The first time Rich asks her out on a date, Annie accepts him.
"Great!" he grins at her acquiescence, gracious even though she hadn't considered refusing him, and he knows it. It's obvious that Rich believes enthusiastic responses from young women to be part of the natural order of things.
Annie should resent it, but he follows up by telling her about the coffee shop he plans to take her to, and makes a show of putting his number in her phone under "A-Rich" so that his name will be at the top. "And then maybe you won't forget about me," he tells her with a smile guaranteed to flatter and inspire confidence.
She can feel herself blossoming like a flower under the sunshine of Rich's attention. He's no Jeff Winger: he's better than Jeff Winger, an improved and evolved edition, with morals and empathy and a solid work ethic and a real professional degree from an American university.
"This Wednesday at five, don't forget!" Rich pats her on the shoulder before he leaves the classroom, a casual touch that still manages to be proprietary, as if a planned date gives him the right to touch her. She doesn't mind; in fact, she leans into his hand and smiles at his back until he's gone.
Worst of all, Annie has to admit to herself that she does it because of Jeff Winger. Evidently, Annie Adderall is also a masochist, a girl who, in spite of being scorned and pushed away and informed that she's young and silly, is still infatuated with her tormenter.
It's a sick craving. Sure, there are times she's not thinking about him, like when she's studying or sleeping or having dinner with her family, but then she goes back to Greendale and he's there, flirting with Britta and eyeing every skirt on campus and either scrupulously avoiding her or chastising her like an older male relative.
So basically, dating Rich is like going to rehab. She's taking the cure, and the addiction is Jeff Winger, and the cure is Rich.
"That dude?" Troy says around a mouthful of tuna salad sandwich. He's stranded on his side of the table with his offensive lunch, abandoned even by Abed, and the rest of them are clustered around Annie and Jeff.
"Yes," Annie answers, snapping shut her three-ring binder. She'd seen no point in hiding her plans with Rich from the rest of the group. She'd wanted to know how they'd react.
Hating herself, she glances over at Jeff. She knows he heard her announcement, but he didn't react aside from the lip-curling sneer he always gets whenever Rich is mentioned.
"That's so nice!" Shirley pats Annie's hand, beaming.
"If you like boring old guys." Troy fishes around his mouth, grimacing, and withdraws a large piece of eggshell, which he pretends to flick at Britta.
"Sick, Troy. I will not have my personal space invaded with animal products!" She gets up and heads for him, vengeance in her eyes.
"Hey, my grandma made this sandwich for me. I know you love her. Wanna bite?"
Abed's restraining a squirming Britta and the sandwich is in the trash before the group settles down again.
"That's it, then?" Annie demands when she thinks she can make herself heard.
"What's it?" Pierce asks. "What'd I miss?"
"Rich! I'm going out with Rich!"
"And?" he prompts, waving his new plastic leg scratcher around.
"Where's the fury? When you guys found out I – well – that Jeff and I kissed, it was like the end of the world in here, all shrieking and Chris Hansen quotes and offended morality. Rich is older than Jeff! Doesn't anyone care?"
"Eh, we all know you've got a ladyboner for older guys. Call me when you work your way to the top," Pierce says.
"Ugh!" Annie stomps her foot and collapses back into her chair with disgust.
"Oh, Annie," Shirley soothes. "Of course we care! It's just that Rich is such a nice, trustworthy young man! You two would be perfect for each other, and - " her eyes go to Britta, and she doesn't continue, but smiles again and strokes Annie's shoulder.
"Yeah," Britta chimes in, using the soothing, less-sardonic tone of voice she has when she wants to sound sympathetic. "Rich seems great! You guys'll probably have lots of fun together."
"I can contribute a shriek if you think that's what's missing," Abed says.
"What does Jeff think?" Troy turns to him, eyes narrowed in one of his moments of uncanny prescience.
Jeff doesn't lift his head from his Blackberry. "The conversation wasn't about me, so I got bored."
"This conversation is stinking up the room. Later, nerdballs." Pierce huffs into his straw, maneuvering his wheelchair toward the door.
"He's right! It does stink in here now!"
"That would be your fetid sandwich, Troy," Britta sniffs.
They follow Pierce out, squabbling all the way.
Before eating his slice of carrot cake, Rich divides it into neat quadrants, smoothing down the cream cheese frosting that his knife disrupted. "In case we want to share," he says in response to her quizzical look. "Plus, I don't want to eat it all. Watching my carb intake." He pats his flat stomach.
Annie thinks that this should work perfectly.
"Tell me about yourself, Annie," he says, cheek dimpling as he smiles. "I know that you're way too smart to be at Greendale, I know you have an appreciation for the arts, and I know that you have an interesting group of friends, but that's it. What's your story?"
"Well, I'm still researching degree programs while I finish my basic courses at Greendale, and I'm involved in a lot of extra curriculars so that my resume will look good when I transfer." She smiles up at him, then drops her eyes back to her cup of coffee.
"Sounds good. Keep the University of New Mexico in mind while you're researching schools. It's a great choice, and I'm not just saying that because it's my alma mater. I've got connections there too, so tell me if you're thinking of it, and I can help you out."
Annie thanks him.
Rich fiddles with his cake again, and Annie's attention is drawn to his hands, with their broad palms, short, thick fingers, and ragged cuticles. They're the hands of a capable man, one who performs surgery and soothes the sick and creates art in his spare time. She thinks of Jeff's hands. They aren't flawed by so much as pen callus, and she doubts he ever does anything with them aside from playing with his phone.
"Annie?" Rich asks. "Do you want to try my cake? You're staring at it."
"Pardon? Oh, no thank you. I was just thinking – could you tell me more about medical school? I'm still considering that as a career."
That gets Rich talking, and Annie only needs to nod and smile at appropriate moments to keep him going. She's honestly interested in the medical profession, and Rich is giving her a lot of useful information, but her mind wanders and her eyes dart again and again to a clock on the wall.
She thinks back to how he's acted so far that evening. He's been polite, holding doors and pulling out chairs and offering to pay even though she insisted that they go dutch. Shirley is right: he is a very nice man, and Annie knows she shouldn't judge him by one boring first date.
At six-thirty (he's also very punctual; she'd told him she needed to be home by seven), Rich walks her back to her car through a parking lot darkened by an early winter sunset.
"I had a lot of fun. We should do this again," he smiles.
"You're right, we should."
He takes a step closer to her, and Annie lifts her face expectantly. Rich bends and kisses her cheek, and she's waiting for the hot, full-body flush of excitement and adrenaline that she feels every time Jeff touches her, but – nothing. She feels nothing.
She looks up at Rich and only just stops herself from asking him to do it again, because this isn't how it's supposed to work! Annie hasn't felt this defrauded since the time her alarm clock stopped in the middle of the night and she'd woken up only an hour before class started.
Rich seems to sense her distress. "Everything okay?"
"Yes, fine!"
When he suggests that they meet again in a week and a half to see a movie, she agrees.
Being irritated with Jeff has never been difficult for Annie, but it's even easier now, and the next day in the study room when he asks her for a set of her Calculus notes from when she'd taken the class the previous spring, she explodes.
"You want my notes, Jeff? Because I'm so happy to go home and find them and pay to make copies of them and hand them to you with what, a curtsy and a smile? How many credit hours are you taking this semester? Twelve, right? That's the bare minimum to be considered a full-time student, but I guess expecting you to do your own work like the rest of us is just too demanding!"
"Whoa," Britta says.
"Time to bring out the chocolate, Abed," Pierce says, but Abed shakes his head, perplexed.
Shirley starts to get out of her chair in order to move to Annie's side, but Jeff frowns at her and she subsides.
"Fine, Annie," Jeff says, tone neutral and face blank. "You're our go-to resource around here, but I'm sure I can find what I need elsewhere."
"Copies are ten cents a page at the library now!" That fact seems very important to her at the moment.
Jeff doesn't speak to her again until the study session is over, but as everyone leaves, he hangs back, and when she attempts to scurry around him he blocks her path.
"What?" she demands.
He looks behind them, making sure the rest of the group is out of earshot, then grinds out through clenched teeth, "Annie, get off my case."
"Your case?" She knows she's being obtuse.
"Stop lecturing me in front of the group. How many credit hours I'm taking and how I study is none of your business."
"It is when you expect me to pick up your slack!"
Again Annie tries to dodge him and leave the room, but he catches her wrist in his hand and pulls her back. Their eyes lock, and there it is – even a touch that slight sends her pulse skittering. She can't hide her shiver, and Jeff catches it, feels it where his skin presses into hers. He lets go and steps back, letting her leave the room without challenge.
All she can think about as she flees the library is that there's something wrong with her. She's broken, and it's Jeff Winger's fault.
Even on a campus as small as Greendale's, avoiding Jeff is easy. Annie has his class schedule memorized (which is nothing; she knows the schedules of everyone in the group), and as long as she stays away from the faculty parking lot, Jeff's favorite sunning bench south of the Luis Guzman memorial, and the cafeteria from 11:30 am through 1:00 pm, she never sees him outside Anthropology or the study room. And there, the rest of the group continues to act as an amazing buffer between them, and she's able to go nearly a week without exchanging direct communication with him.
Tuesday evening, the group gathers for an unplanned study session, since they all have major exams and papers on the horizon. Everyone studies quietly for once, and Annie, lost in her own private bubble of memorization and review, looks up and realizes that hours have passed, and that she and Jeff are the only ones left in the room. She watches Jeff's profile warily, wondering if she should leave, but he's grimacing at his scientific calculator, so she turns back to her Chemistry flashcards.
It's not long, though, before Jeff, bored and restless, starts flipping pages and sliding his chair around. Annie can read his usual cues, and she knows that he'd like to be entertained or encouraged, but she ignores him.
"So, how're things going with you and Greendale's resident pottery ringer?"
Annie taps her cards on the table with a little more force than she probably should. One bends. "We've gone on one date. It's too soon to tell."
"Never too soon to tell whether or not someone's a douchebag."
"I think your dislike of Rich is farcical."
Now that the conversation is rolling, Jeff abandons all pretense of studying, and props his feet comfortably on the table, first nudging aside one of Annie's textbooks with his toe. She frowns at him and moves it from his reach, but he ignores her pique and says, "There's something about him I can't stand, so I don't fight it."
"You don't even know him!"
"Defensive, much? Are you sure things are going well with ol' Potterywood?"
Annie won't meet his gaze.
Jeff's feet hit the floor with a thump as he leans forward to scrutinize her. "What did that jerkwad do?"
"Nothing! Nothing. It's just that – well, I don't know if I like him like that." She hates how childish that sounds.
With a smirk, Jeff reclines again, and she feels compelled to continue, so she says, still prim, "I'm not attracted to him."
That elicits a snort. "Who would be?"
"That's unfair, Jeff! He's a very nice-looking man." She studies her ballet flats, rubbing the scuffed tip of one against her ankle, and keeps her head down as she mumbles, "I think there's something wrong with me."
"Ridiculous."
"No, it's not." Mustering her courage, Annie looks him full in the face. "I can't start a relationship with anyone, because I can't stop thinking about you."
Jeff flinches a little, like she knew he would.
"I'm not going to go all crazy Annie on you, don't worry," she says, trying to maintain her dignity.
"Hey, it's okay, I get it, but I think you're looking at things all wrong here. It's like that ducks and geese thing Troy's studying. Imprinting." Jeff waves his hand like he does when he feels as if he's making an important point. "You think you imprinted on me, but it's just a case of what turns you on and what doesn't. Rich doesn't – no surprise – so you just need to keep looking until you find someone who will," he finishes, not unkindly.
The longer he talks, the angrier she gets. Possessed by a blind fury, Annie stands up and starts sweeping highlighters, flashcards, and textbooks into her backpack, with no regard for order. Without deigning to speak to him, she stalks to the door, but just before she exits, he calls her back.
"Annie, wait."
She turns toward Jeff, and he's standing there, hand extended and a rueful smile twisting his mouth. "You forgot your pen."
In his palm is her last purple gel-grip pen, a twin of the one that had caused so much havoc a few weeks earlier. Annie stares at it for a few seconds, then looks up at Jeff. She moves forward as if to take it from his hand, but instead takes another step into his personal space, stands on tiptoe, and presses her lips to his.
Jeff doesn't respond, so Annie tries again. His lips are sealed and unmoving against hers, and when she puts her hands on his shoulders, he draws back from her. "Annie, stop."
He's staring down at her with a mixture of bemusement and apprehension, but then something dark comes over his face, and with a harsh exhalation, he bends down and kisses her.
Jeff's never touched her like this before: there's no vestige of the gentleness he's always used. Annie tries to lean into the kiss, but his tongue slides into her mouth roughly, almost choking her. Jeff's arm slides behind her back and pulls her up tight against him, making his shirt buttons press a painful line between her breasts. She's moaning into his mouth, but he doesn't let up, doesn't slow down, and one of his hands slips down to her buttocks where it cups and fondles.
Annie works her hands free from where they're trapped between them and locks them around Jeff's neck.
When Jeff lets go of her and lurches back, they're both gasping for air. With trembling fingers, Annie wipes at her chin, which is sticky with saliva.
Jeff finally catches his breath. "Was that what you wanted?"
There are hundreds of lies and excuses Annie could employ, but she doesn't use any of them to dilute the bald truth of the word she blurts out. "Yes."
She can't read the expressions crossing Jeff's face. His eyes widen and he takes a step toward her, then he scowls and stops short. "No. Annie, we are not going to do this."
"Why not?" All dignity is abandoned; she's pleading here.
"What, do you want me to fuck you up against the wall?"
Annie knows he's being deliberately crude to put her off, but she still cringes and breaks eye contact.
"Look at me."
She does.
Jeff's face has softened, but his voice is still hard. "No matter what you think, I can't give you what you really want."
And with that, he leaves.
Annie bends and picks up her pen from where it has fallen to the floor, forgotten.
