Work Text:
I think you should kiss me goodbye or you might regret it for the rest of your life.
What about you?
I’ll regret the kiss for a week. I’m in my twenties. Who cares?
You care.
And you’re not allowed to fucking say anything because, oh, you’re cool now, you’re chill now, there’s none of that dumb petty drama over some stupid boy now. He comes back from the airport, Abed’s clean deodorant and Annie’s bright perfume clinging to the fibers of his sweater. You look around at the haggard remains of your clan— Chang, Frankie, Craig, him— happy, smiling; glass meets glass; you avoid his gaze as best you can, but it doesn’t help the heat you feel radiating from his skin. He always seems to warm your body, all of you rising in temperature from the feet up, slowly, until you can’t remember when you started sweating. This man would be your own personal furnace (if he were your anything; if he were yours at all), like he was meant to stay nestled behind your ribs somewhere, keeping your body at 98.6 degrees, and without him you feel colder, lighter (free to fly away, if you need to, if this world becomes too much), hollow.
You don’t know when this became your pathetic, stupid life— you were a motherfucking foot model! You were in the Peace Corps! You never, ever wanted to depend on a man for anything: not for money, not for fulfillment, not for your core body temperature. He grins at you sideways, as if to say, Man, isn’t it crazy we got this far? Who’d have thought we wouldn’t both be dead or in jail by now? But all you can see is the gleam of Annie’s lipgloss on the corner of his mouth (lipgloss, god, she’s twenty-five but all you can see is the nineteen-year-old she was when you first met, how precocious and impressionable) and you kind of want to tear your own skin off.
You’ll be okay, you think, if you can make it through the week. One week. Seven days of all this being over, of putting it behind you. Six years gone, pages turned, book closed. You can give yourself distance. It won’t be so hard if you can make it through the first week.
You don’t make it through the first week. Four days, four fucking days like this is amateur hour, like you’re fifteen and you’ve just been dumped for the first time, like this is still— ugh— Season One Britta, smooth hard glass, tough but easily broken (where have these six years gone? All that “growth” and “character development” Abed kept talking about, all that meta bullshit you bought into because it was so sweet to have that kind of innocence around, that childlike ability to see the world both as it really is and as it really isn’t: flat, as it appears to be, no depth). Now you’re sitting here like a chump, on the floor of your dingy apartment, halfway through a box of Franzia— fuck off, it was cheap and delicious— your one-eyed cat purring in your lap, cell phone pressed to your ear, ringing, ringing, ringing. You know it’s going to voicemail. It’s just a matter of waiting. God, how sad is it that you couldn’t even wait until it was late enough that he was surely asleep, that his phone would be off, that you would be met immediately with Please leave a message after the tone, instead of this agonizing ring-ring-ring-beat-beat-ring-ring-ring-beat-beat-ring-ring-ring waiting for something to happen. Somewhere in the bottom of your mind you’re scared to admit that you really love voicemail because you get to hear his voice without having to hear him speak, because that’s the shit that repulses you and sucks you in at the same time. You like the way he sounds, even if you don’t always like the things he says. And it’s little, awful things like that that confirm what’s never really needed confirmation, but in some sick way it’s kind of nice to know for sure: you’re still in love with him. You are just as in love with him now as you were when he was Michelle Slater’s prized hunky boytoy, when Annie was preparing to move to Delaware with Vaughn (what happened to Vaughn? Is he still in Delaware? Where is Delaware? You wonder if he’s back in Colorado, if his hacky sack scholarship panned out, or maybe if his band got big; you wonder if you still have his number; you wonder what would happen if you called him. But he probably wouldn’t want to talk to you— it’s not like “Getting Rid of Britta” was easy to misinterpret).
But before you can scroll through your contacts to see if Vaughn was anything more than a vivid hallucination, the ringing stops, something clicks, and you hear a voice that makes you sit up as straight as you can, given your compromised state, even though all you want to do is melt into the floor. Because it’s not the usual I’m not here. It’s— god damn. You’re going to die tonight.
“Britta.”
“Jeff! Hey! What’s— What’s up?”
“Britta, are you drunk? Did you just drunk-dial me? Britta, it’s 10:30 on a Tuesday.”
“I am not drunk.” o sweet and merciful death please come and strike britta perry down where she sits “I just had a little wine, and then I wanted to talk to my friend Jeff, because it’s been a while. Or are you too cool to admit we’re friends?” here lies britta perry: foot model, revolutionary, cat mother
“Wow, Britta,” and you can hear his smug grin, that smarmy prick (but, shit, if he could just keep saying your name like that, Britta, Britta, Britta, wow, Britta, yes, Britta, fuck, Britta), “y’know, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the receiving end of one of your booty calls. I gotta say, it’s kind of flattering.”
Ugh. “Oh, fuck off, you chauvinist pig. This was not a booty call.” This is so Season One Britta. How are you still so Season One Britta?
A silence, terrible and terrific, the low deep hum of his breathing through the speaker— now would be a perfect time for you to die, heart attack, stroke, something, anything, fuck— and then he says, quiet and slow, “Do you need me to come over?”
yes god yes yes you do yes yes yes please yes
You don’t hear your own answer, but you do hear a click, and then nothing, and then you feel that coldness in your chest again (which is so funny when it’s fighting the warmth of the wine, like your skin is on fire but everything inside of it is still raw, uncooked flesh, like when you’ve fucked up your s’more by burning the marshmallow: the flaky black shell slips off and inside is a pasty gob of sugar and gelatin, sickly and saccharine). You have another drink— seriously it’s not fair that the cheap gross stuff is allowed to taste good— and then, ugh, what was that thing that you were gonna do earlier? There was something— something— ’cause you were thinking of— and then Slater— and then Annie— and then Vaughn. Vaughn! You were gonna call Vaughn! It takes you some amount of time (how long, who knows) to find the “contacts” button on your phone, and even then, willing your eyes to stay focused, you can’t seem to figure out whether you have this stupid guy’s stupid number or not, because how the fuck do you even spell Vaughn?
And then a knock:
“Britta? It’s me.”
ohhhhh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
So you say the only thing you can say, logically, of course:
“Uh… Britta’s not here right now…?”
duh-doy obviously he knows you’re here, you called him, you dingus
“Britta.”
God damn, he needs to stop saying your name like that. You stagger to your feet— this was an awful idea, why did you do this, why are you punishing yourself like this— and somehow manage to get to the door without tripping over your geriatric cat and just dying instantly, with motherfucking Jeff Winger on the other side, waiting for you, waiting for you. You open it and he smiles at you a little bit, and for a moment you stop hating yourself (because there’s always that moment when you stop hating yourself, when all you can feel is love and loved— but he doesn’t love you, he’s never loved you; he wouldn’t even grant you the courtesy of being an ex-boyfriend— he’s just an ex-no-strings to which you got far too attached, because you’re Britta and you ruin everything and that’s just what you do). He brushes past you (but he doesn’t touch you, god, you just want him to touch you) into the apartment, and he’s even more fucking graceful than you are, because the cat is winding itself around his ankles the entire time and he doesn’t trip, not even a little bit, not even once.
He nods at the box of Franzia— clearly so impressed by how classy you are, such an adult with all your shit finally together, yes, drinking cheap boxed wine alone with your cat on a Tuesday— and settles down in the middle of the couch like he owns the fucking thing, what a douchebag, wow, you just want to curl up against his side and slowly drift off to sleep while he strokes your hair and tells you it’s all going to be okay. But instead you squeeze yourself into the corner of the couch, trying to be as small as possible (even though you’ve always hated feeling small in front of men, how dare they make you feel like this, how dare he make you feel like this).
A long time passes (though probably not as long as it feels) before he speaks. He looks at you, and you look at your hands.
“Britta, you can’t keep doing this.”
You’re a little offended by what he’s implying, but mostly you’re upset by how right he is, how desperate you are, how much you ache whenever he says your name, again, please, more. But you don’t say any of that. You don’t say anything at all.
“And, look, Britta, I’m sorry about the way everything happened, okay? I just— You know me, Britta, you know me better than anyone, and you know how I feel about Annie, and…”
You tune out everything but your name, Britta, Britta, Britta, to him, punctuation, to you, a prayer. He keeps talking, because that’s what he does: he talks and he talks and he talks and the more he says, the less he means, the less any of it means. And after six years of talking, you’re pretty sure none of it means anything anymore. He keeps saying your name, Britta, like a heartbeat, Britta, Britta, Britta, and you love how it sounds rolling off of his tongue like it was born there, like he made you, like he has you (you feel so sick) and you wonder when he stopped saying anything other than your name, Britta, Britta, he’s trying to get your attention, he puts his hand on your cheek, soft and warm and the perfect fit (fuck, you are aching for it). You finally look at him.
“Britta.”
“Jeff.”
And then he’s kissing you, or maybe you’re kissing him, but it doesn’t matter because this is what you wanted, except it does matter because he doesn’t love you, because you aren’t Annie, because this is just convenient for him, so much like that old life he used to have all those years ago, before this meant anything, before you meant anything. But Annie’s probably never coming back to this town, and you know that you and Jeff will be stuck here forever, so he takes what he can get, even if it’s more than he bargained for, even if it’s not what he wanted.
He goes to bed with you, because he’s Jeff Winger and that’s what he does.
You fall asleep with your back pressed warm against his chest, wrapped up safe and tight in his arms (and for a few sick, sad moments you can pretend that this is how it always is, that this is just one of those things the two of you were meant to share, these heavy, tender moments). You love the way you can feel his heart beating against his skin: Britta, Britta, Britta.
You shiver awake— in the sharp light of morning, he’s gone.