Chapter Text
The Dean explained that, having scolded Leonard, he was obliged to grant the man three wishes. Troy suggested the study group as a whole find a way to get themselves scolded by the Dean, as well. After this the events of the day seemed completed, and everybody started to file out with the intention of heading home or getting an early start to the weekend. It was, after all, just after lunch on a freaking Friday.
Jeff, in particular, felt he'd put in a full day's work over the course of the morning and lunchtime. He vowed silently to go home, put his feet up, drink some Friday-afternoon scotch, and watch an old movie or two. That his weekend plans had become so basic and solitary did not particularly bother him. He was a man in his mid-thirties, after all, no longer a teenager or a twentysomething, out having madcap adventures. Indeed, he savored the time he was able to spend in repose, and valued it greatly. Nothing, he thought to himself, would prevent him from his chosen recreation.
Then Annie touched his arm and he stopped, concerned. His resolve vanished in the face of her troubled expression. Silently she indicated the study room, and tilted her head towards the backs of the rest of the study group in a manner which Jeff correctly interpreted as a request for him to join her, separate from the group, without anyone knowing.
Unsure what Annie wanted or why—and slightly apprehensive, as it didn't seem impossible to Jeff that Annie was going to spring some kind of weekend chore on him—Jeff nodded and turned back to the study room. He assumed that she would ask him to accompany her to IKEA so she could have the opinions of a tall man on the suitability of furniture she might buy, or to a used car lot so that the sales staff would assume she was the wife or girlfriend of a canny and not-to-be-taken-for-a-fool man of the world, or to assist her in some volunteer effort that required an extra pair of hands, like sorting donated shoes or cleaning up a disused park… He would do it, of course, but he would complain while he did it. Perhaps that was why she was apprehensive, he thought. While she no doubt knew she could snap her fingers and direct him to her will, she probably wasn't looking forward to hearing him grumble about it. He silently resolved to grumble less and support more, at least until Annie's mood cleared.
Once they were alone in the study room, Annie's expression and body language shifted again. Gone was the cheerful, relaxed college student who had moments ago left the room with the group. Gone, too, was the slightly anxious, perturbed young woman who had led him back in. In their place stood a wistful and melancholy ingenue, who clearly had something on her mind. Almost certainly it was something more substantial than dread of hearing him complain as he followed her directives, he noted with ambivalence.
Jeff tried to break the tension he sensed with a joke, and asked if Annie's concern related to her being second in the GPA rankings, after Shirley. If Annie wanted help studying, Jeff was hardly the best choice, even out of the study group. They got very little actual studying done as a group, he observed, and it would make sense for her to seek additional resources, but unless Annie was taking a class in scotch tasting or billiards, Jeff would be little help. In fact, he confessed, he was not even a very good billiards player and actually he had only a vague idea of how it differed from regular pool.
Annie smiled tightly but didn't laugh. Jeff recognized that his first guess, about her roping him into a weekend chore, was incorrect. She was winding up for some kind of major confession, accusation, or similarly fraught declaration. He suggested they sit. She nodded, and he sat on the good couch. She did not join him there, as he had assumed she would. Nor did she sit on the bad couch, across from him in the conversation nook in the corner of the study room. Instead, she sat in Abed's usual seat at the study table, turned around to face him.
This seemed to Jeff unnecessarily distant, though he did not comment on it. He knew that she was well aware that she was welcome to sit across from him. For that matter, she was welcome to sit next to him, or even curled up leaning against him. His brain didn't quite let him complete the thought with the cozy mental image of Annie in his lap, wiggling her toes contentedly as he rubbed her bare feet with one hand and the back of her neck with the other, but it danced through the back of his mind nonetheless.
They sat and regarded one another for a second, perhaps two. Then Annie cleared her throat and began, awkwardly, to explain. She had a problem, one that she had struggled with for a long time. Years, at this point. She had thought it would go away on its own. For a while, it had seemed like it was, and then it would return with a vengeance. If she was going to move forward from it, she needed to take action.
Jeff listened intently. From the circumspect phrasings she used, he could tell that this was a problem she found embarrassing to discuss. One possibility leaped out to him as the likely issue, and he spoke quickly to reassure her. Addiction to amphetamines was a lifelong struggle, he said, and no one would think any less of her if her troubles came to light. He appreciated that Annie chose him to speak to, on this topic, and he promised to aid her in whatever way she needed.
Annie's response was a bark of nervous laughter. She held up her hands and begged him to stop, because the issue in question was not a relapse of her Adderall addiction. She described the events of the day, as she had experienced them: with Shirley, she'd discovered that Leonard was using a technicality to hold on to the top GPA spot. They had gone to the Dean to complain, and that was when they found out the Dean and Jeff had switched bodies—
Which did not happen, was not a thing, no, Jeff interrupted.
Annie nodded dismissively. Of course it wasn't a thing, but nevertheless the Dean had committed to the bit wholeheartedly. As Jeff, he'd teased Annie and taken his shirt off and then gone and insulted Leonard, and Annie had found herself responding to the Dean's attention in a way that, when she remembered that it was the Dean, made her profoundly uncomfortable.
Jeff was nonplussed. He had a vague sense of what had happened, but didn't completely grasp Annie's concern. The Dean was, after all, a weirdo.
Annie explained, as best she could: she was still, on some level, pining for Jeff, and this was making her unhappy. The words tumbled out of her quickly. In the interest of being less unhappy, she needed to move on from him, and she couldn't do that while he was her best friend and closest confidante and favorite person in general.
Jeff felt his heart sink with almost physical pain, a spasm in his chest like he'd been kicked in the solar plexus. He didn't want to make Annie unhappy, and he said so.
Annie assured him that she knew this, that Jeff had never led her on or intimated that he was interested in her. She steadfastly did not mention or think about any of the more questionable interactions they had shared, couples costuming and ski trips and the holiday party they'd thrown together, to name three from just the last few months. Still, she had a problem, and it wasn't getting better, and it would only make her miserable if she continued to ignore it, and so she needed to dial down their relationship. Not relationship, she quickly amended, 'relationship' was obviously not the right word.
Jeff's pulse raced. He was breathing a little too fast, too. He cleared his throat and briefly considered making some kind of speech, like he was good at. Something that would convince her…of what, exactly? He realized she was right. He was hurting her, and he needed to stop. They could accomplish that by cleaving apart, allowing her to move on and date and fall in love with someone wonderful enough to deserve her (Jeff couldn't imagine such a man but suspected he would hate him). Or, alternately…
He realized Annie was staring at him, waiting for his response. Her arms were folded, and she was blinking like she wasn't quite tearing up, eyelids fluttering with emotion. The Disney eyes, he called them. He knew she deployed the expression deliberately on occasion but he also knew that in this case it was entirely genuine.
Slowly, Jeff recapped what Annie had told him about her encounter with the Dean. Craig Pelton, a man who had certainly made a close study of Jeff going back years, had chosen to affect Jeff's demeanor and he had accomplished this by, one, flirting with Annie, and two, dropping everything to help Annie, even if, three, it meant breaking rules on her behalf, and four, he had done it unhesitatingly, despite complaining while he did about how he hated doing it.
Annie looked flustered. She could tell what he was getting at, he knew, but she didn't want to admit it in case she misunderstood and he pulled the rug out from under her yet again. Shirley had also been there, she pointed out after a moment. Shirley had commented on the whole Dean-as-Jeff and Annie interaction.
Jeff shrugged this point away. He told Annie a severely abridged version of the events of the day as he had experienced them (she gasped when she heard that Britta and Troy were broken up, as this hadn't quite percolated out to her and Shirley and Pierce). He circled back to the advice he'd given Troy-as-Abed. Not so much advice as words of encouragement, he reflected. He'd told Troy that while his and Britta's relationship had not worked, nevertheless Troy had tried. Troy had taken the risk, and made the attempt, and in so doing proven himself to be a brave man. Braver than Jeff, who had a shifting patchwork of excuses for why he couldn't do the same. Jeff had not been specific, with Troy, about what it was that he was afraid to do, but there was an answer, a specific one.
He listed off all the times he had wanted to take the next step with Annie, only to retreat instead out of fear. He laid out his excuses and shot them down one by one. The most obvious one was their relative ages, but that seemed less an issue now than it once had, and their life experiences were comparable despite the difference in years. They were very different people, but they were so compatible. He had an awful track record with relationships that lasted longer than a weekend or that were more serious than booty calls, but with her help he felt he could do anything. He had once seen her as a delicate flower, but he knew now just how tough she was. He had been a washed-up ex-lawyer with nothing to offer, but now he was on the cusp of returning to the professional world.
She was rapt, nodding along, hanging on his every word. Jeff was halfway through his final grand rhetorical flourish before he even realized what he was doing, that he really was making a speech at Annie asking her to reconsider dialing back their intimacy and to instead deepen it. That he knew he had been a fool for letting things drag out so long, instead of taking the plunge months and months ago. That he might be too late, now, if her mind was made up and that she knew her own mind and he would respect her choices, but—
Then Annie launched herself, flung her body like a sling-stone, closing the twelve feet or more between them in a fraction of a second. The chair she had been using flipped over, such was the force of her leap. Abruptly she was no longer seated across from him in Abed's chair but was instead seated across him in his lap, her arms around him, and then he was lying on the couch facing the ceiling and she was lying atop him, facing him, and she was tiny and yet also the entire world.
They had kissed before, but neither of them had quite expected the level of response in the other, on this occasion. The only thing that kept them from immediately moving from first base through second, third, and on to home plate, was their clothing and how time spent removing it would have been time not spent focused entirely on one another. Each fumbled a bit at the other's clothes, but successfully undressing each other or themselves would have taken more concentration than either could spare, at first, as they touched and felt and smelled and tasted one another's skin, lips, heart.
Eventually they made a mutual decision not to have sex for the first time in the study room, or anywhere on campus, and rushed to Jeff's car and then apartment, ignoring the various text messages from their friends wondering where they had vanished to.