3After writing one version of this story, I ended up extensively rewriting it. But in the end I decided to post both versions. While the beginning and end of both are virtually the same, the middle is variously different in both.
Abed scrolled through his Netflix account, trying to find the perfect film marathon for the night. Jeff was hosting movie night at his place and Abed wanted to pick the right four movies for all of them to watch. He'd already narrowed his choices down to thirty picks, and now had to do another round of cuts. He lowered the volume to the radio station he was playing as he readied to make his picks.
"And that was 'Killing Me' by Blameshift. You're listening to The Listening Experience on 93.7, Riverdale's premier radio station. And now for all you Kickpuncher fans out there, we have a special treat for you." Abed immediately turned up the volume on his computer as the DJ kept talking. "Tonight only we have Derek Mears, star of the Kickpuncher franchise at the Lucky Orange pub signing autographs. And I'd advice getting there early, because tonight there will be a Kickpuncher impersonator contest, with the winner winning a walk on role in the newest Kickpuncher movie."
Without a moment's hesitation Abed bolted out of his chair, pausing just long enough to grab some props and Kickpuncher DVDs before racing out of the apartment.
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Britta grabbed her jacket and checked that she had her wallet on her when her phone buzzed with an incoming text. Her eyebrows shot up when she saw it was from Troy. Ever since he'd moved to Denver they'd made a point to talk on the phone every Sunday night. But since it was Friday, this was unexpected.
Troy: Hey. How R U?
Britta: Good. Jeff's havong movie night, so I'n aboit to hed out. What r u doin tonigt?"
Troy: I'm about to surprise a really great girl.
She was about to comment on that when she suddenly heard a knock at the door. That's, it's not, she thought with anticipation as she went over to the door. Her mouth dropped in surprise as she swung the door open and saw who was behind the door.
"Hey," Troy said in an unconvincing casual tone.
"Troy!" She hugged him before backing up so he could come in. "What are you doing here?"
"Decided to come down and surprise everyone for the weekend."
"Well like I said, Jeff's having a movie night, so everyone's gonna be there."
"Yeah, I want to see everyone. But tonight, I really just wanted to just see you."
She frowned as she fidgeted uncomfortably, knowing exactly what he was implying. "Troy…it was really hard when we ended things."
"I know," he said softly, feeling a bit uncomfortable himself.
"And it was even harder when you moved. And if anything happens tonight, it will just make things even that much harder."
So…you think it's better if we don't do anything?" he asked
"I think it's for the best."
They stood apart from each other before racing over, their lips smashing together as their hands gripped each other. They knew this was probably a mistake. But right now all they cared about was having this one night together.
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"102.4," Shirley said with concern as she finished taking Ben's temperature. She knew he hadn't been feeling good when she dropped him off at the sitter's. But he'd taken a definite turn for the worse when she picked him up at the end of the day.
"Hang on Sweetie. I just have to call Dad." She grabbed the phone and dialed Andre's number. "Please tell me you didn't leave the store yet?"
"Well hello to you too."
"Andre, don't joke. Ben has a fever and is sick."
"Is he all right?" Andre asked with concern.
"I doubt its life threatening. But can you pick up some ginger ale and children's Tylenol."
"No problem. I just finished counting out the register, so I'm leaving in a few minutes. I should be home in less than a half hour."
"Thanks Sweetie. I'll see you later." She hung up before texting Jeff, telling him she would be unable to make movie night.
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"Okay. I'll text you tomorrow or something. Hope Ben feels better," Jeff said as he hung up his phone. He looked around, taking stock of the situation. First Abed had bailed, and now Shirley couldn't make it. As of now it looked like just him, Annie and Britta would be there for movie night. He thought about just texting the girls and rescheduling when he heard a knock at his door. "It's open."
"You know your doorman doesn't even ask if I live here," Annie said as she walked in and put down her book bag. "This place is really unsafe."
"I think you're the last person to lecture me on living somewhere unsafe."
"My first apartment wasn't that bad…" She fidgeted as Jeff gave her a knowing look. "Okay, maybe it was."
"And don't you now live in a place where the front door is propped open with a brick."
"That was Troy, alright?" she huffed. "Can we not talk about my living situations?"
"Fine by me." He glanced over at her as Annie joined him on the couch. "Shirley's not coming. She just called and said Ben's sick."
"Oh. I hope he feels better. Abed's not coming either. He texted me something about becoming Kickpuncher to be in Kickpuncher. "
"I got the same text. So that means it's just going to be you, me and Britta." He sighed as he thought about past movie experiences with his faux environmentally cautious friend. "If she tries to convince us to watch another animal slaughter doc…"
"I still have nightmares from when she made us watch The Cove," Annie moaned. She cringed as she pulled her phone out and dialed Britta's number. It rang once before they both heard 'In A Gadda Da Vida' playing.
"Well, Britta's not coming," Jeff declared.
"How do you know that?"
"Because she always sets that as her outgoing message whenever she's having a sex fill night."
"Wait, that's what it means?" Annie asked. "I just thought she really liked that song."
"She probably does. But it's also code for 'don't bother me, I'm unavailable all night'." He glanced over at Annie, feeling a bit odd at having the two of them alone together in his place. "If you want to bail-"
"Do you want me to go," Annie asked with a bit of a challenge in her voice.
"No. I'm just saying, it's just going to be the two of us."
"I don't see any problem with that."
Jeff nodded his head, wishing he hadn't said anything about it. "Alright. I was going to get pizza when it was all of us, but since it's just the two of us we can get something else."
"Okay. What do you feel like?" she asked as she went to the kitchen and got a glass of water.
"I don't know. The take out menus are in the drawer under the silverware."
She returned with her water and a bunch of menus and began looking through them as Jeff watched TV. "How about Thai?" She asked, looking through an orange menu for a Thai/Chinese restaurant.
"Yeah, that works. Harvest Palace had some good stuff."
Annie browsed the selections before asking, "If I get an order of Crab Rangoon will you have some too?"
"Deep fried bread stuffed with cheese and crab. Yeah, that'll the essence of good health." He rolled his eyes off the look she gave him. "Fine, I'll have one piece. Happy?"
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"Whenever I get Thai I always say I'll get something different," Annie exclaimed as she dug into her dinner. "And then I always end up getting Pad Thai."
"It is tasty," Jeff said as he stopped eating his own dinner to get another piece of Crab Rangoon (ignoring the smirk Annie gave him at eating more than one of the tasty appetizer.) "Though if you get something else you might find it's better than Pad Thai."
They continued eating their meals, making light small talk until they were finished. "Here, look through my Netflix account so we can find something to watch," Jeff told her as he handed her the remote before cleaning up the various take out containers.
Annie scrolled through Netflix to find something, when she saw a few DVDs on the entertainment center. She got up and looked through them before pausing at one in particular. "You like Game of Thrones?"
"What's that?" Jeff called out from the kitchen. He walked back into the living room as Annie held up the first season of the show. "I wanted to check it out and it's not streaming on Netflix so I borrowed it from someone at work."
"I hear it's supposed to be really good. Why don't we start watching that?"
"I don't think you'd like it. There's a lot of sex and nudity in it."
"And why would that be a problem?" she asked with a frown.
"Well…it's you…" Jeff said uncomfortably. "I thought you were uncomfortable with that stuff."
"I was," Annie stated, placing great emphasis on the 'was' to make her point. She was well aware that she once was extremely uncomfortable with anything sexual. But that was years ago, and she wasn't the same person she once was. "But I'm not eighteen anymore Jeff."
"I know."
"Do you?" she asked. "Because a lot of times it seems like you still think of me like that eighteen year old who couldn't say…penis." She paused for half a second on saying the p-word, but that was more from Jeff annoying her then being unable to actually say the word out loud.
"I know you're not eighteen," Jeff said.
"Then why don't you treat me like an actual adult? Most times you act like I'm a kid who's into stickers and unicorns."
"I thought you liked unicorns," he said with a smirk to dissolve the growing tension.
"That's not the point!" she yelled, finding his humor unnerving right now. "The point is that after all this time you still think of me as if I'm a kid. Well I'm not a kid. I financially support myself and take responsibility for my actions and yes, actually like and have sex! I'm sick of people trying to pause me in a certain age that I once was."
"I'm not pausing…I know you're an adult."
"I don't know, because there are a lot of times you treat me like I'm not an adult."
"What do you want from me Annie," Jeff groaned as he sat back on the couch. "You want me to say that sometimes it's easier to act like you're still eighteen then to admit you're an adult. That it's simpler to think of you as you once were then who you actually are. Because when I think of the reality of who you actually are it causes a whole mess of problems."
Annie sat on the other side of the couch, considering what Jeff just said. She thought about it before asking, "How do you feel about me?"
"What do you mean," Jeff said, extremely hoping she'd take the hint and drop the whole matter.
"Jeff, I know things between us are unresolved. But after all this time you're telling me you have no idea where you stand with me?"
"Can we not do this right now?" he asked.
"You mean can we not do this ever?"
"Fine, you want the truth, well here is it? I. Don't. Have. Any. Feelings. Towards. You," Jeff sternly replied, pausing on each word to further drive his point home. "And maybe if you lived in the real world, and not in fantasy land where we're a couple in a hotel and I get drinks thrown in my face, you'd actually realize that."
Annie sat there, shocked at how hurtful he was being, even for Jeff. "I said that didn't mean anything," she said in a small voice. "It was just playful pretending."
"Playful pretending is going along with a mistake a bartender makes, not decorating a hotel room so it looks like we'd been living there for days."
Annie looked up at Jeff, catching what he had just said. "Wait, what are you talking about?"
"Nothing," Jeff said, realizing his momentary slip of the tongue.
"No, before. What did you mean a mistake a bartender makes?"
"Annie, I didn't mean anything. Don't make up something that's all just in your-."
"Don't you dare say it's all in my head," Annie told Jeff in a dangerous voice. "I know you meant something with that comment. What is it?"
"Nothing, alright!"
Annie yelled out an angry shriek before getting off the couch and storming into the kitchen and grabbing a pair of scissors from the cutlery drawer. Jeff watched as she marched right into his bedroom. "What are you doing?" His face paled when he saw her come out holding one of his dress shirts, the open scissors an inch from the fabric. "Annie wait, what are you doing?"
"Tell me what you meant Jeff, or I ruin your shirt."
"Annie, just relax, alright," Jeff said with false calm as he got up and walked towards her.
"No! I'm sick of you acting like I'm always imagining things. I know you meant something before. I want to know what it is?"
"Okay, I'll tell you. Just put the shirt down."
Annie started lowering her arms, when she frowned and tightened her grip on the shirt and scissors. "Nice try. But I know as soon as your shirt's safe you won't say anything to me."
"Annie, this is ridiculous. Now you really are acting like a little kid."
"Well that's how you think of me, so I might as well live up to your expectations."
Jeff readied to lunge at her, when his foot knocked against something. He glanced down, seeing Annie's backpack by his feet. "Alright, you want to play…" He quickly reached into the bag and pulled out a blue notebook. "Drop the shirt or else I destroy your notebook."
"Jeff," she said seriously. "That's my third forensics notebook. That had notes for last year's class midterm and this year's. It's important."
"Oh, but my shirt isn't?"
"You have God knows how many shirts. Those are my only notes for my midterm. I need it."
They stared at each other intensely, Annie slowly closing the blades of the scissors while Jeff tore the edge of her notebook slightly. "Alright," Jeff said. "I'm going to count to three. And when I say three, we drop each other's stuff. Deal?"
"Deal."
"Okay. One. Two. Three!" They both looked at each other, neither dropping their item. "You didn't drop my shirt."
"Because I knew you wouldn't drop my notebook. How dumb do you think I am?"
"Dumb enough where you become a crazy person because you're so desperate to think I have feelings for you that you'll only hear what you want to hear!" he yelled.
With that Annie plunged the scissors into the fabric, ripping a large hole. Jeff gasped in horror before he began violently ripping pages from her notebook. The two of them yelled in fury as they destroyed each other's possessions.
After several moments of insanity they both finally stopped, breathing hard as they looked at each other. Jeff's shirt was little more than frayed rags, while Jeff stood in a circle of ripped paper that was once Annie's notebook. "What the hell is wrong with us?" Annie asked. She looked at his shirt, feeling bad at what she had just done. "Jeff…I'm sorry. I shouldn't have ruined your clothes like that."
"It's just a shirt…a really nice shirt…" Jeff looked down, feeling equally shameful at his own actions. "I'm sorry about your notebook. That was…over the line." With that he sat down on the floor and began gathering up the pieces of paper, trying to make some sense of the mess in front of him.
He looked over as Annie sat down next to him and began helping him. They worked together, trying in vain to salvage some of Annie's notes. "He thought you were my wife," Jeff suddenly blurted out of the blue.
"What?"
"When we went away for that ski weekend and you pretended we were married. After we made up and I got you that appletini the bartender thought you were my wife, and I didn't correct him. That's what I was talking about before."
Annie stared at Jeff in disbelief as she tried to absorb what she had just heard. "Why did…why were you so adamant about not telling me that?"
"Because that's what I do. I fight tooth and nail not to admit anything real."
"So you'd rather we get into a fight and destroy each other's things then be honest with me?"
"Apparently so."
Annie sighed sadly, annoyed at how far Jeff was willing to go to keep things bottled up. "Why are you so unwilling to admit you have feelings for me?"
"I never said-."
"Jeff, if you thought of me as just a friend you would have had no problem saying someone once thought I was your wife. But you kept it hidden for a reason. And that's just one time you've done something that shows you feel something for me. Why do you keep going to these incredible lengths not to admit-."
"Because I'm scared, alright?" he blurted out, causing her to immediately stop talking.
"Scared of what?" Annie softly asked after several moments of silence. "Scared of me?"
"Of us. I'm scared of us getting together."
"Why?"
"Because I'm terrified if we did, it won't work out and I'll lose you. And if that happens…" Jeff sighed deeply as he pressed on. He knew he had to keep going, since he doubted he'd allow himself to ever reveal this a second time. "I don't deal well with people I care about leaving me. That's why I've tried not to get close to people, because it hurts too much when they leave. And if we broke up and you couldn't be around me anymore, I don't think I could handle that."
Annie sat there and stared at Jeff as he looked away. She was at a complete loss for words over what she had just heard. She tried to think of the right thing to say, knowing she had to tread carefully and not make any empty promises just to make him feel better. "Jeff…I would hate it if we weren't in each other's lives. And I can't tell you exactly how it will go if we do get into a relationship. But clearly we both know there's something there between us. And the more you keep denying it the more you're inadvertently pushing me away from you."
"So you're saying I'm pushing you away by not putting us in a situation where I push you away?"
"Yeah."
Jeff looked over at her, letting out a chuckle at the absurdity of it all. "Why does that make both no sense and perfect sense?"
"I don't know," Annie said with a smirk. She inched closer to Jeff until she was right next to him. "So, what happens now?"
The smile left Jeff's face briefly as he thought about it. He knew there was a lot he should do to make up for all the ways he had mistreated this amazing woman, like apologize for everything. But instead he said, "Annie, would you like to go out?"
"Out how? As friends?"
"You're not going to make this easy. Okay. Out on a date. On an actual, not just friends spending time together, I pay for everything genuine date."
Annie was silent for a moment as she thought about it. She'd be lying there wasn't a small part of her that briefly considered saying no just go get back at him. But instead of being cruel just to be cruel, she said, "Yes Jeff. I would love it if we went out on a date. But, we should probably take things slow at first."
"Definitely."
She brushed some hair behind her shoulder, causing Jeff to look at her longingly. She caught his look, and felt something stir under his gaze. Almost simultaneously they lunged at each other, their lips crashing together in a fury of passion. Jeff gripped onto Annie tightly, wanting her as close to him as possible as she wrapped her arms around his body.
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The front door opened three hours later, with the two of them walking out and down the hallway to the elevator. In a way they had taken things slow, at least from Jeff's perspective. They didn't sleep together or do anything besides kiss. Though Annie wasn't sure if an hour of making out on the floor completely counted as taking things slow in her mind.
They did eventually decide to stop, and managed to go the rest of the night without a repeat performance. They ended up watching the first couple episodes of Game of Thrones. Jeff pulled Annie into him during the beginning scene with the White Walkers, and ended up holding onto her for the rest of the two episodes. He only let go of her briefly when she said she was cold, and he gave her a sweatshirt for her to wear.
"So, when do you want to go out?" Jeff asked as he held the lobby door open for her.
"Um, I'm sure you're already busy tomorrow, so-."
"I can be free tomorrow. Does seven work for you?"
"Seven's good," she said with a smile. They got to her car when she noticed she still had on his sweatshirt. "Oh, here."
"Annie, keep it," Jeff said as he stopped her from taking it off.
"Jeff, it's your sweatshirt. And I've already ruined one shirt if yours tonight. I'm not taking-."
"Annie, it's fine. I'll get it back from you another time. Plus, this is kind of historic. Many women have tried to take some piece of clothing over the years, but you're one of the few I've given something willingly."
She chuckled before opening her car door. "Good night Jeff. I'll see you tomorrow." She gave him a brief kiss, which led to several more kisses, before she finally got in her car. As she drove away neither realized they both had smiles on their face at how the night had ended up going for them.