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The first time Jeff has sex with Michelle, he thinks about Britta. He’s not pining after her or lamenting what could have been. He thinks about when he asked her, for the final time, if anything was going to happen between them. How he gave her first dibs. How she turned him down.
He isn’t exactly upset about the whole thing because Michelle is—well. Michelle is smart and funny and sexy as hell and she kisses like she has a secret she wants you to work to find out. Michelle drinks black coffee and laughs deep and seductive in every room in the house. She is the kind of woman Jeff always thought he’d be with, the kind of woman who could make him think but still make him feel, the kind of woman he would miss when she wasn’t around, but not so much that he doesn’t exist without her.
As great as Michelle is, she’s not incredibly fond of Britta. Jeff doesn’t blame her: Britta tends to be walking with Jeff when he’s on his way to meet Michelle, they text each other stupid things that Pierce has said throughout the day, he and Michelle are almost late to the dance recital because he can’t figure out what kind of flowers to get Britta. But Michelle is the first person Jeff calls his girlfriend since he was nine years old and married Sara Baker at recess while Anthony Ortiz played the Wedding March on the harmonica. They could be, after it’s all over, something of a power couple—the lawyer and the professor. Jeff thinks back longingly on the world of cocktail parties and pressed suits and Michelle in a little black dress.
It could work; Jeff believes it could all work in a way he hasn’t thought much about things working out in a long, long time. But there’s a thought there, in the back of his mind, that he can’t help but go back to every so often.
What if Britta had said yes?
Summer stretches across three and a half months, long and sticky and quiet. Jeff keeps his phone on silent so he doesn’t have to hear the constant ping of a new text message: Annie Shirley Abed Troy Pierce. Shuffle. Repeat.
He responds to them each once a day, stock answers such as It’s fine and Don’t worry about it and I’ve got it handled. And, of course Look, just don’t say anything to anyone right now, okay? Are we cool?
In between rounds of golf with some of the partners from his old firm and avoiding calls from his mother, Jeff thinks about Britta and Annie and Michelle and how bad he’s screwed it all up. He has a few options, mainly calling all three of them and apologizing, but he takes the Old Winger option and ignores them instead.
See, he thought he’d gotten past all that, those stupid dick moves of intentionally hurting people he cared about. He thought he’d become the kind of person who did the right thing—or, at least, the kind of person who tried to do the right thing. But here it was, a situation that no matter what was going to end somewhat badly, and instead of manning up he… made it even worse.
Walking out on two women who loved him, kissing a girl more than a decade his junior, those were things Jeff would have done a year ago. Those were the actions of a guy before the last nine months, before honesty and saving Halloween parties and taking on the school bully and being Annie’s debate partner and being Michelle’s perfect boyfriend and teaching Troy and Abed how to krump and double-dating with Pierce and eating chicken fingers in a dark kitchen and giving his paintball prize to Shirley and pushing Britta’s hair behind her ear. All those things, they had changed him, but what if it wasn’t enough? What if he was still the same asshole he’s always been, the same asshole he was always going to be?
In July he sees Britta for the first time. She’s crossing the street and he’s driving home from the grocery store. Maybe she doesn’t notice him, waiting in his car at the red light, or maybe she does and she’s ignoring him on purpose. But she walks quickly through the crosswalk, in jeans and sneakers even though it’s almost ninety degrees outside, a white t-shirt the only sign she understands the concept of weather. Her hair is twisted up messily, like she was in a hurry when she left this morning, and a rolled-up newspaper sticks out of her bag. He should say hi. He should roll the window down and yell her name. He should beep the horn until she looks up. He should ask her to lunch. He should apologize.
His finger hovers over the window button. This is what he needs to do. He needs to call Michelle and tell her how amazing she is, and that she deserves a lot better than someone masquerading as a functional adult. He needs to call Annie and explain that he shouldn’t have used her like that and that he really does care about her a lot. He needs to stop moping around acting like he was the one who was wronged instead of the one who had done the wronging.
Britta steps onto the curb. Jeff opens the window a crack and hot, humid air seeps into the car. She pauses as both of her feet land on the sidewalk, just for a fraction of a second, just long enough to look up at the sky. She might sigh; her shoulders rise and them slump ever so slightly. Jeff lowers the window ever more and draws in breath. He thinks, for the first time all summer, that he’ll do anything to make it up to her, to be in her orbit again, this girl he thought he knew so well. Nine months and he seemed to learn something new about her each day.
She pulls open the door of a coffee shop. The light turns green. Jeff closes the window.
Sometimes Britta is air, and Jeff inhales and his lungs are healthy and full and he can feel the pieces of himself coming together, his heart rate steadying itself. But sometimes she is water, and Jeff breathes in too much of her and he drowns beneath the weight of her, crushed and choking and overwhelmed. Sometimes she is nothing and he thinks he can go the rest of his life without ever seeing her again. Sometimes he needs to sew the two of them together at the hip until their bodies fuse and the same blood flows through both of their veins.
Morning is when he’s at his mushiest, when he wakes up with his face buried in Britta’s shoulder, the scent of her lotion in his nose and the taste of her dried sweat on his tongue. He always wakes before her because Britta is slow to wake up in the morning; sometimes Jeff can pinpoint the exact moment her body begins its ascent into consciousness and can recognize the quiet breath she takes the second before her eyes open. Her voice is deeper, lower, but softer for the first hour of the day. She’s a different person, almost, or maybe a real person, maybe this is who she really is, the person she is before she can catch herself and harden and hide.
There are times, before she’s fully awake, when Jeff reaches out and kisses her in a way that’s not how he kisses her during the afternoon or at night. Quieter. It’s the lazy and small kiss of two people in love for a hundred years, people confident in that love they have for one another. It’s the only time Jeff can kiss her like this, when she isn’t fully aware of it and what it means. Unless she is.
She pulls him closer by hitching a leg over his hip. Five months since they started doing whatever it is they’re doing, sneaking around and sleeping together every night like it’s no big deal, and this is the Sunday morning routine, this subconscious pulling toward each other.
It’s during these times he wavers between knowing he could leave her and knowing he never could. Sure, she’s his friend. And sure, they have great sex. But it’s not like they’re in love or anything. It’s not like this is going to last forever. It’s not like they’re going to get married and have two kids and live happily ever after.
But sometimes—his tongue in her mouth, his fingers tangling knots into her hair, all concept of time gone—does he ever want to.
He realizes it when his father falls to the floor in a fake heart attack worthy of Pierce Hawthorne: this is the reason he’s been so afraid to love someone this entire time. Because how could he ever explain it? The shoebox, the text messages, the consistent self-sabotage. It all stems back to this, to a father who didn’t want him, who spent twenty-five years a twenty minute drive away and didn’t bother to send even a birthday card.
When he was little, his father was this large, looming figure. He took Jeff to the zoo (and forgot him), he let Jeff stay up late to watch Rockies games (and usually passed out drunk by the seventh inning), he told Jeff he could be anything he wanted (and added as an aside that he probably couldn’t). Jeff didn’t understand what he ever did to make his father hate him so much, and it took until he was thirty-four years old to realize that his father was just the hateful, pathetic person Jeff had always feared he would some day turn into.
So: how do you tell someone all that? And how can you ever expect someone to look at all that, to look at this terrible man you came from, and love you anyway?
Britta is mostly quiet on the way home and even though she had smiled at him earlier, Jeff’s waiting for the goodbye. Because she has to get it now, get why despite how much he’s always cared about her, he’s never been able to make it work. Why she’s better off with someone like Troy, who is good and whole.
And maybe she won’t excuse herself from his life completely. But he wouldn’t be surprised if she edges her chair a little toward Abed on Monday morning. And despite the fact that things have been good between them for the last few months, he’s going to have to learn to not expect texts from her about all the terrible people who frequent L Street on Friday nights or if Pierce has been sundowning a little too much lately or how he needs to break the “no carbs on Wednesdays” rule for the new cookie recipe Shirley’s trying out. She’ll distance herself from him.
This was why he didn’t want her there. Not because her help wasn’t welcome and not because it wasn’t nice to have a friendly face and someone having his back. But because there has always been this part of him—this stupid, naive part—that thought maybe one day they could… maybe.
He pulls the car into the parking lot of her apartment building and gives her a half-smile. He wants to tell her that it’s okay, that he understands.
She unbuckles her seatbelt and rotates in her seat a little so she’s facing him. She holds his gaze for a long time without talking and her eyes shine with tears but also something else. For some reason they’ve always been good at this, this weird method of nonverbal communication, and she doesn’t look like she wants to say goodbye. She looks like she wants to stay.
Britta graduates on the swelling evening of a sticky August night. They have a party in the study room—their third one, now, so it’s sort of a tradition—with the air conditioning cranked up and cold glasses of champagne in hands. Britta smiles for pictures and admires her diploma, but it’s with tired eyes; Jeff knows she spent most of the summer elbow-deep in textbooks and papers trying to graduate a full semester early.
Jeff drinks a lot of champagne because he sprung for the good stuff. He’s not drunk, but he can feel it buzz in his blood and there’s something about this night that feels so final. It’s not: Britta got a job as an assistant counselor at a women’s shelter just a few blocks from the law firm where he works and Troy and Abed are still in school so it’s not their final goodbye to Greendale and the study room. Almost everything will be exactly the same come tomorrow morning, but Jeff can’t help but think the sun will rise in the west or won’t rise at all, that he missed his last chance at seeing a sunrise by sleeping in this morning.
He excuses himself to the bathroom and on the way back, he finds Britta in the hallway. She smiles in a sleepy, drunk way. And for some reason, he feels like he might never see her again after tonight. He has to figure out how he feels about her in the next five seconds or he never will.
She opens her mouth to say something but he cuts her off with his lips. He frames her face with his hands and when she doesn’t respond, he pulls away, suddenly sober.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I—”
“No, it’s fine.” She squints a little, even in the dim hallway, as if the answer to his behavior is written on his face. “You can try again, if you want.”
He does, with much more success, and she fails to stifle a giggle when he pulls away again.
“I’m not going to disappear, you know,” she says quietly.
“I know,” he tuts, like she’s crazy for even suggesting a thing.
“Okay,” she smiles. “Of course.”
The restaurant is really crowded tonight so they have to park a few blocks away and then walk. Neon signs illuminate her face and the sounds of too-early Christmas carols cause her nose to scrunch up in annoyance every so often. It’s cold, late November, and although it hasn’t snowed yet this year it smells like it’ll come tonight. Tomorrow he will be thirty-eight. They’ve known each other for six years.
She steps on every leaf she sees. Most times, it makes a crunch but when it doesn’t, she tsks under her breath, as if the soggy leaves irritate her as much as “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” “I love you,” he wants to say, but he doesn’t.
She laughs.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“Nothing. You’re just so quiet.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Hmm.”
Without moving her head, she reaches over and places a hand on his arm, just above his elbow. There’s something inherently non-sexual about it, it’s comforting instead. It’s an anchor.
“I didn’t get you, like, a present or anything,” she says. “I didn’t know what you wanted and it seemed kind of lame to ask.”
“I want you,” he doesn’t say. He wants to spend the entire day in bed, he wants to run his mouth up and down her body until he can’t move anymore.
He shrugs. “Don’t really need anything.”
“Yeah.” She turns to face him and smiles. “You sort of have everything already, don’t you?”
She squeezes his arm before letting to and it’s his turn to laugh. “Sort of.” His right hand finds her left and he laces his fingers with hers. He hasn’t held her hand in… ever, probably. It feels nice. Just for tonight.