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It hits him when he realizes that every song is about her.
The ones about looking across a room and being so captivated by someone that you forget why you’re even there, the ones about yearning for something you know you could never have, the ones about the echoes that never quite fade out - the one that will haunt your days and dreams for all eternity.
Every song is about having love, or losing it, or missing it, he thinks one morning as some generic drivel about lovers and Christmas lights comes on the radio. So every fucking song is about her.
She hadn’t stayed for much longer after Annie and Abed left. They’d had a big fight about it; she told him about the job that she had secretly applied for and accepted, he forgot to congratulate her before getting upset that she was leaving, she bitterly asked him if he really had expected her to stay put for him for the rest of their lives. He’d told her that wasn’t true. He was pretty sure that she’d never believe him.
He had known she wouldn’t stay put for him - or for anybody - if she was presented with any other options. Selfishly, devotedly, he had purely believed that he had more time until such options were made available to her.
So now, he spends his work days thinking that she’ll pop up around every corner, poke her head into his office, shoot him a look that says ‘kill me now’ from behind Shirley’s sandwich counter. He spends every night thinking about who he should call and ask to have a beer with him. He spends a few minutes every morning laying awake in bed after his alarm goes off, wishing the space beside him wasn’t empty, desperate to hear her grousing as she rolls over and tries to go back to sleep.
The realization comes too late; that he planned a future with her in secret and forgot to ask for her input, assuming they’d always be on the same wavelength. He realizes that nothing can replace her, that he’s destined to live half a life without the one thing that gave it any meaning at all.
—
Frankie notices. She notices the night of Britta’s going away party (that he had single handedly organized, refusing all help offered to him, desperately hoping it could make her forgive him for falling apart at the mere idea of going on without her).
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks in a hushed voice when they have a moment alone; him mixing a drink at his kitchen counter, her leaning against a stool on the other side.
“What do you mean?” he asks flippantly, as if he has no clue what she’s talking about.
“Come on, Jeff. Don’t play that game with me,” she replies, eyes narrowing, lips pursing.
He sighs a touch too dramatically. “Of course I’m gonna be okay.”
Her expression refuses to waver. “Your best friend of several years is moving away, the last of your little Greendale group, and you’re really truly okay with it?”
“That’s an awfully loaded question.”
“Perhaps.”
Jeff puts down his drink to focus all his attention on her. He tries to tell her silently that of course he’s not okay, but that’s okay. That she might be leaving, but he was happy for her. That it was all she ever wanted and she deserved it. That she had every right to live out the dreams that didn’t include him.
And yet, all he says is, “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be okay with that?”
Frankie shakes her head at his smug smile, but not in any sort of begrudging or condescending way. If anything, she looks sad. Like she absorbed all the sadness Jeff was trying so desperately to hide, like he’d placed all the weight he’d been carrying squarely on her shoulders.
And yet, on his it remained.
—
It takes a few months for him to acknowledge that he has a problem.
She calls him sometimes as she’s driving home from work. She tells him all about her new coworkers, how much she loves her new job, how much she’s enjoying the city. She seems to forgive him for his indiscretion, maybe because he does a good job of making her think that he’s been perfectly fine without her. Every once in a while, she offhandedly mentions that he should visit sometime. Without fail, Jeff always comes up with an excuse for why he can’t. It’s always “I can’t take that much time off right now” or “I need to save up for a plane ticket” or something even more nonsensical and trivial. He refuses to admit that it’s partly because she keeps mentioning one specific coworker, a guy named Adam, with the kind of tone that used to be reserved for him. She’ll get overly giggly whenever she says his name, can’t seem to resist telling stories about him that go nowhere and hold no importance, mentions how much she loves hanging out with him and his friends on the weekends.
Despite never having met the guy, Jeff is pretty sure he hates him more than he’s ever hated anyone in his entire life. And given how much he hates his dad, he’s pretty sure that’s not exactly healthy.
The other reason is much more murky, one that Jeff hardly wants to give any merit to. Sometimes, when he hears Britta’s laugh on the other end of the phone and can clearly picture which of her many smiles is plastered across her face, he thinks that if he ever went to visit her, he’d never want to leave.
And that, somehow, is more terrifying than the prospect of continuing to live with this Britta-shaped void.
After the first couple of months, her calls drop off in frequency. So he starts calling her when he knows she’s driving home, tells himself that it’s for her benefit. That she’s still adjusting to life in a new place, that she needs comfort and familiarity, that she needs him. It takes only a few weeks for him to realize how big of a lie it truly is.
So he stops calling. She doesn’t start again.
—
It’s not until he sees a picture on Instagram of her and a guy he can only assume to be Adam - arms around each other, faces pressed together as they beam at the camera - that he falls completely apart.
His first instinct was to call Abed. Why, he wasn’t exactly sure, but it hardly mattered.
“Jeff?”
“I’m in love with Britta.”
Silence hangs between them for a moment too long. All Jeff can hear is the beating of his own heart, the rush of blood through his arteries.
“You know, I think you’re supposed to start phone calls with a ‘Hi, how are you?’ and not by confessing one of your deepest darkest secrets,” Abed says. Jeff lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding when he registers the amusement in his voice.
“Sorry. I just- I felt like I wouldn’t have ever been able to say it if I didn’t say it right then, you know?”
“What made you realize?”
“We, we sort of…fell out of touch. I mean, we used to call all the time, when she first moved away. It was always her calling for a while, then it was always me, and I sorta felt like she didn’t really want to talk to me anymore. So I stopped. And I’ve texted her a couple times and gotten no response, so I think she’s mad at me.”
“She’s not mad at you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“We talked the other day. She said she’s not mad at you.”
“Well, then…do you know what’s up?”
Abed hums, like he’s considering how much he should or shouldn’t tell Jeff. “She was starting to feel like you were in love with her.”
“Oh.” Jeff tries to hide the fact that it feels like he just took a ton of bricks to the chest, but he knows Abed has the uncanny ability to see right through him, even when they’re not physically together.
“It’s not that she hated the concept. She’s just frustrated with your timing.”
“Do you know anything about Adam?” Jeff asks, only because he can’t help himself.
“I do.”
“And?”
“She wanted to try dating him, but he rejected her.”
“Oh.”
“Aren’t you going to ask why?”
“I mean, are you asking because I would want to know the answer?”
“Perhaps.”
“Okay then…why?”
“He said that he could tell she was still in love with someone else.”
The room starts spinning.
“And…is she?”
“I didn’t ask,” Abed replies just vaguely enough that Jeff can’t tell whether or not it’s a lie.
“Oh. Cool.”
“So, did you just want to get that off your chest? Or did you want advice? Because you usually get mad at my advice because I tell you to do things that you already know you need to do.”
“I…I’m not entirely sure. I think I just needed someone else to know.”
“Getting it off your chest, okay.”
“Yeah,” Jeff swallows, trying desperately to keep his growing sense of dread from overtaking him. “So…how have you been?”
—
He knows that he should call her. He knows that he just needs to talk to her. But the time apart was doing funny things to the ways in which he thought about her.
Had whatever they’d been really been that great? What was it about her that made him care in a way he’d never cared about anyone before? And why her at all?
He gets in his car the morning after his call with Abed and puts on one of Spotify’s auto-generated playlists. The first song is one she’d introduced him to, by that band she loved that was named after a part of the brain. He sighs and skips it, not quite feeling up to listening to anything that would remind him too strongly of her. The next song is one that had been one of their favorites to scream along to late at night, some garbage by Flo Rida and David Guetta. He skips that one, too. The next is a song she’d once told him made her think of him. The next is one that they’d discovered together while on a trip with the rest of their friends. The final straw is a song by Jukebox the Ghost, a song that he had introduced her to, a song that had become one of her favorites of all time.
He can’t contain his visceral reaction; he lets out a strangled cry and nearly punches the volume button to mute the stereo.
He drives to work in complete and total silence.
—
“Why won’t you just call her?” Craig asks, sounding totally and utterly perplexed.
“You don’t get it, I…I missed my chance.”
He’d noticed, too. Apparently, your boss tends to notice when you make a habit of showing up to work late and start stashing even more alcohol than usual around the office.
“How?”
“It took me too long to realize what I wanted. And we’re bad for each other. Like, really fucking bad. We know how to make each other more miserable than either of us has ever been in our whole stupid long lives.”
“But you still love her?”
“Yes! Because it- it feels like this part of me is being carved out, right? But I don’t want it to stop, because I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.” Jeff stops for a second to let out a sigh. “And I miss her. And I’m mad it took me this long to realize how important she was to me. And she has every right to be mad at me for that, too.”
Craig doesn’t say anything, only keeps studying Jeff’s face.
“It’s stupid, I know,” Jeff says after a moment passes.
“It’s not stupid. You’re having a lot of intense and complicated feelings, and those are hard to handle. Especially if you’ve never had them before.”
“Is it sad that I’m a 46 year old man who’s never been in this kind of love?”
Craig shrugs. “Maybe. Only if you look at it that way. But it doesn’t really matter, because you’re experiencing it now. That’s what truly matters.”
Jeff looks down at the table between them. “It took living without her to realize that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. That means there’s something wrong with me, right?”
“I don’t pretend to have all the answers to life’s greatest mysteries, Jeffery, but I think that’s quite a common feeling. Why, I don’t know. But you’re certainly not alone in having it.”
He looks up just enough to look Craig in the eye. “What would you say if I told you I was thinking about doing something monumentally stupid?”
“Are you thinking about calling her?”
“...sort of.”
“Then do it. Even if all your worst fears are true and she doesn’t want anything to do with you for the rest of her life, at least you’ll know, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“You are right about that,” Jeff hums. “Although, I will say, you sounded a bit too chipper during that last bit.”
“I just want what’s best for you, Jeffrey. If that’s her, then you need to go for it.”
He looks back down at the table, not sure of what else there is to do in this hopeless scenario.
—
He buys a plane ticket. Jeffery “never set foot outside of Colorado” Winger buys a plane ticket to New York City with almost zero actual plan.
The first thing he thinks of when he books the flight is how many tropes Abed would say he was simultaneously deconstructing and falling into. He tries to turn his brain off for the 27 hours before his flight, knowing that he’ll talk himself out of it if he thinks too hard.
He doesn’t call her until he lands. Even then, his finger hovers over the green button, and it takes every ounce of strength he has to press it and raise the phone to his ear.
It rings. And rings. It rings just enough times that Jeff thinks it’s about to go to voicemail, then he hears a subtle click.
“Jeff?”
“Britta. Hey.”
His mouth suddenly goes dry, all the words he’d so carefully planned to say rush right out of his head.
“Gosh, it’s been a while. How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been…I’m…I’m in New York. Right now.”
He swears he can hear Britta’s face contort in shock on the other end.
“I’m sorry, you’re what?”
“I’m in New York. I just got on a plane and came here because I knew I had to see you, and I totally get it if you don’t want to see me, and I’m just now realizing what a terrible idea this is, and-”
“Jeff. Are you still at the airport?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
“LaGuardia.”
“Okay. I’m coming to pick you up, be there in 30.”
She hangs up before he can argue, a classic Britta move. A smart one, at that.
And then, there’s nothing to do but wait.
—
He’s sitting on a bench outside the airport when her car pulls up. He has no reason to know what her car looks like - or that she even had one - but it’s so perfectly Britta that it would be impossible to believe it belonged to anyone else, as it’s a slightly beat up-looking light green Volkswagon beetle.
She sees him and pulls her car up next to the sidewalk. He stands up and grabs his luggage, but before he can take a step towards the car, she’s hopping out of it and barrelling towards him.
He drops his suitcase out of both necessity and shock as she throws her arms around him. She squeezes him so tightly that he’s fairly sure having a broken rib isn’t an impossibility. He squeezes back just as tightly. With a ferocity that says he’s scared he’ll never get to do it again.
“Jeff, what the fuck?” she breathes out, along with something between a laugh and a sob.
“Britta…I fucking miss you.”
They stand together for a few more moments, fully entwined, chests rising and hearts beating in tandem once again.
“I miss you. Even though I didn’t want to.”
She sniffles a little as they pull apart, moving to dab at the corners of her eyes. It’s not that Jeff has never seen Britta get emotional - she just never lets him see her cry.
“I’ve missed you too,” she says. “But why didn’t you just tell me you were coming?”
“I…thought I might chicken out if I did.”
“Why?”
“Britta, you were the last member of our family to leave. And I knew that would hit me harder than anything, but…it hit even harder than I thought.”
She stands there, staring into his eyes, imploring him to say more. So he sighs, gathers his resolve, and prepares to face the most humiliating moment of his entire life.
“Every song is about you, okay? Every fucking song. I can’t listen to anything without thinking about you, or the shit we’ve been through, or how much I miss you, or…how much I love you. And it’s so fucking stupid and I’m so fucking sorry it took me this long to get my shit together, and that it took you going all the way across the goddamn country for me to figure it out. I know you’ve got a life here, and I don’t want to fuck any of that up for you, so I-”
“Jeff.”
“Yes?”
He takes a moment to breathe, tries to make his head stop spinning, does his best to center himself. She comes into focus; teary eyes, wobbly mouth, and all.
“Everything I have here is great. I love my job and my coworkers and my apartment and everything but…”
“But what?”
“It’s not home.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what you are, dummy.”
Jeff doesn’t know what to say; that he’s discovered that she is his, that the past eight months have been torture, that he’s sorry he ever conned her into loving someone as awful as him, that he hates the part of himself that wishes she’d never left. So he simply takes her into his arms again, lets her rest her head on his shoulder, squeezes her like he’s still scared that she’ll wake up and change her mind.
“Why wouldn’t you visit me before now?” she murmurs into the crook of his neck.
“I was scared that if I did, I’d never want to leave you.”
For the first time since he’s landed, she laughs; genuinely, in a way that makes her whole body shake.
“So that's not the case anymore?"
Jeff pauses. He’s really not sure, as it’s a factor he ignored at every step of this impulsive plan. So the response that comes out of his mouth as untangles himself from her enough to gaze down at her hopeful face is as much of a surprise to him as it is to her.
“No, it very much still is." In spite of himself and his better judgement, he cracks a smile. "I just realized that I don't care if I never go back."
He waits to pull her back in until he sees her smile, her entire face lighting up in a way that says, Good. I wouldn't let you leave even if you wanted to. And then he holds her, knowing that what comes next hardly matters in this moment; all that matters is that they both finally found their way home.