knew he needed to go back inside and deal with the situation at hand, but he didn’t really want to. Standing with Annie seemed more fun. So he didn’t go back inside. And then she kissed him. And there they were.
The first thing he noticed when she pulled away was her face. He expected her to look more apologetic. Uncertain. And she did, to a degree. But she also looked so… lustful. Like she had wanted to do that for a long time.
He could have handled regular, nervous Annie. But this Annie was a whole different ball game. She scared him. And turned him on.
So without much thinking, Jeff leaned in and put his hands on her back and kissed her hard. Her hair smelled sweet, like vanilla. Her lips were a little more tart, like raspberries that had been picked maybe half a day too early. And soft.
It was so easy kissing her. Even as every alarm bell was blaring in his head, Jeff couldn’t bring himself to stop, and he thought that maybe things could go on like that forever. She clearly didn’t want him to stop, now matching the intensity with which he had started the kiss.
She’s 19 , something in his mind said, and he kissed her harder, and anyone could walk up and see you , something in his mind said, and he kissed her harder, and Britta and Slater are waiting for you inside , and he kissed her harder.
Eventually, something, perhaps the fact that humans do need to breathe to survive, got through to him, and he pulled away from her, and then the moment broke.
“Annie,” he said, already planning out what he had to say next. He knew he had to. Even though he didn’t want to. Even though he would probably still regret it five years later. “Annie, we should….”
She frowned at him. Perhaps she knew what was coming. That would make it easier. But that made him sad. He had hurt a lot of women, but he didn’t care about any of them like he did her, and he never wanted to hurt her, she hoped she would understand.
She looked too young. She was 19. Her backpack had been set on the ground, and her hair was parted unevenly to frame her face, and the light reflected so smoothly off the curves of her face. Yet Jeff wanted to kiss her again. He felt ashamed. And he wanted to kiss her again.
“Go back to your place?” Annie said after a long pause, with a hint of an uncertain smile.
That caught Jeff off guard. He had expected her to understand. Didn’t she see their age difference? And even in the world where she didn’t understand, he didn’t expect her to be so forward. It made him want to kiss her again.
The mention of his apartment also made him realize how exposed they were, standing out on the Greendale quad with so many students around. Surely some must have seen them, they were kissing for so long, and Jeff didn’t like that thought. He wanted to go in any direction off the quad that wasn’t back inside, where both Britta and Slater were waiting for him. Leading Annie towards his car (he carried her backpack) seemed like as good a first step as any.
He planned on saying something to her when they got in his car. He took her backpack and put it in his trunk. Now that they were out in the garage, away from the crowd, he could tell her why they couldn’t possibly work. But he thought that if she had been planning to leave with Vaughn, she would need a ride home, and there was no reason he couldn’t see that she got home safely.
She didn’t say much to him, but the car was filled with nervous energy that kept Jeff at the edge of his seat. Things calmed down a bit when Jeff turned on the radio and thanked his luck that it was set to one of his newer stations.
He was driving home instinctively, and he realized he had no idea where she lived. He would have to ask her, which would mean hurting her, which he wanted to avoid. But really, he couldn’t bring a 19 year old back to his apartment.
“Annie,” he started.
“Yeah,” she said, happily, but clearly also nervous. He glanced over at her face and saw that her eyes were so eager and desirous. She’d probably do it right here if I pulled over , Jeff thought, and then he didn’t know where that thought came from.
Jeff lost his train of thought during his long pause. He kept driving home, mostly on instinct.
Before he knew it, they were in his garage. His plan had failed. He wanted to smack himself, remind himself that there was no way for this to end well. Instead he ended up walking upstairs to his apartment with Annie steps behind him. Perhaps the least he could do after everything was offer her a drink. Then he remembered that if he gave her a drink he would be committing a crime.
He ended up pouring her a glass of water as she sat her backpack on his couch. This had to stop.
“Annie, I know… I just don’t… this can’t… we can’t….” All of his thoughts trailed off as he stared at her. She had bit down on her lower lip, hard it seemed, and was rolling it slowly in circles with her front teeth. Her eyes were just as eager and lustful as after she first kissed him.
That did it for Jeff.
He walked up to her with long, determined strides, facing her with little distance between the two of them. He stared at her. She was irresistible in the most literal sense of the word. He grabbed the back of her head and pushed her lips into his. He sat them down on his couch and barely took a breath as he kept their lips attached. He did break it to ask “should we move…” which he didn’t finish when she started vigorously nodding. He grabbed her with one arm while she wrapped her legs around him and carried her into his bedroom.
He woke up the next morning not entirely remembering the night before. He knew there was someone next to him. That wasn’t new to him; he had brought plenty of women into his bed over the years. He just didn’t really remember going out the night before. He propped himself up on one elbow to see who it was. Shit. Annie.
It all came back so clearly, then. Kissing her after the dance. Kissing her in his apartment, even when he knew he needed to break things off. Doing… so much more than kissing.
He knew he had to break things off with her, which made him sad. Not because he hadn’t hurt women before. He had just liked having one person in his life who actually made him feel like a good person. Perhaps that was too much to ask.
“Good morning, Jeff,” she said. He didn’t even process it at first, he was so lost in his thoughts. She sounded happy, cheerful. This was going to be hard.
“Good morning,” he said, groggily. He smiled weakly. She moved closer to him and kissed him on the lips. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. She moved closer to him.
“Annie,” he said when she paused from kissing him, “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
Annie frowned at that. “While we’ve already done it once,” she said, and she sounded way too seductive for someone who was too innocent to say sex, “so I don’t see how doing it again will make anything worse.”
Jeff almost laughed at how logical she sounded. Of course she knew how to be persuasive. And if that wasn’t enough, she bit her lip like she had the night before, and Jeff could barely control himself.
If the light of day wasn’t enough for him to realize what he had done, the post-nut clarity certainly was. He looked at the 19 year old lying next to him and knew that nothing was going to be accomplished while they were in bed together, not even while they were in his apartment. “We need to have a conversation sometime soon,” he said. It also let him postpone the discussion to a later date.
“How does dinner tomorrow night sound?” Annie asked. He had been hoping they would be able to push it back even later, but he knew he didn’t have an actual reason to ask for that.
“Okay,” Jeff said, and he watched he pick her clothes off his floor and led her out of his apartment door. After closing it, he shook his head at himself.
He ended up getting their… meeting moved up from dinner to coffee. It seemed less formal. Less likely to get her hopes up. Like it might hurt her less.
He hated that he had to do this to her. He always hated to make Annie sad. This was going to particularly bother him. But he couldn’t seriously consider dating a 19 year old , and he knew that the longer he waited, the worse it would be.
Jeff spent way too long trying to pick out an outfit. What do you wear to break things off with someone? He settled for a sweater and jeans.
Annie was wearing one of her nicer sundresses and had already claimed a table for the two of them. She sat there drinking something with obscene amounts of cream and sugar in it while smiling nervously. She looked really good. Jeff wanted to kiss her. Badly. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to say everything he needed to.
“Hi, Jeff!” she said when she saw him, smiling at his appearance. “I got us a table!”
“I noticed,” he said, trying not to sound too nervous, and then he winced because he sounded like an asshole.
She placed her hand on his forearm. “Don’t be so nervous, Jeff,” she said reassuringly. “Have you never gone to get coffee with someone before?”
Something about the direction of that question felt wrong to Jeff, but his heart was too busy melting for him to figure out what it was. He had no idea how he was going to be able to end things with her. He ordered an espresso and decided to put that issue off for at least a bit longer.
Forgetting his worries was easy when he was talking with her. That was Annie’s problem: it was too much fun to spend time with her. Jeff waited until they were close to end, but not so close that they were rushing out, to speak his mind.
“Annie,” he said, cautiously and uncertainly, “I just don’t know what could possibly happen between us considering our difference in age.”
She frowned at that, though she didn’t look totally caught off guard. Perhaps she had expected the sentiment.
“Jeff,” she said, her voice going up in pitch, and her lips almost pouting, “I’m really not that young.” Jeff looked at her. Young or not, he found her incredibly attractive. But what she said just wasn’t true.
“I know,” he replied. “There are just so many things I have lived through that you have no idea about. Not just in my life but in the world. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“I’ve lived through things in the world,” she insisted.
“What’s the first world event you remember living through?”
She paused at that. Perhaps she was thinking, or perhaps she was hesitating, not wanting to give too recent an answer.
“I remember the impeachment, or at least hearing about parts of it.”
Jeff nodded, staring at her face, not wanting to fully pay attention to her words.
“You must remember Bush v. Gore pretty well, no?”
She hesitated at that. Apparently not. “Yeah, I definitely remember… hearing about it.” There was an awkward silence, Annie lost in concentration, searching for something to prove her age. “I remember really clearly when the towers came down,” she said.
Jeff remembered that day, too, of course. He was already at a law firm. Annie wasn’t helping her case; she was only shocking him that that day wasn’t yesterday.
“What are the earliest world events you remember?” she asked. The conversation wasn’t going well towards rebutting concerns about their age difference, yet Jeff still felt compelled to answer honestly.
“I vaguely remember the hostages, I think.”
Annie’s face bunched up in concentration as she tried to decipher what he meant. She almost looked hot. He knew no one his age would need further explanation as to the hostages.
“The Iranian hostages,” he explained. “But the first thing I really remember is the 1984 election.” She waited, perhaps afraid to say something, for Jeff to elaborate. “Reagan versus Mondale,” he explained. They took a moment’s pause. “And in fact, if my memory serves me, Reagan famously said something in one of those debates about how age should not be an issue.” He smiled uncertainly as he said that.
“See, Jeff,” Annie said, now tapping his arm. She returned his uncertain smile with more optimism. “It must be a sign. We’re going to be fine .” So Jeff paid the check and drove home without having broken anything with her. He didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps Reagan really was giving him a sign. It seemed unlikely. She was so young .
They didn’t set any future dates, but he promised to call her soon.
Something was still bothering Jeff when he got home, so he went to look up what Reagan said in the 1984 debate and found he was actually promising not to exploit “youth and inexperience.” That definitely seemed like some sort of a sign, and he put off calling Annie.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her; he really did. But Jeff didn’t call Annie for ten days after they had lunch. By the end of that period, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where his shame at not having called her made him less and less want to call her. Perhaps if he didn’t do anything, the whole thing would just blow over. They could both go back to Greendale and forget anything ever happened. He would look at her and only ever see her wearing multiple layers of clothes. That’s what he told himself.
That plan was shattered by Annie’s surprise arrival on his doorstep during the evening of the tenth day. He wasn’t dressed for company, especially not company like her, wearing just a t-shirt and sweatshorts.
She looked angry. Or at least she was trying to look angry. “You, mister, have a very strange definition of soon,” she said pointedly as she walked through his door.
“You came to my apartment?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
“You promised me you would call me soon.”
“You came to my apartment?” he reiterated.
This time it seemed to catch her off guard. “Yes, I did,” she said in a much quieter, less confrontational voice. “I was in the area and I wanted to see why you hadn’t called me.”
Jeff nodded. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Annie asked, her voice regaining some confidence as she crossed her arms over her chest.
Jeff couldn’t think of another way to change the subject. “You’re so you—“
“That’s garbage,” Annie interrupted, clearly prepared for that. “Am I too young for you to enjoy spending time with? Too young for you to be attracted to?”
Jeff chuckled at that. “No, I enjoy spending time with you more than just about anyone else.”
“So you’re afraid of other people? Afraid that they might judge you? That you might not be so popular?”
Jeff chuckled again, not knowing what to say. She was very persuasive. Perhaps it helped that he really wanted to date her.
“Jeff, what do you think you’re going to regret in five years? That you didn’t leave a good enough impression on strangers? That people you met once didn’t get the best image of you?”
“You’re very persuasive,” he said. She didn’t reply. They both stood in silence for a long time. She wasn’t going to speak first. “Maybe, we should go to dinner,” he said. “And then maybe we should do it again. And then maybe after one of those dinners I can take you back here.”
Annie smiled at that. Jeff thought he heard her exhale. “That sounds like a plan,” she said.
“I care about you, Annie,” and he stepped forward, leaned down, and kissed her on the lips, and the alarm in his head that told him it was wrong was a lot quieter than the first time, and he thought that it wouldn’t take much before kissing her only felt so right.
It was about a month later that they were lying in bed together when the doorbell rang. “Just leave it,” Jeff said.
Annie turned to look at him. “Jeff!” she exclaimed with alarm, “you can’t just ignore your doorbell! What if someone needs something?”
“They can get it somewhere else,” he mumbled, and he wrapped one arm around her, trying to pull her back to sleep. “It’s too early.”
Annie displeased him by hopping out of bed. She pulled one of his t-shirts over her head and walked out into the main area to open his door. He groaned softly but made no attempt to stop her.
“Hi, I’m Mrs. Ellis,” Jeff heard someone say. His nextdoor neighbor. He jumped out of bed and quickly pulled on a shirt and sweatpants. “I wanted to drop off some mail that landed in my box,” Jeff heard as he walked into his living room, “I didn’t know Jeff had a daughter.”
For some reason, Jeff felt a strong desire to correct her. Perhaps if he was not caring about the rest of the world, his elderly neighbor was as good a place as any to start. “Uh… well,” he heard Annie stammer awkwardly.
“She not my daughter,” Jeff said, making Annie very slightly jump as he appeared next to her. “She’s my girlfriend.” And then, he put his arm around her and very lightly kissed her on the lips.
“Oh!” Mrs. Ellis said before walking out of his doorway without saying anything more.
Annie turned to Jeff and smiled. “What was that about?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, walking back towards his kitchen, flipping through the coupon books and catalogs Mrs. Ellis had thought so urgent. “I guess I like having you as my girlfriend and I don’t mind if other people know it.”
Annie giggled quietly as he said that. Calling her his girlfriend wasn’t brand new, but it was new enough that it was notable. She leaned back on his kitchen counter, and pushed herself up to sit on it. “I seem to remember you feeling differently a month ago,” she said.
Jeff took a more serious expression. “You’re right,” he admitted. “I guess I just thought about what my life will be like in five years. I realized that even if some people look at me funny, and even if you don’t remember as many presidential debates as I do, the world where we’re together seems one heck of a lot better than the one where we aren’t.”
He leaned towards her and kissed her as she sat on his counter. She smiled sweetly at him. “I think I might make breakfast,” he said. “Eggs?”
“Sure,” she agreed, and she swung her legs against his cabinets while he cracked six eggs into a pan.
The sun is rising.
The sun is rising over the Greendale quad.
Because Jeff didn’t take Annie home after the Transfer Dance. And now he let her go. And that seems even more like the right thing to do as he looks around. He really spent an entire night sitting on a bench in his community college, his mind stuck in the past.
The morning looks so promising, nothing like the cold empty night he remembers leaving behind. Jeff thinks that that promise is a lie. There is nothing promising in the life of a man who spends his time on community college benches. How could he not have let her go?
If there’s one good thing about it all, it’s that Jeff proved he could stay up all night on accident. Though he strongly regrets it from the way his bones scream as he stands up. He knows it’s going to be a long walk from this spot to his car, and in the real world, Annie won’t be with him.