Jeff Winger had a problem and her name was Annie Edison. There had been a simple plan: sleep with her, move on, do his time at this purgatory called Greendale Community College, and put it all behind him. But she kept complicating things. First she'd hemmed and hawed about sleeping with him, despite cooperating enthusiastically when it came to rounding the bases as far as second, halfway to third. Then, just when he had been about to decide once and for all that it wasn't worth it and if she couldn't make up her mind already he would just let the matter drop, she'd very firmly declined to sleep with him. Then she kept being absurdly pretty and smart and good-natured and his friend. He found himself fantasizing not just about sex with her, which was old territory in re fantasies, but about some kind of relationship. About a world where they weren't just a couple of people who'd slept together or friends with benefits, but where they were sleeping in the same bed most nights. Where they factored one another into every significant decision. Where it was an unspoken assumption that they'd spend part of each weekend together. Where they went to IKEA together and looked at rugs.

He'd been someone's boyfriend before, of course. He wasn't a sociopath. Sometimes when you were with a woman and she wanted to call you her boyfriend you were better off going along with it. Sometimes you felt obliged. Sometimes you were willing, in a reluctant sort of way, to give something a half-hearted try because it seemed like the way things were supposed to go. But he'd never wanted to be someone's boyfriend before. He'd definitely never wanted to be someone's boyfriend when he wasn't even sleeping with that someone. Jeff was in murky waters.

Three months ago, he hadn't met Annie Edison. Jeff in some ways envied that younger man, who didn't know what he was missing. By contrast the Jeff of the present knew exactly what he was missing, had kissed and held and fondled what he was missing. That was the problem, really: lack of completion. If they'd just slept together back before he'd started all this fantasizing, then it never would have happened and he'd have moved on already. Or if there'd been something wrong with her, something that put her off the table besides just her own inclinations, then Jeff was sure he wouldn't have fallen down this rabbit hole. If she'd been already married or a lesbian, if she'd been nineteen or forty-five. There should have been some backstop, some terminal thought that prevented him from ranging out so far with his fantasies. There should have been something to stop him from wanting Annie Edison.

The worst part was the way Annie — no, the worst part was the way they weren't having sex. The second-worst part was the way Annie didn't seem to mind or notice or miss his hands on her, the way he missed his hands on her. She was still just as flirty and as friendly and as impossible to ignore as she had been back when the air had been so pregnant with the possibility of a janitorial-closet hookup that their friends had complained.

Weeks after that Halloween declaration — delivered with a level of finality that couldn't be gainsaid — Jeff Winger had to man up and face facts: the sleep-with-Annie-Edison part of the "sleep with Annie, move on" plan was never going to happen. He should focus on the second part.

Annie would approve. She'd taken to asking him, every so often, whether he'd asked out the statistics professor. And he'd respond, every time, that he wasn't interested in the statistics professor. And she'd explain that by dating 'the statistics professor' she meant dating basically anyone who wasn't her. And he'd say that he wasn't interested in dating.

He was, of course, still human. Over the course of the last month he'd picked up three different nervous divorcees. None of them had wanted anything more from him than reassurance that they were still capable of attracting a man's interest, or that they too could step out on their ended marriage the way their former husband had, or just that they could have a good time. One of them hadn't remembered his name the next morning, which had irritated Jeff because he felt he'd made a special effort in staying all night. She and one of the others hadn't tried to give him any kind of contact information. The third had entered her phone number into his phone when he'd foolishly left it where she could grab it, under the name Mercy, which Jeff had no idea whether that was a first name, last name, nickname or simply an open offer any time Jeff felt he needed someone's tender ministrations.

Three hookups in five weeks wasn't well below Jeff's batting average, but he'd become choosy in his dotage. Mercy and her two dopplegangers had all three been fair-skinned, with long dark hair, slender and under five foot four.

At no point had any of them suddenly broken off and smiled and called him mister or buster or buckaroo or anything along those lines. Still, closing his eyes and thinking of England was better than nothing.

Mostly it was better than nothing.

Annie cornered him in the hall one morning in early December. Smiles and pizzazz leaping at him from behind a bank of lockers as he turned a corner, hands clasped together in what she had to know was a pose straight off the cover of a particular kind of supermarket romance novel, the sweet young thing staring adoringly at the dark stranger who was about to upend her life…

Jeff resolved to hit the bars and find a fourth barfly that night, even if it was Monday. Maybe he'd call up some mercy.

"Jeff!" Annie said, with slightly forced enthusiasm, "have I got a deal for you!"

"You want to offer me sex in exchange for my Spanish notes," Jeff guessed.

Her slightly-forced smile warmed a bit (that was the other thing, she didn't get annoyed and push him away when he flirted with her, which he'd kept doing after she gave him her firm no because on some level he wanted her to angrily rebuff him, instead of grinning and laughing at his jokes and touching his arm). "Not quite. Brace yourself. Are you ready? Jeff, are you ready?"

He nodded, which apparently wasn't good enough for Annie as she grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him close. "Are you ready?" The third time she asked it was almost a purr.

She had to know what she was doing to him. If he didn't enjoy it so much he'd have shoved her back. "What is it?"

"Debate!"

"What?"

Her eyes were bright and shining. "Greendale debate club! You and me, versus City College, tomorrow."

"Is this just an excuse to be close to me?"

She scoffed with mock irritation and swatted him lightly on the chest, then took a step back so they were no longer in kissing-close proximity.

"No!" Annie rolled her eyes. "This is not about spending time with you. If I wanted to spend time with you, I would say 'Jeff, let's spend some time together.' Like I have done! Many times!"

"To be fair you've never used those specific words," Jeff said with a smirk.

She glared at him. "The way they do debate here, I need a partner. It's a two-person thing, and I need a second body."

"You need my body."

"Are you five years old?" She seemed to be trying to sound disgusted, rather than amused, but couldn't quite manage it.

"It's okay. I'm not going to make you say you need my body. Because I… actually, no. Say you need my body."

"I could get someone else," Annie said, folding her arms. "I could get…" She glanced around. "Leonard."

"Hard pass," Leonard interjected from down the hall.

"Shut up, Leonard!" Annie yelled at him, over Jeff's shoulder. "I saw you at the Girl Scout stand! Those free samples were one cookie per customer!"

"Their stated policy was ambiguous at best!" Leonard called back.

Annie turned her attention back to Jeff. "Or Garrett," she continued without missing a beat. Or Fat Neil. You know he's actually a really good guy —"

"Yeah, I know that," Jeff said a little petulantly — he didn't like that the topic of conversation had shifted away from how much Annie needed his body. "I know Neil. We —" He broke off suddenly.

Annie cocked her head. "You what?"

Jeff glanced around to confirm no one was eavesdropping. "We talk Dungeons and Dragons," he said in a low voice. "He plays Dungeons and Dragons."

"You play Dungeons and Dragons?" Annie's face lit up with delight she was no longer struggling to conceal. "That's adorable," she told Jeff, affectionately stroking his arm. "You're a lawyer, you play dee-and-dee, you're basically ideal debate club material. I'm amazed you're not already signed up."

He made a sour face that barely hid his own amusement. "I don't play D&D, I just… never mind."

"You're just a big handsome dork, you know that?" She smiled up at him.

"You're just trying very artlessly to manipulate me, you know that?" Damned if it wasn't working, though.

Annie licked her lips. "Debate, Jeff," she whispered. "Debaaaaaaaate…"

"And yet somehow I'm managing to resist this siren call. Maybe because it's debate, and I'm not in high school, and I'm not a nerd."

"Which is a shame, because I really need the body of a nerd. A nerd's body. I guess that's not your body…"

"Much as I admire your ability to avoid saying you need my body —"

"I'll get Abed to do it, I guess," Annie said with a toss of her shoulders. "Anyway, have fun not debating."

She turned to walk away, very slowly, and of course Jeff fell into step next to her before she'd gone more than a foot. "Abed? You don't want Abed as your debate partner. Abed doesn't know how to create and manipulate emotional connections to win over judges. He's a human computer, and you're already set for memorization, I'm sure."

"Hmm, yeah." Annie put one finger to her chin in a thoughtful pose. "Maybe Britta."

"You can't be serious. Unless the debate topic is legalization."

"Troy, then."

"Troy doesn't do the reading for his class on picture books."

"Shirley?"

"Shirley's busy. Don't bug Shirley with this. She's got two kids and she's going to school full-time already."

"Pierce?"

Jeff stopped walking, and just stared at her.

Annie gave Jeff a long hopeful gaze. "Please?"

Jeff broke and looked down at his shoes. "Fine," he said. "But only because you said you needed my body." This wasn't true; it was because she'd done the thing with the eyes, but she didn't need to know that. He would have done it even if she hadn't done the thing with the eyes.

Annie scoffed. "I did not say that!"

"It was implicit."

"No, I — okay, that's fair." She smiled. "It's tomorrow night, so we have tonight to study."

"Hey, you never said study. Debate is arguing. I used to argue for a living. I don't need to study."

Annie cleared her throat. "Jeff, I need your body. Let's spend some time together…"

Jeff chuckled.

"Tonight, while studying for the debate tomorrow. Deal? I'll meet you at…" Annie broke off, catching herself before she said whatever she'd been about to say. "In the study room. At six."

#

Lunch at Greendale Community College's cafeteria. The droning background noise of a few hundred colorful characters extraing it up. A sign proclaiming Today is "Meat"-ball day!, punctuation not edited. Annie was feeling pretty good about herself, which was no doubt why the universe sent Shirley into her path.

Not that Annie didn't like Shirley. Shirley was sweet, kind to a fault, fierce and fiercely loyal. But she was also a rock-ribbed social conservative evangelical who would vote a straight Democratic ticket to her dying days while agreeing with the GOP platform more often than not. Shirley, in other words, thought she knew better than Annie.

"I saw what you did, you know." Shirley opened their conversation as she sidled up to stand next to Annie in the cafeteria line, at lunch that day. "And the Lord saw. And Leonard, because he eavesdrops which is a sin and why no one likes you Leonard!"

"I hear my name, I perk up." Leonard's voice. Annie leaned over and saw Leonard over on Shirley's other side. "I'm like a chimpanzee that way. Also the upper body strength, ladies…"

Annie and Shirley emitted simultaneous scoffs and turned away from him. "What did I do?" Annie asked Shirley. "I didn't do anything. Definitely not anything God would take an interest in. I didn't eat oysters or ham. Do you see any ham on my tray?" She indicated the cafeteria tray in front of her.

Shirley was, however, having none of it. "Please. You know what you did, and you should be ashamed. Yanking that poor boy's leash. You know he's got it bad for you, and what do you do? You take advantage." Shirley clucked her tongue. "Sad, really."

"Take advantage? We're friends!" Annie paused to wave away a cafeteria worker's attempt to ladle some "meat" balls onto her plate. "I assume you're talking about my — our — very good friend Jeff. Who is completely aware that our relationship is completely platonic."

"He may be aware of that, and you may be aware of that, but…" Shirley reluctantly accepted a small heap of "meat" balls. "But is he really aware of that?"

"Yes! We've talked about it. We've talked about it multiple times. You and I have talked about how we've talked about it multiple times, multiple times. We're friends, we work well together and we get along, and I've suggested like a half-dozen women he should be asking out, so, you know, clearly."

Shirley harrumphed. "That boy doesn't ask women out, he picks up girls in bars. If you really thought he was going to go after that statistics professor, you wouldn't keep harping on her."

"I asked him to help me because he's well-suited to the project and because it'll be fun. Which is why he agreed. Jeff definitely doesn't expect anything else." By this point they were sitting down in a booth, across from one another.

Britta suddenly slid in, next to Shirley. "Hey, guys, what're we talking about? You and Jeff? We're talking about her and Jeff, right?"

"No—" Annie said.

Shirley broke in. "What, you think just because Annie is repeating 'we're just friends' over and over again, we must be talking about Jeffrey?"

Britta wrinkled her nose. "Is that a trick question?"

"You know he hasn't stopped wanting you," Shirley said. "I'm not saying you owe him anything—"

"Ew," said Britta, although it was unclear whether she was responding to Shirley's words or the "meat" balls on her plate; the latter seemed to be taking up the bulk of Britta's attention.

"But you can do better than taking advantage of him, Annie."

"I'm not taking advantage of him," Annie insisted. "Maybe I'm taking advantage of circumstances, but — is it wrong to take advantage of circumstances beyond my control? If I find a dollar in the street, is it wrong to pick it up, just because I didn't earn it?"

"Is Jeff the dollar?" Britta asked. "And if so, what do you mean by 'earn'?"

Shirley ignored her. "That's not the situation at all, and you know that. You need to take a good long look at yourself and what you're doing."

"What I'm doing is, I'm going to have fun with my friend Jeff. And we're going to do debate."

"Why?" Shirley challenged her. Annie's confusion must have shown on her face, for Shirley looked triumphant. "Why are you even doing debate, if it's not about keeping Jeff wrapped around your little finger?"

"Debate is fun." Annie folded her arms and glared. "I had a lot of fun doing it in high school."

"I don't think that could possibly be true," Britta mumbled.

"I like having fun with friends. This conversation?" Annie rose, her lunch still mostly-uneaten. "Not fun."

"Debate isn't fun, right?" Britta asked Shirley, after Annie had left.

"Damn straight it isn't fun," Shirley said.

#

Jeff showed up promptly, at only five minutes after six. Annie had already spread across the study room table, waiting for him not with the inviting sultriness that she'd displayed earlier, but with a no-nonsense attitude and several hundred pounds of books culled from the nonfiction stacks.

"What is all this?" He felt a twinge of disappointment. Jeff hadn't really expected to find that the whole debate-prep scenario was just a smokescreen for a secret plan of making out, but he had hoped.

"This is fun. This is debate!" Annie barely looked up from the stack of photocopies she was diligently highlighting as he entered. "I've already sorted and color-coded the primary sources by authoritativeness, so start at that end." She pointed at the opposite end of the table, where a dozen dusty-looking textbooks had been stacked and marked with red, orange, and yellow stickers.

Jeff frowned. "What are we—"

She cut him off, still not looking at him. "What are we debating?" Actually he'd been about to say something like what are we doing all this nonsense for? but whatever. "The issue is 'Resolved: Man is fundamentally good, not fundamentally evil.' I know what you're going to say —"

"Uh—"

"And I agree, it's sexist and archaic to say man is good, rather than humanity, but the asses who run this thing…" She trailed off with a sigh.

Jeff scowled. "Are we pro-good or anti-good?"

That got her to look up, at least. "We don't find out until the coin flip at the start of the debate — Jeff, did you really not know that?"

"I didn't do debate in high school! I told you!"

"Ugh." Annie threw a sheaf of photocopies down on the table in front of her unnecessarily hard and stood up from her chair. "Fine. I'll walk you through it."

Jeff was a little concerned about how tightly-wound Annie had suddenly become. This was a side of her he hadn't seen, up to this point. He circled around the table towards her. "I —"

"There's a lot," she said. She began pacing back and forth behind the study room table. "There's a lot to this and maybe we should have skipped class this morning and started immediately because I'm not sure how we can prep both sides of the debate in one night with basically no notice and you don't even know what you're doing and I haven't tried to do anything like this in a really long time and I really don't want you to embarrass me out there so get cracking!" This last was punctuated by her poking him in the chest with one finger, surprisingly hard.

This wasn't how Jeff had expected the evening to start. "Annie, it's okay, it's just a stupid Greendale thing, it's not going to affect your future…"

"I wouldn't expect you to understand," Annie said coldly, sitting down at the table. "But I'm asking you, as a friend, to actually make an effort."

"I — of course." He scowled as he sat down next to her; it wasn't cool of her to play the friend card like that. "But why? Seriously, why do you care so much about this? C'mon. You're not in high school any more, who cares about extracurriculars?"

"I know, but it's important to me!" Seeing Jeff's inquisitive expression, Annie sighed. "I only found out that Greendale had a debate club with zero members yesterday, ten minutes before I asked you to do it with me. The dean was saying that Greendale was going to have to forfeit again, and I just… I know it was a long time ago, and I don't regret the choices I made — I don't! Mostly I don't. But once upon a time I was really good, you know?" She stared wistfully into space. "In high school I was valedictorian and the best at debate and I spoke better French than the teacher and one time instead of a sub for the civics teacher the principal put me in charge for a week. I was the city of Greendale's volunteer-of-the-month like twenty times in a row. I was going to go to Harvard, and then maybe the Kennedy school or Harvard Law, and by now I'd be gearing up to run for Congress. Or maybe Johns Hopkins and oncological research, so I could cure cancer. Or I'd be an FBI agent — don't laugh!"

"I wasn't going to," Jeff said honestly.

"I used to be a mathlete and the quiz bowl team captain and Knowledge Master… did you ever do Knowledge Master?"

He shook his head. "I don't know what that is."

"It doesn't matter. I mean, you're right. It doesn't matter. I'm never going to be eighteen again. I'm never going to clerk for Sandra Day O'Connor, and I'm never going to become a transplant surgeon, and I'm never going to study gorillas at the Jane Goodall Institute, and I'm never going to investigate X-Files with Fox Mulder. Those childish fantasies are over for me. I'm a burnout former social-justice activist at a community college trying to get cheap credits I can transfer to the state university, and the highest I can realistically aim is dental hygienist."

"First of all," Jeff said slowly, "I think you're being too harsh on dental hygienists. Dentistry in general gets a bad rap, but it's a solid career. And hygienists are going to have work to do until everyone in America flosses after every meal, so, there's plenty of job security, too. You'd make a great dental hygienist, and that's not true of everybody."

Annie emitted a low, mordant chuckle. "Thanks for that."

"Also you're doing a great job at selling yourself short. I'm not saying you're going to go to DC and end up White House chief of staff, but it's not like your only two options are a Nobel prize and dying in a ditch. There's a large middle you're excluding. I mean, I'm never going to be on the Supreme Court, either."

"No, but…" She sighed. "It's stupid. Once upon a time I thought I could. But, you know, there's like thirty thousand high schools in this country, and every year somebody is the top of every single one of those classes. And of those thirty thousand valedictorians there's a thousand who are crazy special only-come-along-once-every-thirty-years types, and of those thousand, one thousand super-special people every year, basically none of them dropped out from everything for ten years to get back at their mothers for not just turning a blind eye to but actively encouraging their addiction to amphetamines… That's why I got you to do debate with me."

"I knew it couldn't have been because it was fun," Jeff muttered.

She nodded, a wan smile on her face. "I wanted to relive my glory days, and I wanted you to be there to watch."

"I think your glory days are still ahead of you. You're what, thirty?"

Annie rolled her eyes. "Gee, thanks. I'm twenty-eight."

Jeff shrugged, as though a couple of years made no difference. "Wait until you're thirty-five and you're busted for fraud and lose everything you thought you'd earned. I only wanted to keep my head down, you know, get through this, and you come along and I'm doing halloween parties and extracurriculars…"

"Fun parties! Fun extracurriculars! With friends!" There was an edge of forced joviality to her voice. Seeing his sour expression, however, she sighed. "We are friends, right? Still?"

"Why wouldn't we be? Do you know something I don't know? Have you been sending pictures of me to the dean in exchange for credit hours?"

"No, no, it was just a thing Shirley said… it's not important." Annie sighed. "Listen, let's just lean in and power through this, okay? You take 'man is evil,' I'll take 'man is good.' See what you can dig out of philosophy, theology, and history. Figure out the broad avenues of attack to take, and I'll do the same, and then we'll work on rebutting each other."

"Objection," Jeff said. "You're describing a scenario where, necessarily, we do twice as much work as we're going to end up using."

"Overruled. A lot of it is going to be dual-purpose."

"You're lucky we're friends," Jeff said.

"Shirley said I was taking advantage of you," Annie said.

It was several hours later. Papers and open books littered the study room table, the floor near the study room table, and the floor near the sofa, which was where they'd decamped to, ostensibly to eat pizza. The remains of the pizza lay cold and greasy in its cardboard tomb, abandoned.

Jeff sat at one end of the sofa, legs stretched out as he stared at a photocopied sheaf of papers in his hands. A few feet away Annie sat cross-legged facing him, her back to one arm of the sofa, an open notebook in her lap.

He didn't immediately respond to Annie's statement, so she extended a leg and gently prodded him in the hip with her bare foot.

"She said that, huh?" he asked wearily.

"She did, yeah. She said that I was leading you on. Dangling the possibility of sex in front of you to cajole you into doing my bidding."

"You were real clear about the no sex thing," Jeff said without looking up.

"So you don't feel like —"

He threw the papers down. "What do you want me to say?" Jeff asked irritably. "That I've changed my mind about being attracted to you? That when you and I became friends I stopped wanting you? Are we not adults?"

Annie was aghast. "So you do think —"

"No! Of course not. Christ. I'm an adult. I'm capable of having desires without acting on them. As are you. Why are we talking about this?"

She stood quickly. "Nothing, never mind," she said, not looking his way as she walked back to the study room table. "I just thought that you — if you thought — never mind."

A tense silence settled over them, broken a few minutes later by Jeff.

"I agreed to do this because you asked me to and I like you," he said quietly. "Also your description of it made it sound at least potentially fun. Which it definitely hasn't been."

"Winning is fun," Annie countered.

"I'll have to ask City College about that."

The silence returned.

This time Annie broke it. "So, you like me."

Jeff looked up, glanced her way. "Is that somehow in dispute?"

"Why do you like me?"

Jeff tossed down his papers again. "Well, for one thing, you never make transparent bids for reassurance."

"Har har," said Annie from over by the study table.

"You're stunningly good-looking and sometimes you make out with me." When Annie didn't give some biting rejoinder, Jeff glanced her way. She was leaning against the study table, head down, hands gripping the table edge a foot or so apart, her hair hanging down to obscure her face. She might have been trembling slightly. "Hey," he said, rising.

"It's fine," she mumbled, her voice thick.

"I wasn't serious," Jeff assured her as he stepped towards her. "I mean, you are stupidly pretty and I like flirting with you, and kissing you, but that's not why I'm here."

She wiped at her face without lifting her head up so Jeff could see. "Then why?"

"I enjoy your company. I feel like I said that, at some point? If anything, the flirting…" He sighed. "The flirting gets kind of frustrating, knowing we're never going to —" He broke off as, suddenly, she was pulling him down to her level and kissing him.

"I know, right?" she whispered breathlessly into his ear as he tugged her back to the sofa. He fell back onto it and she fell with him, ending up in his lap. "I like kissing you too," she continued between nips at his earlobe. "Move we table the no-kissing rule."

"Second," he managed to croak out before he became too distracted to use any words at all.

#

Close to an hour later they took a break. Jeff watched Annie rise and carefully re-clasp her bra on her back, under her shirt, before pulling her leather jacket back on.

"I've been wanting to do that for a while," she said over her shoulder as she walked back to the study table. "Since the last time, pretty much."

"You're the one who —"

"I know, I know. And that was dumb. We can just do that, and it doesn't have to mean anything." Her tone was oddly chipper. "We're friends, we agree on that, and anything else is just a… a bonus."

Jeff swallowed. He'd just had his bell rung, in more ways than one. Was she seriously proposing casual platonic kisses on a regular basis? Casual and platonic second base? Maybe eventually casual and platonic lovemaking? Casual sex with strangers was one thing, but there was a reason Jeff tried not to remember the names of the women he picked up in bars.

He stood, without quite knowing what he was doing. For a moment he hesitated, and almost strode to the study table, picked Annie up and threw her down onto it. But instead he turned and walked out of the room, down the hall towards the parking lot.

Annie was on his heels, of course. "Jeff?"

"Yeah, I'm done," Jeff said, not looking at her. "This is… this is not what I'm into."

"What?" She grabbed his shoulder, tried to stop him, but only succeeded in slowing him down. "I thought this was your thing. I mean, not just the kissing, obviously, but —"

"I'll pass." Jeff felt more than slightly dizzy.

As they left the library building, the doors locked behind them but neither of them broke stride. "I misread things, is that what you're saying? You didn't want…?" When he didn't respond, but just kept walking toward his car, she tugged at his shoulder again. "Hey!"

"Of course! Of course that's exactly what I want," Jeff snapped. "You know me so well." He stomped away.

She stomped right along after him, of course, right on his heels, alternately begging and demanding he stop and explain. She probably would have left him if he'd told her to, especially if he'd insisted, but he didn't, he just kept walking.

He didn't stop until they reached his car. He had his keys out and his hand on the driver's side door handle, when he saw the boot.

"Crap." Unpaid parking tickets had finally caught up with him.

"Oh, that's not good." Annie wrinkled her nose and peered at the boot and dammit, she looked delicious.

"It's fine, I didn't want to move my car anyway. I mean, look at this great parking job I did." Jeff gestured towards his car. "Right between the lines, perfectly straight. There's no way I could ever top that."

"There's a number you can call tomorrow," she said, crouching to examine the boot more closely. "Assuming you can't just talk it into opening for you?"

"Listen, I would love to stand here and make jokes with you about my crisis, but instead I'm going to call a cab, apparently." When Jeff turned and began to walk away Annie fell into step beside him, keeping pace even though he wasn't walking slowly and his legs were much longer.

"Come on, let me give you a ride," she said. He thought she was going to punctuate it with a playful punch on his arm, or a flirty squeeze, or a friendly sort of shoulder check, but instead she just looked up at him expectantly.

"Great. Thanks," he said, because saying no I'd rather pay a cab driver didn't seem like it was going to fly.

"And I'm sorry I… misunderstood," she added after a pause. "It won't happen again, okay? We're friends."

Jeff sighed. "We're friends."

"And I really value that," Annie said solemnly, "and I don't want to put it at risk."

When Annie woke up in Jeff's bed she wondered, just for a second, where it had all gone wrong. In the predawn gloam she could just about make him out, a big muscular lump of a guy who looked like the snoring type, even if he wasn't doing it just then. Did he always sleep in the nude, or only when he had a woman in bed, or had she really thrown him so badly off his game? He hadn't exactly seemed thrown off his game, all things considered…

It was tempting to scoot in close and press herself against him without waking him up. Odds were good that if she moved into position and elbowed him, he'd throw an arm over her and spoon her. Spooning, skin on skin, was something Annie really missed.

But that would have been selfish, she decided. They were friends. They weren't really lovers, they were friends who sometimes had a particular kind of fun together. Staying overnight was probably pushing it. Cuddling was definitely out, no matter how tempting it might be.

And besides, it would have been a lot nicer on clean sheets which, after what they'd done, these definitely were not. Annie should instead climb out of bed and find her underwear and her clothes and her keys, and get home to change and shower and show up at Greendale as though nothing had ever happened.

Afternoon at Greendale found Annie and Jeff in the same room. Normally this would be nothing unusual, but so far that day — the day after they'd spent an evening and most of a night together — they'd been avoiding one another. Annie had skipped Spanish class, even, which she saw as a testament to just how much she was concerned for Jeff's feelings. And Britta reported that he'd skipped, too.

She'd assumed that Jeff wasn't going to show for the debate. Annie had considered skipping it herself, since after all they hadn't really prepared sufficiently the night before and Jeff was probably not going to even be there, but she felt she owed it to the school, and to herself, to honor the commitment she'd made. Plus it gave her something else to focus on. So instead of class she spent the day cramming, prepping notes and material on the topic: man is good. To really prepare she should have covered Jeff's half — man is evil — if only to get a sense of what arguments to have ready counters for, but she really didn't have time and she didn't have the mental energy, either.

When Annie walked into the gym, she had expected there to be about five people present — the City College pair of debaters and the panel of judges. Instead there were several dozen — the dean had, apparently, offered credit hours or something for showing up to cheer Greendale on? — And that several dozen included Jeff Winger, who was already seated at the Greendale table, playing with his phone.

Annie fixed a broad smile in place as she walked calmly to their table and sat down next to him. He didn't look up.

"Hiya, buddy," Annie said quietly to him, in her cheeriest, most casual voice. "Good to see ya." She made a gun-fingers gesture at him before she knew what she was doing.

Jeff nodded slightly, but said nothing.

Despite her sudden attack of dorkiness, Annie pressed on. "Wasn't sure you were gonna make it, buddy. Good to see ya." She'd said that already. Dammit.

"You asked me to do this, so I'm doing this," Jeff's low tone spoke to a certain amount of tension he seemed to be carrying.

Annie forced herself to continue to smile. "Oh, um, yeah. Thanks again, friend-o." Dammit dammit.

Fortunately then the moderator cleared her throat. Coin flip (Annie elbowed Jeff in a see? see? sort of way, but he didn't respond), and then the debate started. Fortunately, inasmuch as it meant that Annie could no longer embarrass herself trying to be casual with Jeff. Which, somehow, was more of a priority than not embarrassing herself in front of the City College debate team, the judges, and the onlookers.

When they were called on to make an opening statement, Annie hesitated just long enough to be sure that Jeff wasn't going to set his phone down and take the lead, then rose and said some words that slid out of her head as soon as she'd said them. She had to start over when the moderator reminded her, gently, that her side had been assigned the "anti" position regarding Resolved: Man is fundamentally good, not the "pro" position which she'd begun exhorting.

It did not get better from there.

Finally, an hour in, after Jeff had stumbled through a half-hearted argument rebutting the eradication of smallpox by claiming the parties involved had only done it to make themselves look good, Annie'd had enough. When her turn to present came up, she took a deep breath, approached the lectern, and took another deep breath before beginning.

"You want to know why this is going so poorly for us? You want to know why we're acting so weird? Funny story," Annie declared. She popped the microphone out of its stand and gripped it like she was doing stand-up. "I've known Jeff for almost three months now. Since the beginning of the semester. He walked up to me and hit on me, and lied to me to make himself look good. And you know what? I liked it! I knew he was lying to make himself look good, but did I think oh, here's a dishonest Ronald, don't want anything to do with him? No! I was like, hey, sexy lying man, lie to me some more about how you speak Spanish! That's what the lie was about, just to clarify. Maybe not a big deal, but in the context of a Spanish class… Anyway. Somehow we became friends." She was pacing back and forth now, not looking at the judges or anyone.

"And I say 'somehow'? But basically it was because he thought I was hot and I thought he was hot and I liked him thinking I was hot. I liked him trying to impress me. Also we made out. Several times. Eventually I decided that it was bad, and wrong, and selfish. So I stopped that, and I told him that we weren't ever going to be a thing, because I wanted to feel better about jerking him around."

She paused, to let that sink in. Everyone in the gym leaned forward slightly.

"Although in my defense," Annie said after a moment's thought, "I'm not planning on staying at Greendale for very long, I'm going to transfer credits… I want to get my life back on track, and glomming onto a hot guy is not a good way to do that. It has not worked for me in the past, you know?" She paused and steadied herself before continuing. "The reason he's here at all is because I flirted at him until he agreed to do it. Last night we were talking and we were supposed to be prepping and we ended up making out, even though I said we weren't going to do that any more, because I was feeling needy and he was saying nice things — I initiated it — and then we went back to his place and had sex until we passed out, which again, I initiated, even though I said I wasn't going to, because I wanted him!" She was shouting now, waving her free hand like she was leading a political rally. "I've been selfish, I've been manipulative, I've been short-sighted. I've used Jeff — a guy I like! — I've used Jeff to make myself feel better about using Jeff to make myself feel better!"

The crowd (such as it was) had begun to murmur, and at this revelation their whispers grew in intensity. Annie silenced them with a gesture. "Jeff does not exactly come out of this smelling like a rose, by the way. He befriended me under the same false pretenses I befriended him under! We tried to just be friends! We did! Somehow we kept kissing anyway. I tried to stop, because he wasn't doing much to stop, and we managed… what, six weeks?" Annie turned and glanced at Jeff for confirmation. His forehead rested on the table in front of him, with his hands over his head, and he was rocking very slightly back and forth.

"Okay! I'm replaying what I was just saying, now, and it occurs to me that maybe I should have thought twice about airing this dirty laundry in public, but you know what? I don't regret it! Now everything is incredibly awkward and I don't have any idea where we stand, because I wasn't thinking, at all. I was just responding to base animal urges, and so was he, because man is evil!"

There was a wave of applause as Annie realized she was out of breath.

"Edison out!" She held the mike out from her body and dropped it to the gym floor, then turned and strode back to her seat. The applause lasted slightly longer than she would have expected for awkward pity applause, which was something, maybe.

There was a delay while the AV technician fixed the microphone (apparently it hadn't been designed to be dropped onto floors), during which time Annie noted some at least halfway approving expressions on the faces of the audience and the judges. She risked a glance Jeff's way, and saw he was fidgeting in his seat and playing with his phone… except that its screen was dark.

"I lied just now," she whispered to him. "About not regretting it. Or at least, I regret it now. Sorry?"

"You apologizing to me tends to follow a certain script," he whispered back. "Now is really not the time."

Annie reddened slightly, realizing what Jeff meant. "Hey, you always accept my apology," she countered, almost but not quite smiling.

Jeff was almost smiling, too. "It's not my fault you're awesome at apologizing. Evil, wicked apologizing…"

They were busy almost smiling at each other and almost missed it when the judges announced that Greendale had been disqualified for not following the protocol of debate. Therefore City College won the gold first-place trophy and Greendale the silver second-place trophy, which led to some excited applause from the dean and the audience, because, as Annie and Jeff later learned, usually Greendale forfeited completely and got zero trophies, despite City College and Greendale Community College being the only two schools in their bracket.

Afterwards the study group wanted to take them out for second-place pizza, but there would have been questions about the whole Jeff-and-Annie-of-it-all, or whatever, and frankly neither of them were feeling up for that. Jeff in particular announced a firm desire to just get home and unwind with frozen pizza and a bottle of scotch.

His evening plans were almost scuttled when he remembered that his car was still booted. Troy and Pierce and Abed wanted to try to get the boot off themselves, but Jeff said he'd just call the police and pay the fine, and in the meantime —

In the meantime, Annie said, she'd give him a ride.