ESPIONAGE IN THE ROMANTIC ERA

ACT ONE

Sunday Jeff lay in bed until he couldn't make himself pretend to sleep any longer. Noon found him stewing in his apartment. He'd started six different emails to Annie, deleting each midway through writing them. He'd gone so far as to try just calling her, but her phone was off. He'd checked with Abed and determined that Annie was at their apartment. He could go over there; Abed would let him in. Then he could talk to her, and apologize…

Or maybe that wasn't such a good idea. A couple of months ago hadn't he tried exactly that? And it hadn't gone well. But this was a different situation, Jeff told himself. Annie hadn't demanded he leave her alone, or give her space. She'd turned her phone off, but there were lots of ways to interpret that. Most of them didn't have anything to do with him, even.

Jeff was halfway out the door, keys in hand, when his phone rang. Pierce. Odds were that it wasn't Annie borrowing Pierce's phone, but he couldn't take that chance. Annie might have fled to Pierce. She hadn't known about Pierce's inexplicable date with Sadie, had she? He felt a sense of deja vu as he answered the phone, hoping it was her. "Hello?"

"Jeffrey? It's Pierce," the older man said. "I'm in my car in the parking lot of someplace called Anne-Marie's Room. Decent French toast, fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. You should try it sometime."

"I've…" Jeff decided there was no point in telling Pierce that he'd been there, recently, with Annie and his mother. "What's the problem, Pierce?"

"Well, I was having brunch with Mercedes, as I told you. I'm on your side, you know. Not doing this because she's hot and plainly interested, but out of a desire to gather intel. In the business we called it sleeping with the enemy. Didn't always do a lot of sleeping, though, if you catch my drift…" Pierce chuckled. "I mean sex."

"Why are you calling? Your car won't start? Sadie attacked you with a knife and you shot her in self-defense and now there's a body to dispose of? What?"

"I thought you should know, I talked to her about you and Annie. She knew about the fight you two had last night."

Jeff grunted.

Pierce went on, "The one on the phone at my place? We were going over the pile of legal documents, and you called Annie, and…?"

"Yes, I remember, Pierce. It's burned into my brain."

"Okay, well, good, we're back on the same page." Pierce cleared his throat. "Mercedes seems to think that you're on the verge of breaking up. Or have broken up? I don't know how she knew. She implied that Annie had called her all tearful and looking for advice, but I think that was her laying out a smokescreen. Annie wouldn't do that. If she were going to turn to a parental figure I'm sure it'd be me."

Jeff grunted again.

"So I don't know about that," Pierce repeated. "Anyway, besides being suspiciously well-informed, she laid out guesses about how it would all end. You pushing Annie and not giving her space. Getting clingy. She feels hemmed in, she bolts. Mercedes made me promise not to talk to you about this, so, obviously I came right to you."

Jeff sighed heavily. "You realize that was probably her plan, right?" Sadie wanted to get into Jeff's head. Sadie must have known that Pierce would immediately run to Jeff with this story. That was entirely in line with what he knew about how she operated.

"What?" Pierce sounded skeptical. "You think she expected me to tell you what she told me? I rather doubt that, Jeffrey. The woman trusts me, I think. She's very… friendly, if you catch my drift. I'm seeing her again tomorrow night."

"How…" Jeff took a breath. "Whose side are you on here, Pierce?"

"Annie's!" Pierce replied readily. "Well, yours and Annie's. We're both men of the world, Jeffrey, you know that."

"Uh huh."

"If the two of you are going to make it work, or not, then you should do it without Mercedes's interference. That's why I'm telling you what she told me."

Jeff cringed. At this point he wanted to just lie down for a while. "Okay. I'll talk to you later, all right? Thanks."

He hung up and, putting thought to deed, went back to bed for a while.

Britta woke to the sound of ringing. She didn't know how to change the ringtone on her cell, so the sound was the default screaming Anne-Frank-hiding-from-the-Nazis klaxon. She normally had the ringer turned off, but Britta was paranoid that a major national crisis would happen while she was asleep, and people would call her for her reactions, seeking her guidance in troubled times, looking to her to organize a protest and start the mass movement… that sort of thing. So whenever she went to bed she turned her ringer on, and turned it off when she woke up. Unless she forgot, which never happened. It was hardly ever a thing that happened.

"Hello?" she mumbled, still mostly asleep. "Who is it?" Her cell phone had come free with an oil change, so it didn't have all the hot new features like caller ID and she was always wrestling with the spelling autocorrect on text messages.

"Hello? Britta?" Annie. She sounded anxious, but then, she always sounded anxious. "Can I come over?"

"Uh… it's…" Britta looked around for a clock, but the only one in her bedroom was stuck flashing 12:00. "It's super early," she said, which was at best an informed guess.

"I know," said Annie, confirming Britta had been right (the score for today so far was Britta 1, rest of the world 0, oh yeah, suck it, rest of the world). "But I need to… to get somewhere."

Britta felt more than a little touched that Annie had thought of her apartment as a place of refuge. She might have gone to Shirley, or to Pierce, or to Jeff. Jeff was the most obvious choice, which meant there was probably a reason Annie wasn't there… But still! That Annie thought of her gave her a sense of optimism. Britta 2, rest of the world 0. "So come over," she said, her voice still thick with sleep.

"I'm outside your apartment," Annie told her. "I tried knocking but you didn't answer."

"Seriously? Hold on." Without hanging up, Britta pulled on a sweatshirt over the t-shirt and yoga pants that were her pajamas. She threaded around the junk in her bedroom and the junk in her front room, then threw the front door open.

Sure enough, Annie stood on the landing. She looked as rumpled as Britta had ever seen her, and there were dark circles under her eyes. "Hi," she said with a nervous smile, hanging up her phone.

Britta hung up, too. "What's up? I mean, come in!" She gestured to the room behind her, and stepped out of the doorway.

Annie carefully stepped into the living room. Britta winced at Annie's reaction to her apartment, remembering that Annie hadn't been over since last spring. The younger woman's eyes widened slightly at the sight of it all — a dozen old pizza boxes, a pile of unopened mail, dirty dishes on nearly every horizontal surface. Cat hair sticking to all the upholstery and fabric. Britta's bedroom, visible through a door wedged open with laundry, was much the same: fewer pizza boxes and more heaps of dirty clothes and several lurking cats. The litter box in the bathroom was the only part of the apartment Britta kept scrupulously clean, because she'd learned the hard way what happened if she didn't.

"Sorry about the mess," Britta continued. "Just set anything anywhere… I'll make a pot of coffee."

"Thanks for having me," Annie said, as she sat daintily on the edge of the sofa, claiming the cleanest seat in the house. "Coffee would be great… I didn't know where else to go."

"So what's up?" Britta asked from her kitchen. Her kitchen was about three feet from the sofa and six feet from her bedroom, so she didn't need to speak loudly. She rinsed out some mugs while the drip maker brewed.

"Yesterday was… the worst day I've had in a long time. I missed the LSAT, because of my mother I think, and then Jeff and I had a fight, and… I just cannot handle him right now. He'll just look at me and I'll freeze and melt and, ugh, I'm sorry." Annie buried her face in her hands. "I didn't really sleep last night."

"Ho-kay…" Britta bit her lip. "You're totally welcome here, of course," she said. "Or if you want to lie down…? Shower?"

Annie straightened up. "I'm fine, thanks," she said. "It's not such a big deal. I shouldn't be so dramatic."

"Annie," said Britta.

"You know, you might be more comfortable in an apartment that doesn't have quite so many empty pizza boxes," Annie suggested. "We could go through them and you could decide which empty pizza boxes you want to keep, and…?"

"Annie! You're deflecting. That is a thing people do, which I know because I'm basically a therapist," Britta reminded her. She leaned back and rested against the kitchen counter behind her. "So anything you tell me will be therapist-therapee confidential. Not that I'd tell anyone anything… you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do." Annie relaxed a bit in her seat. "You know I want to join the FBI."

Britta nodded.

"It's stupid and a long way off and maybe it'll never happen and I would have to be really lucky, and I know it's kind of stupid, but it's what I want to do," Annie continued.

"It's not stupid," Britta said. "You'd make a good FBI agent. You're all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Self-starter. I like to drink and sleep, but you've got it all…" She waved her hand in Annie's general direction. "You've got it all going on." A thought struck her. "You wouldn't be disqualified for having a friend who smokes weed, would you?"

Annie shook her head absently.

"It's not even illegal any more," Britta pointed out. "Yes on 64!"

"That's fine," Annie assured her. "The FBI policy on that is… it's fine."

"Okay, see? You know that. You're smart, you work hard, you'd be an asset. So enough with the it's-stupid routine. Stupid is agreeing to take a four-week yacht trip with a guy you barely know and his two other girlfriends he didn't tell you about in advance."

"Did you…?"

"We're not talking about me. So. Tell Auntie Britta all about it. No. 'Auntie Britta' sounds too cat lady."

"My Auntie Lelia had three dogs and no cats," Annie offered.

"Sister Britta? No. Sounds like a nun." Britta frowned, then moved on. "Doesn't matter. Tell me."

Annie leaned back on Britta's couch. She almost fell into the low part where the frame was shot, but caught herself on the armrest. She spoke slowly at first, then faster and faster as the tears started to flow. "I was going to take the LSAT yesterday, and then Jeff and I were going to meet, and then we were going to have a nice dinner. Instead I missed the start time for the exam, and my car was towed, and I saw Mother, and I just wanted to take a nap after, so I told Jeff that and he thought I meant I didn't want to go to dinner, so then I got all dressed up and I went to the steak place to meet him and he didn't show and then he called me because Mother seduced Pierce and she's planning on cancelling Greendale or something, and we had a fight and I haven't heard from him since so maybe we broke up I don't even know and I didn't know where else to go so I came to you and you have cat hair on everything —" At this point Annie gave up trying to form words and just collapsed crying on the couch, falling sideways into the big divot where the frame was shot. "And now I have cat hair on me, too!" she sobbed.

Britta quickly shifted from the kitchen to the couch, hugging Annie and then sort of awkwardly petting her. "There, there," she said. "It's okay." Tissues, tissues, where are there tissues? Bathroom! She quickly fetched a roll of toilet paper from under the sink in the bathroom.

Annie took a couple of squares and wiped her eyes with them. "Thanks," she mumbled.

"No problem. Hey, listen, it's going to be okay." Britta patted Annie again. "I mean, that sounds terrible," she amended, in an attempt to display empathy and support.

"Yeah, it's just, I mean one thing after another…" Annie almost broke down again, and strained to control herself, with the help of more toilet paper.

"Mmm-hmm." Not knowing what else to do, Britta didn't stop patting Annie's back.

Annie sniffled a bit more. "This is stupid, I shouldn't be so upset," she complained. "I didn't even want to take the LSAT until October. If I had prepared right I would have taken it last February, so it's my own fault. And I should have been more clear with Jeff, and…"

"Hey, no," Britta told her firmly. "Nothing is your fault! Ever!"

"Well, some things are my fault," Annie countered. "I'm not a child; I'm responsible for my own actions."

"Yeah, well, maybe," Britta admitted. "But any time Jeff makes you cry, it's not your fault. It's his fault."

"I don't think that really holds water either," Annie said thoughtfully. She blew her nose on more toilet paper. "Maybe in this case, but not as a blanket rule." Considering the logical flaws in Britta's statements seemed to be having a calming effect. "What if it isn't his fault? Like, he says something that reminds me of my fourteenth birthday party?"

"What happened at your fourteenth birthday party?"

Annie made a sound midway between a chuckle and a whimper. "It was right around when my parents separated. I didn't have any friends, but my father didn't know that, so he rented Big Bear for an afternoon… the ice-skating rink," she clarified, seeing Britta's confusion. "This whole big arena and it was just me and Mother and him and my Aunt Lelia… and Sandy."

"Sandy?"

"His administrative assistant. Well, secretary. Personal assistant…" Annie shrugged. "His mistress, it turned out."

"Ah," said Britta.

"Yeah, it wasn't a fun day. He was upset that Mother hadn't invited any of my friends, and Mother said I didn't have any friends, and he said that couldn't be true, and they fought about it and then he asked me. Mother was right, I didn't have any friends… this was after I quit Hebrew school and before I really started doing college-application extracurriculars, so I didn't really have anybody. But I didn't want to be on Mother's side, in a fight between them, so I lied and said that I had a bunch of friends and Mother had refused to let me invite them… Wow," Annie said, "I haven't thought about that in years."

"Uh huh," said Britta.

"He left right after that. I used to think that if I'd had friends, they wouldn't have had that fight and he wouldn't have left…"

Britta nodded. "He did already have Sandy, though," she pointed out.

Annie snorted. "Yeah. That's what Mother used to say. I don't even know why she was there. Sandy, I mean. I remember she gave me this really nice blue jacket… that I lost at the rink. Mother probably threw it away," Annie mused, realizing it for the first time.

Britta nodded again, hoping she looked smart. She should have gotten her glasses out, she realized. Too late now. "So it all comes down to your father."

"I don't know if that's true," Annie said cautiously. "I mean, yes, I haven't seen him in almost a decade and yes, I guess he did just abandon me and Mother and yes, in a sense I am always looking for his approval that I'll never be able to get… but, you know, daddy issues are what strippers have. No offense."

Britta bristled slightly. "Okay, first off, why would I be offended by that? Secondly, strippers are not all the desperate seekers of male approval that society likes to paint them as; they're women owning their own sexuality. Not being exploited, but exploiting the male gaze for our own profit! Their own profit, I mean. I never stripped."

Annie shrugged. "Sorry?"

"We were talking about Jeff." Britta wasn't much for distant childhood trauma, even if it drove Annie to seek societal approval through achievement in the same way that it might drive another woman to seek male approval through sexual performance. Not really in Britta's wheelhouse. Jeff Winger, though, him and men like him she knew something about. "If he makes you cry, it's not your own fault for being oversensitive, it's his fault for being a dick. He can't help being a dick," she said with some authority, "but he can try to be better and it's not on you if he doesn't."

"I know that," Annie said distantly. "I feel like I used to know what I wanted, and how the world worked, and how to get what I wanted, and now everything's all messed up. I don't even know if Jeff and I are still together…"

"What? Did he —? What kind of —?" Britta sputtered.

Annie played anxiously with her hair. "We were fighting and using the word 'dumb' a lot and then I hung up on him."

Britta blinked. "Hold on. Did you and Vaughn never fight…?"

"Vaughn?" Annie sounded unsure why Britta was bringing him up. "Vaughn and I broke up a long time ago. We were leaving town, going to Delaware, and then I was like, 'hey, no, thanks though,' and he was like, 'what do you mean?' And then one thing led to another and he left me at the rest stop out on I-70."

Britta's eyes widened as she realized that Annie – for all her experience with academic success, social anxiety, narcotics addiction, rehabilitation and recovery, abusive mother, and the mad crucible that was Greendale – had never actually been in an adult relationship. Britta knew more than Annie about something! And it wasn't even something that Britta herself was very good at — Shirley had made that clear, not long ago. Still, she had once had a fight with a boyfriend that didn't end with them breaking up.

She wondered whether Jeff ever had, either.

"Okay, listen to me, because this is a true thing," Britta told Annie. "You and Jeff have not broken up."

Annie looked uncertain. "Are you sure?"

"I am one hundred percent sure. You have had Jeff wrapped around your little finger for, like, a year at least. It would take concerted action to lever the two of you apart. Like, bears and witches working together. Because… listen, if Jeff were here right now and he said he was sorry and he didn't mean to have your car towed —"

"Jeff didn't have my car —"

Britta waved away the inconsequential detail. "Would you take him back? Or would you say 'Sorry Jeff, you ain't good enough for this,' all sassy-like, and snap your fingers in his face?" Britta punctuated the line by snapping her own fingers in Annie's face.

Annie reared back. "But that's just it! I'm the one who screwed this up! I should be apologizing to him, so of course —"

"See?" Britta beamed. "I swear to you, he feels the same way you do. I bet if you call him right now then the first thing he'll do is apologize, probably with a long and flowery speech that brings in allusions to orbiting moons or gravity or something."

"I turned my phone off," Annie said. "Last night, after. I'm afraid to… what if he's left me thirty angry voicemails?"

"He has not," Britta promised. "You and Jeff have fought before. Like, dozens of times. And at the end of it you two have always ended up closer than you were, staring at one another and smiling like you're the only people in the room and the rest of us don't matter."

"That was different." Annie fidgeted with her hair some more. "That was before."

Britta shook her head. "You're the same people and…" She tried to think of a way to explain why she thought the stakes here are actually way lower because Jeff and Annie were a couple, not higher. Too hard. She gave up. "And you care about each other," she concluded.

Annie seemed to mull this over. "And the last time we had a fight he made it worse, the way he kept pressing me. I hadn't really thought about that. So maybe he's not going to do that."

"Maybe!" agreed Britta.

"So I need to make the first move. I've been making a big deal out of, possibly, nothing. And if I just call Jeff and apologize, it'll be okay."

"It'll be okay even if you call Jeff and refuse to apologize," Britta assured her. "Or if you just turn your phone back on and wait for him to call you. Which he will, because he's basically your love slave."

Annie fished her phone out of her purse and stared at it. "I'm kind of afraid to turn it on."

"You can do it! I'm sure you can."

Annie nodded slowly. "I will… I'm just going to go back to the apartment first. I mean, just to get the home-field advantage." Then she smiled a tiny smile, and looked up at Britta. "Thanks."

"No problem."

"I do feel better," Annie said as she rose.

"Yeah?" Britta beamed. Therapized! Britta 3, rest of the world 0, suck it, rest of the world.

Jeff took a deep breath. "I screwed up. I can admit that. We both said some things we regret — I mean, I regret what I said. And I've known you for years and I think I can safely say you regret some of what you said." He cleared his throat. "I'm sorry... that probably goes without saying." Jeff winced; this was harder than he'd thought it was going to be. C'mon, Winger, he thought, you can do this. No glibness, just honesty. "A lot of things probably go without saying. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't say them. In retrospect yesterday I should have made more of an effort to comfort you and make sure you were getting what you needed, instead of letting my feelings be hurt when you hung up on me. And I shouldn't have gotten so defensive when we did talk, last night."

He sat at the table in Annie's apartment, almost alone. Abed stood nearby, working the video camera he'd mounted on a tripod. Jeff had warned him they were only doing one take, so Abed was silent, focused entirely on the feed.

Jeff paused to take a sip of water. He'd started off pretty weak but he could build on that. "I…" He looked away from the camera. Abed's not there, he told himself. Just Annie. "It's not exactly something I'm eager to admit, but you terrify me. This terrifies me," he clarified, glancing at the camera again before looking away. "From the minute you came into my life I… it didn't take long for me to realize that you were someone special. Someone important to me. And over time you've only become more important to me. Which is scary, terrifying, like I said, because caring so much about you — about another person — means that there's this whole new way I can be hurt. There's this whole new arena that I can make huge mistakes in. And just when I think I've mastered it, there turns out to be this whole other level…" He chuckled. "Eventually I'll get the hang of working with you… we do make for a nigh-unbeatable team already, but judging by the fact that I'm doing this, there's obviously room for improvement… so eventually we'll get better at it, and by then there'll be kids to make mistakes with. We'll work together to make the opposite of the mistakes my father made with me and your mother made with you. Whole different realm of mistakes." He glanced at the camera again, before lifting his gaze up to the ceiling.

"It's probably a mistake to admit that – that I look at you and I see a house and a dog and a living room strewn with toys and a couple of kids, driven and brilliant and beautiful like you or lazy wiseasses like me… I think back to the relationships I've been in, such as they were, and if any of those girls had said anything remotely like what I just said, I'd have smiled and nodded and said I was going to make a quick trip to the liquor store and then never come back. The last woman I dated, you remember her, Michelle? Dumped me for getting clingy.

"And I haven't wanted you to dump me, obviously, so… I can't tell you the number of times that I've had the urge to call you, or text you, or grab you and kiss you, and not done it because I know you need a certain amount of space. And because giving in to those urges means admitting, to myself as much as anyone else, just how much I care about you and how devastated I'd be to lose you. Years ago you had a crush on a cool guy who didn't seem to care about anything or anyone, and I don't…" Jeff paused for another sip of water. "I don't want to disappoint you by revealing the extent to which I'm not that guy, the extent to which you make me an emotional wreck. Which I'm sure is more about me than it is you… although if you weren't around I could probably go through life reasonably happy, lying to myself that I had everything I needed, making myself believe it. But you – the way I feel about you forces me to admit that there is more that I want. I love you and I don't want to lose you, now or ever, and… and now I'm sounding like a junior high school girl's romantic ideal. Or not; I don't actually know what junior high school girls want, I just assume it's cartoonish obsessive codependent romance.

"But I guess that's the guy I am. I'm a guy who loves you. I'm a guy who constructed whole elaborate structures of denial and sublimation, because I didn't think it was possible that you and me together could do anything but end badly. I'm a guy who kissed you a couple of months ago because after everything… in that moment, I couldn't bear to not kiss you for one second longer." He swallowed, then continued. "I'm a guy who's looked around at his life and realized he needs to pull it the hell together, because you deserve… You deserve the perfect man. And, much as it pains me to admit, I'm not perfect; all I can be is the best possible version of myself. That's what you do to me, what you've always done to me: you make me want to be better than I am, and you make me feel okay with being me."

Jeff paused, again. He was kind of impressed with his own candor, actually. He rubbed the back of his neck. "And that's nothing new," he said, staring now at a spot on the floor just behind and below the camera. "You've been making me okay with being me, and making me want to be better the whole time I've known you. And you know me pretty well, and… assuming this video confession hasn't driven you to run screaming, which is a risk I'm going to have to take… God, what can I say?

"You're my favorite person. I'm pretty sure, objectively, you're the best person. Definitely the best person in the state. You're cute and you're fun and you have this bottomless well of enthusiasm… and you don't let anyone push you around, you're the sharpest person I know, and did I mention that I'm constantly repressing the urge to just grab you and kiss you, because you're so grabbable and kissable? You're crazy hot. You're Lois Lane.

"And I'm probably overthinking this. I mean, hell, within twenty minutes of us getting together you were explaining that you were open to the idea of kids down the line, just not right away. Which, hey, I can totally support."

He took one last deep breath, for the windup. "I recall telling you on more than one occasion that the only force in the universe capable of withstanding us is each other. When we're shoulder to shoulder we become invincible. So let's work together. Let's thwart all the evil schemes and bring peace and justice to the earth, because seriously, we're a couple of superheroes."

Jeff glanced behind the camera at Abed. "Now, I've asked Abed to record this for me. He's going to put it online and give you the link, and if you ever really want to get me good you can pass it around. I'm sure everybody would have a good laugh at my expense. But this is a message just for your eyes. Abed's seen it, obviously, but I trust him."

END ACT ONE