Archive of Our Own

“‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,” declares Annie, “that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.’”

She pauses for dramatic effect, scanning her gaze over her classmates; Starburns and his lizard up the back, Neil and Vicki shyly touching hands (aww), and Troy and Abed in row three, who give her matching thumbs ups when she sees them. She continues: “So wrote Jane Austen in her 1813 literary classic Pride and Prejudice, but this statement is indicative not only of Austen’s cultural norms, but of the overarching constraints that govern Western society…”

Annie’s presentation is well-researched, well-written, and performed with as much gusto as a former debate team champion can boast. Every so often, her eyes flicker back to Abed. She’s addressing the class, yes, but Abed is the one who kindly listened to her many, many practice runs, so it’s easy to lock onto him now, and to suppress a smile at the way he’s framing her with his fingers. She hopes his montage makes her look awesome and not totally lame.

Abed has a knack for transforming things that Annie doesn’t, unless transforming herself into an A+ student counts. She tries to think of how he might be piecing their study sessions together: images of Abed listening on the study room couch, the two of them practicing and evaluating power poses. She expects there’d be a shot of Jeff rolling his eyes at their antics for comedic effect, and the two of them sighing fondly in response before the camera moved swiftly to her actual presentation. She hands Anthropology 101 a sandwich, her arms spread wide.

“…and with that, it can be seen that not only did the 2009 salmonella outbreak permanently alter American history, but the epidemic curve created by the illness is, in fact, endemic of what is to come.”

Abed whoops.

“Thank you!” says Annie, giggling, as the rest of the class also partakes in polite applause. She curtseys and Professor Duncan slowly lowers his feet from the desk, blinking his eyes dramatically like he’s only just waking up.

“Yes, thank you, Annie, for that fascinating analysis of… something.”

He introduces their next presentation as Annie sneaks back to her desk, leaning around Abed to high-five the hand Troy’s holding out to her. He beams at her.

“You totally killed it!” he whispers and Annie giggles again, knocking shoulders with Abed by accident. Abed nods his agreement.

“It was really good. Very convincing, and the power poses really helped provide some dynamic movement to our montage.”

Annie squeals a little, aware that her eyes are probably doing their big Disney Princess thing but unable to stop it. Abed hasn’t moved away yet so she doesn’t either, thrilled by the warmth of his arm against hers. She keeps staring at him until he starts to look confused, and then she whips her gaze hurriedly to the front, for Senor Chang’s presentation. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him shift to face the front as well, more slowly than she did. That could mean something, right?

She picks up her pen, twirling it slowly in her hands as Chang begins speaking. It’s not that Annie has a crush, exactly. It’s just that ever since Abed revealed that Jeff and Britta were sleeping together, the pleasant lovestruck haze Annie had been walking around in all fell slowly into tatters. The long looks and stolen glances suddenly don’t seem to matter – it’s like she’s now seeing herself how Jeff does, as nothing more than a schoolgirl with a crush.

It's embarrassing, almost mortifying. She feels humiliated and emptied, but she can’t make herself swear off the fantasy. She likes romance, after all, and she likes all of the fluttery feelings that come with it. She likes giggling with her friends about her crushes and their love lives, and it’s that that’s had her eyes gazing around her classmates, around the study table, and finally settling on Abed.

Annie likes Abed. Abed is sweet and funny and a little bit weird, but mostly in a cute way. Annie’s a little weird herself, and she thinks they also understand each other more than the others, sometimes. And so she’s been looking a little more, letting her eyes linger a little longer. She wants to throw her arms around Abed’s neck and have his hands rest steadily on her waist, and maybe she’d like it if their friendship was more like his and Troy’s, because it must be really nice, Annie thinks, to have someone like you that much, in such a to-the-moon-and-back sort of way.

She doodles a little heart in the corner of her notebook, tracing over it a few times. Normally she sits with Shirley during their Anthropology classes, but Shirley had an OB-GYN appointment today and Annie snatched up the opportunity for change. Abed slides a piece of Troy’s notepaper across to her.

Analysing the game of 3-way Tic Tac Toe in front of her, Annie finally settles on drawing a love heart in 3B, next to Troy’s smiley face and above Abed’s triangle. She pushes it back towards Troy and hears him mutter ‘damn’ under his breath.

At the end of class, Abed puts his hand out in front of her.

“Annie?” he asks, and Annie blinks up at him, then back at his hand. He doesn’t wiggle his fingers, and his face is inscrutable. “It gets busy in the hall at lunchtime, and there’s no Shirley for people to make way for today.”

“Oh,” says Annie, and there must be birds singing around her head as she hurriedly shoves her books under one arm and slips her free hand into his, melting like ice-cream on the hot sidewalk. Troy grins at her, too.

“Awesome,” he says, and then flattens his eyebrows and deepens his voice. “Daisy-chain, roll out.”

They wiggle their way out the door like one long centipede, Troy leading the way and Annie trailing along at the back, her fingers snuggled between Abed’s. She feels like she might float away at any second. This could be romance, right? This could be Marianne finally looking at Colonel Brandon instead of Willoughby, and of course Annie shouldn’t have been chasing after Jeff. Of course the answer would be here, right in front of her, someone closer to her age who likes and respects her and is charming and delightful and whimsical enough to balance her out. Her and Abed would make sense.

*

At home, Annie makes a list.

Her therapist used to be really vocal about Annie getting her feelings on paper, in the hopes that it would “bring her in touch with her emotions,” or whatever. Annie applied herself to it with all of her usual zeal, but apparently a colour coded chart of Annie’s moods cross-referenced with potential internal and external triggers was not what Melissa The Therapist had in mind. Something about Annie using self-awareness to redirect from her “real problems” to her “safe problems”.

Annie no longer sees Melissa The Therapist, and it’s only forty percent because of the cost.

Tapping her pen against her lip, she rolls off her stomach and sits up on her bed, tilting her head from side to side to stretch out her neck. For a long time Annie assumed it was the pill addiction that sent her spiralling downwards, that assigned an itty-bitty asterisk to every A-grade she’d ever received. When she found out that Troy was going to Greendale, too, she thought it might have been her Cinderella moment in disguise. The illusion didn’t take long to shatter.

Sometimes she still thinks about that— about her and Troy together, Greendale’s prom king and queen. It wouldn’t matter that they don’t technically have a prom to attend, because they would know it in their hearts, and so would all those other people who made fun of her in high school. She thinks it would be fun to date Troy. She likes the idea of cheering for him at his football games, and of him swooping her up in his arms at the end, kissing as everyone applauds.

But Troy doesn’t like her like that, he’s made that clear. And Abed—  

Abed once sat in a room for twenty six hours, and he did it because she asked him to and she said they were friends.

“Everything changed for me, Ruthie,” laments Annie, cross-legged on her bed in her crummy apartment with the techno-music echoing up from downstairs. She twirls the stuffed animal around in her hands, chewing on her lip. “Nobody’s ever done something like that for me before. It was like he just decided we could be friends. I didn’t know you could do that.”

She sighs and looks at her diary, at the list she’s stopped halfway through because she doesn’t know how to finish it. Everything’s been so complicated since she broke up with Vaughn, what with Rich and Jeff and now the Abed of it all. She flops back onto her pillow, closing her eyes and clutching Ruthie to her chest.

“How long did you wait?” asks the Abed in her mind, and Annie embellishes his black shirt to be a bit more flowy as she pictures his dark eyes from behind a mask. “Tell me, madam, how long before you were engaged to your prince? Was it the same hour you heard the news, or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?”

“You mock my pain!” cries Annie, and shoves at him. He tumbles down the hillside, calling out in a warbled cry, and Buttercup throws herself down after him, cascading into his arms. She feels Abed’s warmth along her side, cups her jaw with her own hand and strokes soft skin with her thumb.

“Death cannot stop true love,” says Abed, as Annie’s eyelids flutter. Buttercup places her hands on Abed’s shoulders, his neck. “It can only delay it for a while.”

They kiss, but the music doesn’t swell like it’s supposed to. Annie frowns and shifts a little, tilting her head back against the pillow. If she really liked Abed, wouldn’t this be doing it for her? She chases the fluttery feeling from earlier, when she realised he was offering her his hand. It doesn’t come, so she frowns and clears her mind.

Sometimes this happens. Her visualisation skills are fine, she took a quiz online, but sometimes her brain is so busy that it’s hard to settle into one fantasy. She searches around for something more familiar, and lands on her tenth grade theatre production (she helped out backstage for co-curricular credit).

At the drive in, the night sky twinkles with a hundred stars. The car is red and sleek, a classic hot-rod that’s the total opposite to Annie, a car made for cool people, but despite that she’s there and snuggled into the smooth leather seats. Beside her, Troy’s sitting with his body curved in towards her and a sweet smile on his face. He takes her hand and holds up his ring.

Sandy beams, her smile bright and wide and joyous. “Oh, Troy,” she gushes, and slides his class ring onto her finger. “Of course I will. This means so much to me.”

“For real?” asks Troy, and Sandy nods. His knee presses against hers, and the car is filled with nervous anticipation, with every butterfly in the world.

He slides his arm around Sandy’s shoulders, but she doesn’t look at him. Her heart is in her throat because he’s sweet and caring and he’s touching her like he loves her, and tomorrow they’re going to the dance together. The music is going to swell and they’re going to get their happy ending.

Troy’s body is hot, and the arm of his leather jacket is sticky against the back of her neck. She thinks about touching his knee, about her polished nails sliding over the denim, a soft touch. She thinks about pink nails running up an inseam, light and teasing. A hand on her shoulder that slips down—

“You know, Grease is actually horribly misogynistic,” says Britta, with a crumpled up face. “I mean, what, Danny tries to date-rape her and we’re supposed to pretend like we’re rooting for them? Pshaw!”

Annie snaps her eyes open. Her popcorn ceiling looks back at her, and she lets out a huge sigh. Whatever similarities her and Abed share, this clearly isn’t one of them: Annie can’t keep a scene straight to save her life. She picks Ruthie up again and strokes the fur on her head while she tries absently to imagine something more realistic. Her and Abed in the study room, maybe. A quick kiss on their way to class.

That’s nice. It doesn’t feel like how everyone says it should feel, but then it never did with Michael or Vaughn either. Michael, she can explain (he’s gay now), and Vaughn was sweet but not really passionate, and so maybe it’s just that she’s never experienced it properly, and maybe that’s what’s stopping her. But she refuses to jeopardise the good of the group the way Jeff and Britta have, so going after Abed is not an option, not unless he likes her too.

She glances at her list of reasons why Abed is an acceptable boyfriend choice, and chews on her lip.

Maybe she’ll make a chart.

*

“And then Abed kissed me,” hisses Annie, feeling hot all over. She toys with her working poster for the Dean’s back-to-school dance, running her fingers along the edge. The Student Organizational Body makes various noises of surprise and interest, even Brenda, who doesn’t usually engage in this kind of stuff.

“Oh my god,” says Kat, clasping her hands over her heart. Her bangles rattle like windchimes with the movement. “With the paint falling down and everything?”

“Ya-huh!” says Annie, with wide eyes. She checks over her shoulder, and adds:  “With tongue, too.”

Brenda wolf whistles, and Annie flushes. “I get it,” Brenda says. “Abed’s hot.”

Annie and Rachel trade a look.

“What? I can appreciate an objective fact. He’s a sweetheart.”

“How do you feel, Annie?” asks Rachel, and Annie drags her eyes away from Brenda, files analysing that sentence away for later. She shrugs.

“I don’t know,” she says, desperately. “I mean, it was amazing and wonderful and magical and it felt just like the movies, but then afterwards he was so Abed about it.”

“I think that makes sense,” says Rachel, “Abed likes acting out movies, right? So he might not have seen the difference between acting out a kiss scene instead of an action scene.”

“You mean, because it’s all just acting?” asks Annie, pivoting into Rachel’s space. She really likes Rachel, because she’s always logical and precise and sometimes gets really, really into things and doesn’t rest until she’s figured it out, and she always seems to understand Abed better than Annie does (and Annie already thinks she’s pretty good at it). “I guess that makes sense. So that means— what? That he doesn’t like me?”

Rachel gives an exaggerated, slow shrug. She always does that; like it’s a movement she’s practiced in the mirror rather than let come naturally to her. She has a really cute cardigan on today, maroon with little bunnies near the collar, and when she moves it looks like the bunnies are hopping up and down.

“He totally likes you,” says Kat, who is colouring in her nails with glitter glue.

“Rachel?”

“I don’t know, Annie. It seems like Abed is the kind of guy who would just say if he was into you. He’s very efficient.”

“Uh-uh, nuh-uh!” says Annie, holding up a finger. Rachel cocks her head. “Because he said he likes girls to approach him, not the other way around. So I just have to figure out if he wants me to approach him.”

“You’re putting in a lot of work here, Annie,” says Brenda lazily, not looking up from the work she’s doing for the banner. She has to cut out a bunch of yellow stars for Annie to glue on later. “You’ve got your ‘project’ voice on.”

“I do not,” defends Annie, as Brenda cuts out another shape. Normally watching people cut things out makes Annie want to screech because they never do it right, but Brenda wields the scissors easily and each cut is clean line. Her stars are even all the same size, not that it makes Annie want to complain any less. Brenda smirks.

“Sure,” she says, and Annie glares at the dirt on her boots, which she can see because they’re propped up on the table and it’s totally irritating. “Whatever you say, doll.”

Rachel pats her awkwardly on the back, a quick touch of her soft hand.

“You’ll figure it out,” she says, and Annie slumps and picks up the puffy paint.

*

Abed asks her to move in with them, which is really weird. He just says it, like, hey, you should move here, like that’s something people do. And Annie doesn’t understand why he’d do that if he didn’t like her, and she knows that he does like her, but it seems like a weird thing to do for someone you don’t like-like. Or maybe not? Annie can’t tell anymore.

But she also thought that maybe there was something going on with him and Troy, the way they said speaking of figuring things out and put baby photo collages on the walls and moved into the one room. That was mind-boggling. And Annie can’t even tell if she wants Abed to like her, because surely if she wanted to go out with Abed then she would’ve asked him already, but every time she thinks about it she gets weirdly queasy and feels the hairs on her neck stand up, which is not how you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love.

Sometimes Annie thinks about Jeff. Not in a way where she thinks she wants to date him, but in that self-analysing and self-critical way that Melissa The Therapist tried to discourage. When she thinks about Jeff, she thinks that what she really wanted was for someone to think that she was hot and capable and smart. He reminds her of every slightly crappy rom-com leading man and she wants so, so badly to be the slightly-crazy-but-actually-one-in-a-million love interest that turns him around, because if Annie could make Jeff fall in love with her then she could make anyone love her, and then she’d never have to be alone again.

“Hey, Troy?” asks Annie, the weekend before she’s supposed to move in with them. “Are you sure this is okay? Me moving in, I mean.”

“Yeah, of course,” says Troy, half-distracted. He’s bouncing his left leg up and down, tapping his fingers on the table in a fast-paced rhythm. “We’re so excited to have you, for real, and we have so many grown-up questions for you. And also we can have movie nights. It’s going to be the best.”

“Yeah? Are you sure I won’t, I don’t know— cramp your style? It might be weird having another person around.”

Troy frowns at her. “Why would it be weird?” he asks, and Annie pauses with her mouth open.

“Well,” she says. “The loss of, um, privacy, and stuff.”

Troy interlocks his fingers together, twists his arms at the elbows, and swings back in his chair. Annie thinks of every teacher who’s ever told her a story about a student swinging on a chair and cracking their head on the concrete, and feels sick. Britta reaches over and uses her hand on Troy’s knee to yank him back to Earth.

“Geez, quit it with the withdrawal symptoms,” she says. “You’re acting like this is your first time.”

Troy pulls a face at her. “They’re not real cigarettes, Britta,” he accuses, and then he turns back to Annie.

“We won’t mind,” he says. “We’re not really very private people.”

Annie looks at Britta. “That’s good, right? Open boundaries?”

“Mm-hm,” says Britta, with raised eyebrows and an unconvincing high-pitched tone. “It’ll be great!”

When Troy’s not looking, Britta grimaces and gives Annie a slashing-of-the-throat motion. Annie sinks in her seat and tries not to worry. It’s going to be great, and everything that Britta has to say about it (now and on Moving Day, when Annie is almost convinced that she’s right) can just shove off. Annie is not becoming one of those people who are more trusting of pretty people (Wilson & Eckel, 2006, she passed out hard copy summaries like flyers), so Britta can just take her hair and her mouth and can it. It’s going to be fine.

*

Annie knows she had tough expectations, but after the initial hiccups, living with Troy and Abed really does turn out to be great. Annie thought they would be kind of hopeless about it all and shove her under the label of ‘responsible’ just by default, but it actually turns out that they managed to survive this long for a reason, and that’s nice.

Troy makes a beef stew on her first night there, and they eat it sitting on the floor rather than at the dining table for whimsy-reasons, and Annie gets to add any rules and stipulations that she wants to the lease (as long as it’s written in crayon). It turns out Troy and Abed are a lot more Troy & Abed in their own company, which is weird at first, but she gets used to it soon enough.

Abed brings out movie lines and impressions at the drop of a hat, which Annie kind of already knew would be happening, but it doesn’t prepare her for exiting her bedroom only to be greeted by Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor whisking her into a dance number.

Annie stands in between both of them, giggling like mad, and Abed takes her hand and spins her round before depositing her on Troy’s knee, singing along to the soundtrack emitting from their CD player.

“What in the—?” cries Annie, and then Troy’s standing up and Annie’s sitting on Abed’s knee and his hand is steady on her back. “When did you two learn to dance?”

They spin her around again, tap-dancing away, and Annie knows next to nothing about dancing, but she knows that how easy they make it look has got to mean it’s doubly impressive.

“That’s all that we learnt,” says Abed while Troy bounces up and down excitedly, big exhilarated grins on both their faces. “But we have to end it properly."

Annie laughs in disbelief as they grab her hands, and then the three of them fall back onto their old orange couch in a pile, shoulders smushing together and their legs thrown atop one another.

“You guys,” says Annie as the song ends, looking between them. “Is every morning like this?”

“We try to keep it interesting,” says Troy. “Also, we thought if you were in a good mood you might feel like making pancakes.”

Annie rolls her eyes. “Oh, so that’s what this was? I won’t be bribed, guys.”

“We’re not bribing you,” says Troy, while Abed shakes his head emphatically. “We just did it in the name of breakfast.”

Annie giggles and touches her head to both their shoulders. “I’ll make pancakes,” she says, and squeezes their hands. Abed makes a fist in victory and she smiles at that, too.

So it’s really good, and sometimes when Annie wakes up Harrison Ford is in her kitchen, or Jerry Seinfeld or sometimes two Jerry Seinfelds, or Robert de Niro or Patrick Swayze. Sometimes Troy and Abed come out of the Dreamatorium sweaty and laughing and bright-eyed and something clenches in Annie’s chest, and sometimes Abed puts on a Voice and that fluttery feeling comes back to life in her stomach and she tilts her head and thinks maybe.

Because Annie likes Abed. She really, really likes him, and he’s one of her best friends and he makes her laugh and he’s sweet and thoughtful and he cares about her so much in his own way, and that’s fine because Annie cares about other people in her own way, too. Her own way looks like making the grocery list and getting them to school early and cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry and making sure there’s a meal roster and that the rent has been paid, and so it shocks her, when Abed looks at her sealing their rent into an envelope and says:

“I could take that down.”

Annie freezes. Abed is looking at her carefully, and Annie tightens her hold on the envelope. Troy is starting dinner in the kitchen, cooking chilli con carne because it’s Monday, and she can hear him humming to himself.

“It’s okay,” she says, and then swallows. She puts on her Caroline Decker voice. “I mean, I’m going down that way anyway.”

“I used to do it all the time before you moved in,” Abed argues.

“I know,” says Annie. “But it’s fine, seriously. I’d rather just do it myself.”

Abed pauses. He frowns, looking off to the side, and then meets her eye again.

“We could take it down together?”

Annie breathes in and out, like she has been her whole life. “Okay,” she says. “Yeah, sure.”

They take down the rent. Annie’s pretty sure you’re not officially supposed to pay the rent in cash, but living above Dildopolis did a lot for Annie in terms of what she’s willing to turn a blind eye towards. The landlord gives them their receipt and they walk back upstairs in silence. Annie wants to say something, but she’s not sure what options she has that don’t make her sound crazy.

Abed opens the door for her and Annie toes off her flats in the designated shoe space. Abed straightens them when he lines up his own shoes next to them. Annie sniffs.

“Troy? I thought it was Monday?”

“What?” calls Troy, and so Annie and Abed walk into the kitchen, their steps in sync. Annie has a jittery feeling under her skin, and she pulls her cardigan tight around her. Abed stops to stand by her shoulder.

“It’s Monday,” she repeats. “But you’re, um. You’re not making chilli.”

“Oh, I know,” says Troy, smiling at them, “We don’t have any cumin.” He giggles. “Um—yeah, so I thought I’d do this instead, and then we can have chilli tomorrow after we’ve been to the store.”

“Oh,” says Annie. She turns to Abed. “You forgot to get cumin?”

Abed shakes his head, eyes serious. “It wasn’t on the list.”

“It was on the list,” she says, and Abed shakes his head again. “I don’t just forget stuff, Abed, I would have put it on the list.”

She goes and gets their recycling box out from under the sink, and rifles around for the grocery list.

“It’s not in there, I threw it out,” says Abed. Annie’s eye twitches. To Troy, he adds: “We could have gone and got more cumin.”

“Yeah, but I figured by then it would be too late to cook.” Troy looks slowly between them, a can of chickpeas half pried open in his hands. “Are you guys okay?”

“It’s Monday,” explains Abed. He goes to their fridge, and then he deposits a Hershey’s Kiss in Annie’s hand. She blinks at it, her ears buzzing and her chest tight, like she’s having an asthma attack. “It’s chilli night.”

“Annie?” asks Troy, nervously. He’s stopped cooking. “You look like you just lost another pen.”

“I’m fine,” Annie says. “I’m not crazy.”

“I didn’t say you were?”

“I’m not crazy,” she repeats. Abed snaps his fingers.

“Annie, close your eyes,” he says, and Annie does. There’s some fabric noises, then the click and squeak of a marker. “Okay, and open them.”

He’s standing by the fridge again, which has photos on the bottom half and Annie’s whiteboard on the top half. The whiteboard has the meal roster and the day, and where this morning it said Monday in Annie’s loopy handwriting, Abed has now rewritten it to say Tuesday.

He raises his eyebrows at her. “See?” He points. “It’s Tuesday. It’s curry day.”

Troy and Abed look at her expectantly. Annie clenches her eyes closed. She shrieks.

“Woah,” says Troy. Annie covers her mouth with her fingers.

“It’s fine,” she says, and backs away. “It’s fine, I’m just gonna go and, um—”

She retreats into her bedroom and drags her comforter over her head. God, she is so stupid. She is stupid and crazy and they’re going to think she’s so weird. It’s just dinner, and Annie needs to chill out and stop freaking out about stupid, pointless things she can’t control, even though she was meant to be able to control this one, because it’s just dinner, how hard is it to follow a roster? But now Annie will have to cook chilli tomorrow because Tuesday is her day and that means she’ll have to have finished all her school work by four o’clock which basically means she’ll have no time after school because Tuesday is her biggest day and she won’t even have time to do her homework in her lunch break because she’s supposed to be having lunch with Rachel and Annie has so much to do—

Eventually someone knocks on her door, and Annie has no choice but to face the music.

“What?” she yells, and Troy says: “Can I come in?”

“I guess,” says Annie, and Troy slips inside.

“Hey.” He closes the door behind him, and Annie stares miserably up at him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, scrunching up her face and fiddling with the hem of her skirt. It’s purple corduroy, she likes it. “Thanks for cooking dinner.”

“It’s cool,” says Troy, as he sits beside her on the bed. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to. I’m sorry I freaked you out.”

Annie puts her face in her hands. “No, I’m— it’s my fault, you were just trying to be nice, and it’s not like you agreed to having a total dictator move in with you, I don’t know what my problem is—”

“Hey,” says Troy again, and he puts his hand on her shoulder. “Annie, it’s okay. You’re not a dictator, and you don’t have to loosen up. I know the meal roster is a way of making you feel in control.”

Annie winces, and Troy rushes to correct himself. “I mean, not in a bad way! It’s a cool way! It’s really helpful! And Abed likes to be in control too, so it’s fine. I really didn’t mean to make you upset.”

She lets him hug her, his arm squeezing her shoulders. She tucks her face into his shoulder and inhales, because she might not like Troy like that so much anymore, but she owes her high-school self something. “Hey, this is your first official freak out since moving in, by the way! You beat us to it!”

Annie laughs and wipes her eyes. “You guys don’t freak out,” she accuses.

“Uh, hello? I freak out all the time when the group is fighting.”

“That’s different,” says Annie, and Troy pulls a face.

“Is it, though?” he asks, and Annie has to concede that Troy can scream pretty loud. “Plus, you haven’t seen Abed face off daylight savings yet. That’s a doozy.”

Annie ducks her head. “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asks, and Troy pulls another face, this time an expression of extreme incredulity.

“Um, because you’re awesome? Because you’re Annie and you’re our best friend? We love you, of course we’re nice to you.”

“Oh,” says Annie, around the lump in her throat. She thinks about leaning forward, about pressing her lips to his. She’s not sure how to do this, any of this, not with two guys who like her just for her and learn dance routines to make her smile. Troy drags her back out from her room by the hand and Annie feels shy, especially when Abed is just standing there waiting for her.

“I upset you,” he says immediately, “I’m sorry.”

Annie shakes her head. “It’s okay. I was just— I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to do and like if I don’t do it everything will go wrong and just explode on me, you know? And living with you guys is so great and I don’t want to mess it up but I feel like I am messing it up because I know you said I didn’t have to change but sometimes I still feel like I do and it’s just been really bad this week and I don’t know why and then we had to go and take down the rent and I felt like I was treating you like a child but then if I don’t take down the rent then how will I know that it got paid and even though I know I should trust you to take it down I still wouldn’t have been able to sleep and I just—!”

Abed is looking at her with wide eyes, and Annie throws her arms around him.

“I’m so sorry!” she cries, and Abed puts his hands on her on back, not exactly a hug, but more just holding Annie against him. She blinks away more tears, burying her face in his chest.                                    

“It’s okay,” Abed says. “It’s roommate shenanigans. It’s a classic staple of this kind of plot line.”

“I guess,” says Annie sceptically. “But I’m not fun like you guys.”

“You don’t have to be fun,” says Abed. “We dealt with this already, remember? We concluded this thread.”

Annie pulls back, and wipes at her eyes. “It’s not that simple, Abed.”

“But it should be,” says Abed, still blinking a bit too often, looking nervous. “This problem should be over by now.”

And maybe—

Annie thinks about it, about the earnestness in his voice and you asked me to and you said we were friends, and decides she might as well try it. It’s not like she can make it worse, anyway.

*

A guy in their History class asks Annie out. He’s friendly and sweet and he has big thick glasses like the ones Rachel wears, and Annie knows she should say yes, but she doesn’t. He’s too tall and his shoulders are the wrong size and she thinks about his hands touching her and finds her nose wrinkling in distaste. She fantasises about him with a clinical sort of disinterest during lunch, while Troy eats her pudding and her and Abed organise their fries from shortest to longest. Jeff asks her a question while Annie is thinking about the logistics of oral sex and she doesn’t even have to ask him to repeat it, and she’s pretty sure that’s not how it's meant to go.

On Wednesday evening, Annie tries to figure out if there is a single guy on Greendale’s campus who she’d like to take her out, and her list ends up as just a title.

*

Annie rap-tap-taps on the open door to the Dreamatorium, and pokes her head in. Abed is doing refurbishments, which means updating the Dreamatorium’s systems to Dreamatorium Mark II, an action characterised by fresh coats of Sharpie and the use of construction paper. Abed doesn’t look up from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, complex piping (toilet paper tubes) and wiring (bits of Annie’s yarn) strewn about him, but she thinks it’s still okay to talk.

“Hey, Abed?” she asks. “When you have brain space, can I ask you something?”

Abed nods, so Annie sits down in the doorway applesauce style, the same as him. She cradles her cup of tea in her lap, letting the warmth keep her company more than anything else. Now that she’s looking closer, she can see that the mess is actually well organised and methodical, a bit like when they dismantled their old coffee table to sell on Craigslist and Abed lay out all the screws in order on the floor without Annie even needing to tell him to do so. That was hot.

She drums her fingernails on the cup. It’s a sunshine yellow one that Rachel bought her for Hannukah, and it has a smiley face on it that everyone agrees looks just like her. Abed pauses for a long moment, staring at the ground, and then he crosses a blue piece of yarn over a green string and looks up at her.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hey,” says Annie, grinning. “Fun remodelling?”

“It’s getting there,” he says, wiggling his hands. “You wanted to ask me something?”

“Right,” says Annie, her fingers tightening. She blows out a belly-breath like Melissa the Therapist suggested. “Um. You run simulations, right? About the rest of the group. All that ‘student of human character’ stuff?”

At Abed’s nod, she continues: “Have you ever, um. Do you ever run, like, romance scenarios? And, follow up question, have you ever run one on me and you?”

Abed blinks. “I’ve run all the simulations,” he says, after a moment. He doesn’t sound like he thinks Annie is a freak, which is something, but he’s also looking at her like she’s a bug and he’s the microscope, so the jury’s still out. “Well, almost. Mostly out of curiosity. Why? Are you uncomfortable?”

“No!” says Annie, too quickly. “No, I just— wondered. How did it… we… go? In the simulation?”

Abed frowns. “It was okay,” he says. “You and I like each other, and most of the time we understand each other’s patterns. You possess a level of self-discipline that I struggle with while I have more whimsy, and those qualities complement each other. But we also have similarities: we’re both rigid in our beliefs and confident that our way is best, and those could yield conflict. Also, you confuse me. And I confuse me. So I wasn’t confident in the results.”

“Oh,” says Annie, digesting. “I confuse you?”

“Yeah,” says Abed. “You’re unpredictable, and I find myself being unpredictable around you. Like inviting you to move here, I didn’t mean to do that. But it always works out, which is also unpredictable. Why? Do you want to run Annie/Abed together?”

She considers it. “Not really. I just thought— I just wondered. If you had thought about it.”

“Oh,” says Abed. “Yes.”

They sit quietly for a while, and Annie licks her lips. She doesn’t know how to—

“What about— non-simulated. Do you think we’d be… compatible, like that? Like, if you just had to answer. Do you think you and I would… work?”

“No,” says Abed, immediately. “There are differences in timelines and realities that affect whether or not we would be suitably happy. And I don’t think— here, now, there are other factors, other people. Is that— I don’t want to make you sad. Are you asking me out?”

Annie smiles, but only because that’s what she thinks she’s meant to do.

“No,” she says. “Um. I wanted to ask you for a— a favour, I guess, but I didn’t want to ask it if you thought that we were— if you liked me, or if you thought that we might work, somehow, later. I didn’t want us to switch genres by accident.”

Abed shakes his head. “We won’t do that,” he says, certain. “I like you just as a friend.”

“I like you just as a friend, too.”

She relaxes back against the doorframe, and drags the teabag back and forth.

“I’ve been thinking,” Annie says. “About— love. And relationships. I’ve never really been in one before, not one that felt the way it should.”

“What about Vaughn? He twirled you around in the air.”

“Yeah, but. I don’t know. Vaughn was really sweet, and I liked it, but I kind of don’t know if I liked him? He was a little annoying.” She adds the last part with a wince, feeling bad about it, but Abed doesn’t dwell. “And lately I feel like I’m not even interested in dating anyone even if they’re cute, so I thought, well, that’s fine, because I’m smart and capable and honestly, I can date myself better than anyone else can.”

She presses her lips together, frowning. “But I still get— flustered, I guess, watching movies, at the big, music-swelling kiss scene. And then I feel like I’m missing out. But I don’t want to do that in real life and I’m so confused and I don’t know what I mean or what I want and so I just— I want to do an experiment, somewhere safe, with like, what stuff I’m actually into. Because it feels really mean to date someone just to find out if I actually like dating.”

Abed still doesn’t say anything. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No.” He runs his thumb across his index finger, tongue poking just slightly between his teeth. “I think you mean you want to run a simulation.”

“Could we?” asks Annie, finally meeting his eye. “I know it’s a lot to ask, I know it’s totally weird, but I just— you’re my friend and I trust you and I just want to know why the movies make me feel that way when nothing in real life does. So I thought if we— if we could simulate some, some movies and stuff, then I could see if I still get excited about it when it’s happening or if it’s just when I’m watching it. Like, maybe I just like seeing other people happy, you know?”

“Okay,” says Abed. He doesn’t say, so you want to kiss, basically, which Annie is grateful for, although she doesn’t know why he would. She knew Abed would get it, that he’d understand that it’s not about the kissing, it’s about the love story and the dialogue and the structure of it all.

“We should set up very clear ground rules,” he continues, eyes darting over the Dreamatorium’s wiring again. “Also, I’ll have to finish this first. And we should probably make a list of movies you like so we can look for common tropes. And if we’re going to be kissing, we’ll have to create a strict tooth-brushing routine, and also—”

Abed hesitates.

“Yeah?”

He licks his lips.

“I think we should do this when Troy isn’t home,” Abed says.

“Okay,” says Annie. He nods to himself.

“Cool. You should make a list of boundaries and decide which movie you want to do first. I’ll do the same. We could run our first simulation on Friday afternoon. Troy has dance class then.”

Annie knows that, but she’s still glad he said it. Her mouth feels dry. “Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Abed. Can I sit in here for a little while?”

“Sure. Just don’t hum.”

“I won’t.”

“Or backseat craft.”

Annie lets out a mildly offended sound. “I won’t!”

“Okay.”

*

Annie tries really hard to think of a movie that won’t make Abed uncomfortable. She wants to pick something that will demonstrate to him that it’s really not about Annie being creepy, it is about investigating if her relationships maybe just haven’t been romantic enough. The closest she ever got was the kiss with Jeff, and that crashed and burned so spectacularly that the memory is now forever tainted.

She settles on a film that she knows is pretty tacky, but she has a soft spot for anyway. They watch it on Wednesday night and Abed makes three notes on a notepad that Annie can’t read. Then she gets worried that Abed will connect the dots that she used to cast Troy in the lead’s role during her fantasies, because that was all sixteen year-old-Annie wanted: Troy denouncing football in favour of the geeky klutz after a rousing and impassioned speech. She doesn’t tell Troy what the movie’s for.

“Oh, A Cinderella Story!” calls Troy from the lounge room, sending her that brilliant, mega-watt smile while he inspects the DVD case. “Sweet!”

Annie smiles. “You like the movie?”

“Ya-huh,” says Troy, and then he’s bounding into the kitchen and hugging her from behind with one great big squeeze, and she can feel his smile against her cheek. “This is a great choice, Annie.”

Annie giggles as Troy lets her go, and resumes dishing out the curry she’s made for dinner, Abed doing to same next to her. There’s only room for two people at the kitchen island, so Troy pokes his head in-between them and rests it on Abed’s shoulder. Annie watches Abed look at him. Her heart whines in her chest.

Abed and Troy usually have the two chairs set up in front of the TV, and even though Annie likes that, and likes sitting perched on Abed’s arm rest with his hand in hers, they usually move the furniture around if all three of them have planned to watch a movie. Annie takes her usual designated spot nearest the wall so that she can rest her cup of tea on the windowsill, and Abed sits next to her with the footstool in front of him. Troy seats himself on Abed’s other side, sighing happily.

“Alright,” he says, and kicks his feet up onto the stool next to Abed’s. “Let’s do this!”

This is what Annie doesn’t understand: if she won’t go after a romance, then fine, she doesn’t want it. That makes sense. But if she doesn’t want romance, then she shouldn’t feel like this watching the film, like her heart wants something so badly, when she knows that she always balks when faced with the real thing. But there’s that magical moment, when Sam appears at the top of the staircase in her beautiful white wedding dress and everyone is looking at her, and Annie says: “Wow.”

“Yeah,” say Troy and Abed in unison.

And she wants the movie to go well. She wants Sam to find love, she wants Austin to take himself down a peg and realise she’s the girl for him, she wants him to love Sam as unconditionally and as kindly as she deserves.

Carefully, she places her empty bowl on the floor and resettles back in her seat. Abed turns his hand palm-up on his leg, not looking away from the screen, and Annie curls her hands around his, one in his palm and one round his wrist. He’s going to help her. That’s bizarre to her, and she’s almost waiting for the punchline, like maybe Abed will reveal he’s using her as fodder for his scripts. Nobody’s ever helped her, nobody ever helps her, first because high-achievers don’t have problems and second because the help she sourced from a bottle made everyone ashamed to know her, until Greendale.

Annie threads her fingers through Abed’s and strokes her thumb back and forth over his skin. She feels him freeze for a moment before relaxing, like he does sometimes. She pauses, but then Abed moves his hand a tiny bit, almost like he’s jostling her to make her continue, so she does. It’s nice.

*

“Now, I know this is your first time,” says Abed on Friday, while Annie bounces nervously on her feet, “so I’ll be gentle. The Dreamatorium is a delicate ecosystem and needs to be protected, and it might take you a while to become fully compatible and emersed within the program.”

“I can handle it,” Annie says.

“It’s not a matter of handling it, it’s a matter of seeing it. On this side of the door, I’m just Abed in Troy’s spare jersey. But on that side, I’m star quarterback Austin Ames and I have Jeff’s face.”

Annie wrinkles her nose.

“Or Chad Michael Murray’s face, it doesn’t matter. The point is, you have to believe it. Okay?”

Annie nods, a quick and sharp jab of her head, her hand clenched around her lines. She made Abed agree to follow the script rather than improvise by pointing out that if they did have to check lines, they could turn it into a meta-joke. “I can do it.”

“Okay,” Abed says, and takes her hand. He places his other hand on the doorknob, and raises his eyebrow at her. “Welcome to the Dreamatorium.”

The door swings open onto a space that Annie has seen before, but only when powered-down. Powered-up, it looks the same: black walls and orange tape, but Annie tries to look past that and see the football field. They’re only doing the final scene today, both of them in agreement that it was better to start small and work up to bigger runtimes.

Annie has already memorised her speech, has had it memorised since she was sixteen. It’s not the speech she’s worried about, it’s what comes after. She thinks she’s probably going to throw up. But this is what she has to figure out, because she likes Abed, and she likes romance, enough that she can’t cut it out of her life just yet. She just needs a test run.

Annie rattles off her speech, which is easy, and then all she has to do is stand back and let Abed cue the music, and he flits between Austin and Carter easily, and then he’s running up the Pep Rally stands and stopping in front of her.

Austin-Abed slides his hand around her neck and pulls her in, kissing her firm on the mouth. Annie closes her eyes and tries to concentrate: she feels the push of Abed’s mouth against hers, tastes toothpaste and that sort of musty taste that she’s always found mouths to have. She frowns and tilts her head slightly, opens her mouth a little wider.

This isn’t like kissing Abed before. When Abed kissed her during paintball, Annie could barely see straight. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she’s not as good at rendering environments as she thought, maybe she needs a school-wide A Cinderella Story re-enactment. She could probably convince the Dean to hold a masquerade dance. If her and Abed were really clever about it, they might even be able to knock off Romeo + Juliet in the same night.

Austin-Abed breaks the kiss.

“Okay, stop simulation,” he says. “This isn’t working. I don’t believe that you’re Hilary Duff, or that you work in a roller-skate diner, or that you’re totally in love with me and finally getting everything that you want. How do you expect this to work if you’re not fully engaged?”

“I am fully engaged,” objects Annie, hotly, and Abed half tuts.

“Annie, I could feel you thinking. Kissing isn’t about thinking, it’s about feeling.”

“You don’t need to teach me how to kiss,” says Annie, furious, and Abed says:

“Clearly, I do.” He takes her by the shoulders, and a lone butterfly pops into being in Annie’s stomach. He’s tall and commanding and in his element, and three other butterflies spring up around the first. “Here, just relax.”

“Abed!” cries Annie, although he hasn’t done anything else. “Boundaries!”

“I’m not— Oh, sorry. I’m not going to kiss you, I’m directing you. Close your eyes.”

Annie does so automatically, and then feels herself flush and tries to direct it down to her hands with the power of thought. Abed begins speaking. His hands are heavy and warm, which is nice, and his voice is soothing. Annie focuses on that rather than the feeling that she’s already failing at this, although it only somewhat helps.

“Okay,” says Abed, and he’s holding her shoulders firmly, not tentatively, like he actually expects he needs to hold her in place. It’s secure. “Imagine you’re being kissed.”

“Abed—”

“Imagine it,” he says, cutting off her under-the-eyelid-eyeroll. Annie thinks back to a few moments ago, to Abed’s mouth on hers, and feels herself make a face in spite of the butterflies. Abed huffs.

“No, you’re thinking it,” he says again. “Imagine it. Like you’re in the movie.”

“It’s not working,” Annie complains, still with her eyes closed. She can feel her lip starting to wobble. “Look, let’s just stop, okay, this was stupid. It was a stupid idea and I don’t know why I thought it would work, I’m probably just wired wrong—”

She presses her lips together, and takes a deep breath. Abed’s hands are still steady, and that calms her. “But I want to do it,” she says, to herself and to him, and pushes back her shoulders. She can do this, she can. “So, okay. Direct me.”

“Okay,” says Abed, and he takes his hands off her shoulders. “You’re Sam Montgomery, and you’re sixteen, and you’re in high school. Your mom and your step sisters are awful. No one understands. You have to work a bad job as well as go to school, and the only saving grace are the emails you share with a boy you’ve never met…”

Abed carries on describing the plot, and Annie watches the movie play out on fast-forward behind her eyes, feeling her emotions rise even though it’s not the real thing. It helps that she’s just watched it a few days ago, so it’s still fresh in her mind, and it’s easy to listen to Abed.

“…and it’s too much. Everyone is here, everyone is looking at you, and they can see your broken heart. They know how sad you are. You’re going to leave. But then— you look up. It’s Austin. He’s running, and he’s running to you. He loves you. You know he loves you, you can feel it. It’s like a balloon in your chest, like when everything is turned up but not in a bad way, and he’s going to kiss you. He’s going to kiss you, Sam.”

Annie feels her eyelids flutter, and—

“Render environment,” says Abed softly, and when Sam opens her eyes, Austin’s hands slip around her neck, and he kisses her full on the mouth. Sam sucks in a breath, her hands latching onto him automatically, and she almost forgets about the eyes on them, focusing on draping her arms around his neck and then being lifted, and her body is pressed so close to his and everything is warm, and she’s being kissed by someone who loves her.

Annie cups Abed’s jaw, her fingertips sliding over his skin, and then she feels herself grin, and she feels the muscles in his face move as he smiles too. He places her back on the ground and Annie opens her eyes, her hands falling down either side of his neck.

“Stop simulation,” says Abed, and the stadium dis-renders itself and Annie jumps up and down on the spot, beaming wide.

“Abed, we did it!” she says, grabbing his hands. Abed smiles at her. “That was awesome!”

“Congratulations,” he says, “You are now a fully-qualified member of the Dreamatorium crew.”

Annie throws her arms around his neck, and Abed catches her. She tucks her grin into his shoulder, kicking her feet. “I really did it,” she squeals again, falling back to the floor. “I’m an actress!”

Abed smiles at her. “You look happy,” he says. “I made you happy?”

“So happy,” says Annie, and her cheeks are sore from all the exercise. “I feel— I don’t know. Did I— was that good? Was I good?”

She feels suddenly flustered, like she’s awaiting her grade, and tucks her hair behind her ear.

“It was good,” says Abed. “Was that— what you wanted?”

Annie nods, quick and sharp. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I think so. At the end, anyway. It took me a while to get into it, but then it was good. It was even kind of— fun.”

“I thought it was fun,” says Abed, fidgeting with his hoodie zipper, up and down and up again. He won’t look her in the eye. “It was different. I don’t usually do rom-coms.”

Annie frowns. “You and Troy don’t do stuff like that?”

Abed glances up at her, unreadable. “No,” he says. “We mostly do action scenes and laser fights and Inspector Spacetime.”

“Figures,” she says, with a fond expression. Her cheeks still feel hot, but she feels all sort of glowy, too. “So, now that we’ve done it once… would you still want to do it again? Or is it too weird?”

“It’s not too weird. We can do it again next Friday.”

“Okay,” says Annie, and smiles down at her hands. “Cool. Thanks, Abed.”

*

“I want to ask you something,” says Abed, and Annie definitely isn’t counting time as Before The Dreamatorium and After The Dreamatorium, but this is three weeks After The Dreamatorium. “You and I understand each other, right?”

“I mean, I think so,” says Annie. “I feel… safe, with you, so— yeah, I think we do.”

“Me too,” says Abed, his mouth twitching. His tongue pokes out between his teeth, not like he’s trying to find his words, but like he’s trying to remember the lines he practiced for this earlier.

“Sometimes there are social rules about when to touch people,” he says. “About who can do it, and when, and what touch is appropriate. The rules exist pretty much all the time, mostly, except for sex when it’s kind of a given. And I find it hard to tell when people want you to touch them and when they don’t, and then it just seems easier not to try.”

He steeples his fingers together, then points at her. Abed does that a lot, moves his hands when he’s speaking, but more so when they’re at home than at school. Actually, scratch that: more so around Troy than anywhere else. Annie’s pretty sure she just counts by osmosis.

“You and the girls sometimes initiate things, like hugs or hand-holding, and I like it. It’s a non-verbal way of demonstrating affection and friendship, and it— it makes me happy. And I want to make you guys happy, too. But I don’t want to get it wrong. So I thought, because we’re practicing romance, that maybe we could also practice that, too. Physical touch.”

Annie feels her face soften, her heart cinching in an old but familiar way. Annie was a lonely kid. “Oh, Abed,” she says, and Abed grimaces at her aw-voice. “Of course we can! That’s so sweet.”

She swings on her feet. “What physical touch do you want to try?”

“I thought we could hold hands,” says Abed, ticking it off on his finger, “And hug. And— I don’t know. Maybe if we watch a movie you could lean your head on my shoulder.”

“I do that already,” says Annie, and Abed’s mouth twists.

“I know. Maybe I could lean my head on your head.”

Annie nods. “Yeah, sure.”

Abed looks relieved. “Really?”

“Yeah, totally. You can touch me whenever, Abed, it’s fine.”

His forehead crinkles, a little line appearing between his eyebrows. Abed calls it a Meg Ryan crinkle, but she doesn’t know if he’s ever applied it to himself. He licks his lips.

“That’s not a rule, though,” he objects. “Rules are dependable, and true. But sometimes you don’t want to be touched, like if you’ve had a bad day or when things have gone wrong, so being told I can touch you whenever isn’t correct. You flinched away from Shirley on Wednesday when she tried to help with your poster.”

“That’s… true,” says Annie, reluctantly, and frowns at Abed’s graphic tee. “I guess I don’t think about it as following a rule.”

“I know you don’t,” says Abed. “No one does, that’s the problem. It’s like a special rulebook that nobody knows they’re following except for the people who don’t have the rulebook. It’s annoying.”

“Okay,” says Annie slowly, thinking, “Well, there’s definitely stuff that is safer than others, I guess, in terms of what people are comfortable with. Have you tried modelling the other person’s behaviour?”

“Like, copying what they do?”

“Yeah. Like, because I’ve held your hand before, you can feel assured that I’m comfortable with that touch, you know? So you could start out by thinking about what touches we already offer to you.”

“Britta holds onto my arm a lot,” says Abed. “And Shirley pats me sometimes.”

“Exactly,” says Annie, pleased. “And you also hold hands with Troy, right?”

“Troy holds hands with me,” says Abed.

“Is there really a difference?”

“Yes.”

She hesitates. “Do you want to hold Troy’s hand?”

“I want to get better at it with all of you,” Abed says. “I want— I just want to be better at it.”

“Okay,” Annie says, and she thinks again, like always, of you asked me to and you said we were friends. “That’s okay, Abed.”

“I want to do something now,” Abed says, and Annie smiles.

“Okay! What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” He frowns, the movements of his hands becoming agitated and sharp. “I don’t know what the options are. I want to show you that I like you and that you’re my friend, but I don’t know if hugs are allowed.”

“Hugs are allowed.”

“But how do you know?” presses Abed, and Annie has no choice but pull a helpless face.

“I don’t know!” she says. “I guess I know because I wouldn’t be bothered by it?”

Unsatisfied, Abed rubs his thumb on his index finger. Annie bounces up and down. “Look, let’s just try it, okay? Let’s hug!”

She holds out her arms and, with a frown, Abed walks slowly into them. She tucks her arms under his and around his back and he lays his gently around her shoulders, the way they always hug. She can barely feel his arms on her, they lay there so lightly.

“You can hold on a bit tighter,” she suggests, and Abed does. “Yeah, like that. That’s nice.”

She gives him a squeeze and then she lets go, drawing away from him. Abed’s hand slides down her back and falls into the air beside them. “See? That was fine.”

Abed still looks annoyed. “It wasn’t enough,” he says. His eyes flick over her face, going from her mouth to her eyebrows to her forehead.

“What?”

He moves his head towards her and without meaning to, Annie jerks back. She raises her eyebrows. “Are you going to kiss me?”

“No,” says Abed, and then immediately: “Yes. On the head. Sorry.”

“No, it—” Annie licks her lips, considering and almost instantly deciding that she doesn’t need to. “It’s okay, you can do that.”

When Abed hesitates, she tucks her hands behind her back and puts on her Geneva voice. “Initiate forehead kiss, guv’nor.”

Abed scrunches up his face, then peeks open one eye. Annie nods encouragingly. Abed kisses her on the forehead quick and sharp, so fast that she barely feels it.

“How was that?” he asks.

“Great!” cries Annie, over-enthusiastic. She tries to tone it down. “I mean, normal. It was good. Fine. Gold star.”

“It was weird,” assesses Abed, and Annie shakes her head vigorously.

“No!” she cries. “It’s just the setting. But it was fine, honestly.”

Abed frowns again. “Would you— would you give me a list? Of things that you’re comfortable with. So I can practice.”

“Oh,” says Annie. “Yeah, sure. I’ll write one down. But that was all fine— hand holding, and hugs, and things. And the forehead kiss. And, um, cheek kisses? That’s also fine. And I guess leaning heads on shoulders. And I kind of like it when people touch, like, here—” She puts her hand on the small of her back, “—to move me out of the way and stuff. And also the way you and Troy drag each other places sometimes? That would be nice. And, um, you know, patting my head is fine too, although I guess that’s kind of a Jeff thing.”

“Okay,” says Abed seriously, and Annie gets the impression that he’s committing it all to memory. “Do you want me to ask first?”

“You don’t need to?” she says. “But you can if you want to, if it makes you feel better.”

Abed looks at her for a long moment, so long that Annie starts contemplating other things like the lighting, the warm yellow hues that are kissing Abed’s skin. Then he takes her by the arm and steps into her space, holding her eye all the while. He kisses her cheek. Annie’s eyelids flutter. They stare at each other.

She makes a sound that’s not a word.

“That was nice,” she manages, on the second attempt. “But, um. With that kind of stuff, the lead up is kind of important. Like, I could tell you put a lot of thought into it, and that made it seem romantic. Even though it wasn’t. It wasn’t, right?”

“It was too significant,” Abed surmises.

“Yeah!” Annie says. “Exactly. Although, it’s kind of stupid that romantic relationships are always more significant than platonic ones, you know? Like, what, just because you want to cuddle someone means you have to agree to everything else? But you’re right, it had a… a certain vibe to it.”

“Okay. So I should do it more casually, in less romantic light.”

“Exactly,” beams Annie, and Abed nods.

“Thank you,” he says, and Annie shrugs. His mouth quirks. In his British accent, he says: “Now initiating forehead kiss.”

Annie giggles and Abed kisses her head again, this time with his hand cupping her jaw. It’s nice. It’s really, really nice. Annie’s going to melt into a puddle. She’s going to dissolve into one great big burst of glitter and heart-shaped balloons, and their kitchen is going to look like Valentine’s Day threw up in it, and it’s so utterly foreign to her that she gets to have a friend like this.

*

The first time Annie ever met Rachel, she was wearing a Superman t-shirt. It was also Annie’s first day at Greendale— not the first day of the semester, but the open day that Annie had gone to mostly out of a desire to pretend like she had options for college, and wasn’t stuck with the community one. Annie identified her as approachable on the basis of being the only other person wearing a cardigan.

Rachel is really cool, though. She works the frozen yogurt machine in the cafeteria and sometimes Annie sits with her at lunch time to keep her company, on days when the study group aren’t all hanging out together.

“Do you think it’s possible to do too much self-analysing?” asks Annie. She’s sitting behind the counter, which she still gets nervous about, but Rachel has started letting her wear the spare apron so that she feels at least a little undercover. It always makes Annie giddy, for some reason.

“Well, that depends,” says Rachel, and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Are you self-analysing to the point of distraction?”

Annie is thinking about Rachel tucking Annie’s hair behind her ears, and misses the question. “Hm?”

“I see,” says Rachel, matter of fact. “How are things with Abed?”

Annie sighs, not very dreamily. More thoughtful and pensive.

“Complicated,” she says. She finished another diary the night before last, and she hasn’t gone through them this quickly since she was documenting Troy’s daily wardrobe back in high school. “And not. And more complicated for not being so.”

“You should make a list,” suggests Rachel, and Annie smiles.

“I did that already,” she says, and Rachel looks at her and holds her eye, and Annie shrinks into her shoulders a little guiltily. “It helped!” she defends.

“Well, I think you should go for it,” says Rachel. “He’s tall and dreamy and he likes you just as you are. Can he do a British accent?”

Annie nods.

“Well, there you are, then,” says Rachel. “That has to tick off most of your boxes.”

Annie flushes, something warm and pleasant curling up in her chest. It’s nice, having a girl friend. She’s had them before, of course, and her and Britta are kind of friends and Annie still gets together with her high school group every now and then, but Rachel is still different. It’s nice having someone who knows her well enough to tease her without being mean, who brings her takeaway coffees without needing to be reminded how Annie likes it. Just, a girl friend who cares about her and shows it obviously. It’s sweet. Annie missed it in high school.

She bites her lip, mischievousness twirling up her spine. “That’s an idea,” she says, jotting it down on a sticky note and underlining it twice. Rachel leans in close to read it, and Annie smells her citrus and honey perfume and goes hot all down the back of her neck.

“You guys are so weird,” says Rachel fondly, and pushes a frozen yogurt closer to Annie. “That one’s for you,” she says.

Annie picks it up and swirls it round with her spoon. It’s her favourite, and that makes it extra sweet, too.

*

“I like you very much just as you are,” says Abed. Annie smiles, but it doesn’t well up in her like she thought it would. She clutches the lapels of his collar a little harder, pressing her body into his. Maybe it’s because of the Inspector Voice.

She tugs him down and Abed kisses her breathless, and he really is very good at it. Annie’s knees go a little weak and she wants him awfully, but only, she thinks, because she knows it’s off the table. The thought of doing anything like this with anyone without that boundary makes her sick. Still, it’s not hard to gaze half-lidded up at him when it ends.

“Hang on a minute,” Annie says, and makes a mental note for them both to learn other British accents, “nice guys don’t kiss like that.”

Abed tilts her jaw up with his fingers, nose brushing against hers. “Oh yes they fucking do,” he says, and Annie’s shiver travels whip hot up her spine, corny voice and all, just like Rachel said it would.

*

Annie takes Wednesday off. She wanders out of her room with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, hot water bottle tucked between her tummy and Ruthie the kangaroo, and her slippers dragging on their wooden floor.

“I don’t think I’m gonna go to class today, I don’t feel well,” she says, as Troy shoulders his backpack. He’s bouncing from one leg to the other, already warming up for this morning’s dance rehearsal. “I’ll see you later though, okay?”

“Okay,” Abed says, cocking his head. She can see him trying to work out what’s wrong with her, can see traces of Sherlock Holmes in his expression, and she waits for him to be done. “There’s chocolate in the fridge and we can bring home soup for dinner if you want.”

Annie’s heart squeezes. “That would be really nice, yeah. Thanks, guys.”

“No worries. Feel better, Annie,” says Troy, and gives her a quick, one-armed hug on his way out the door. Annie gives him a thumbs-up in return, and Abed hovers in front of her. Then he puts his hand on her face and kisses her square on the forehead. Annie awws.

“I’ll see you later,” she says again, and Abed finger guns her as the door closes behind him with a soft click, leaving her alone in the blissful silence. She’s figured it all out to the minute, knows she’s far enough ahead in today’s classes that she doesn’t need to think about it at all, and so she goes straight for a cup of tea and the DVD boxset under her bed.

She’s never watched this with the guys around, and she darts a look back over her shoulder as she loads up the DVD, like at any moment someone’s going to burst through and catch her in the act. She triple checks the locked door.

Too late, Annie realises that she’s lost track of time, and that she can hear the tell-tale scuffling of Troy and Abed in the hallway. She scrambles for the remote, but only succeeds in hitting ‘pause’ before the door opens, and then she has no choice but to blow it off.

“Hey, Annie,” says Abed, toeing off his shoes and lining them up. Troy follows in behind him, and Annie waves. “What are you watching?”

“Oh, nothing,” says Annie, and then watches with dread as Abed crosses over to the TV and inspects the DVD case.

“Pride & Prejudice,” he reads, “Nice. They did a movie of this with Keira Knightley.”

“Did they?” asks Annie weakly, sinking further into her blanket. Troy flops down onto the sofa beside her.

“Isn’t that the guy from Mamma Mia?” he asks, while Annie avoids Abed’s eye.

“Yep,” she says, faux-brightly, and gathers up her stuff. “I’ll turn it off, we can put something else on. You guys don’t want to watch this.”

“You don’t have to,” says Abed, as Annie snatches the DVD case from him.

“It’s fine,” she says. “How was your day?”

She hides the boxset back where it belongs, feeling sick and guilty and not having the faintest clue why.

*

Her and Abed keep roleplaying, and they work through Annie’s list of her favourite rom-com movies: When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Dancing, Clueless, Emma, While You Were Sleeping. Abed doesn’t ask why they’re not doing Pride & Prejudice, and Annie doesn’t mention it. As it is, it’s wonderful and great fun, and Annie loves all aspects of it, especially the days when the three of them go out searching for new Dreamatorium outfits and they get to enact all kinds of dressing-up montages.

A month passes, and Troy and Abed start including her in some of their own simulations, which is awesome. They still haven’t told Troy what they’re doing, Annie because she’s embarrassed and Abed for reasons of his own, but as a threesome they tackle a whole bunch of different Inspector Spacetime episodes when Jeff isn’t around to be the Blogon scum. It’s better that way anyway, because Jeff doesn’t really like to get in character.

Still, Annie was hoping for more progress to have been made on figuring out whatever her deal is. So far the only notes in her notebook are that she likes making out with Abed when they’re acting, but has no interest in doing it outside the Dreamatorium, and the easy contradiction of those two facts makes her want to bang her head against the wall.

Annie takes another bite of her tiny chocolate. It’s just her and Troy alone in the apartment until Abed gets home, and she has a weird jittery feeling that she usually associates with an approaching deadline. She needs to go for a walk, but she doesn’t want to. She needs to occupy her hands, but she doesn’t want to. It’s like being hungry but having nothing in the fridge.

She shifts a little on her chair. The dining table is cold under her elbows, and she pops the rest of her chocolate in the mouth and sees how slowly she can dissolve it on her tongue. She watches Troy tap his pencil against his mouth and sucks down the chocolate.

He’s lying on the couch, one knee propped up and his Biology book resting on that thigh, and every now and again he’ll scribble something in a margin. Then the 2B yellow pencil will return to his mouth. He’s not chewing it, which is good because that’s gross, but he’ll hold it so that the little eraser rests perfectly in the divot of his lip, and for some reason that makes Annie want to snatch it from him.

He makes another note. He’s wearing jeans and one of his long-sleeve tees, and the sleeves hang down past his wrist and settle around his palms. If Annie was hungry and looked in the fridge and found Troy, she’d probably eat him. She unwraps another chocolate.

Troy is sort of classically beautiful, in Annie’s mind. He’s all straight lines and symmetry, moves with a flow and a certainty that must be attributed to his dancing, the need to be in control of his body. She’s always liked dancing. She bets that if Troy put his hand on her back, that she’d feel something.

“Troy? What are you doing?”

Troy looks at her.

“Uh, reading Biology?” he says, clearly holding back a duh-doy. He must be spending too much time with Britta. Not that it’s not sweet, or anything. Britta might be a hypocrite, but she gets away with it easily, with her perfect hair and pink lips and the way guys fall at their feet in front of her. Annie’s pretty, she knows that, but Britta has that effortless coolness that attracts people to her like magnets, even though Britta is kind of just as messed up as the rest of them. It doesn’t change the fact that guys don’t see that, but Annie can understand that, too. She can understand why someone might meet Britta and want to sleep with her.

“Do you want to do something?” asks Annie, and Troy shrugs.

“Like what?”

“We could play in the Dreamatorium?”

“Without Abed?” scoffs Troy, and Annie frowns.

“Well, we could,” she says. She tears the chocolate wrapper in half down the middle, then again and again until she has eight strips of plastic. She imagines herself saying it like she’s in a movie, like she’s cool and collected and desirable like Britta. But she’s not, so instead it comes out like a squeak: “Or we could, um— have sex?"

Troy blinks at his Biology textbook. He turns his head.

“What?”

Annie flushes.

“I said— you heard me. If you wanted, we could— have sex. Together. You and me.”

“Uhhhhh,” says Troy. “Why?”

Annie shrugs, her shoulders brushing her ears.

“How should I know?” she says, defensively. “For something to do? God, does everything have to have a reason?”

“With you, usually! I didn’t think you liked me like that!”

“I don’t! I just thought, you know, that you’re here and I’m here and we’re— we’re— you know, consenting adults, and— I don’t know! It was an idea!”

“I mean,” continues Annie, a bit desperately, “I’m pretty, right?”

“Duh-doy,” says Troy, casting aside his book and sitting up properly. “I mean, not that I— I don’t like you like that either, but of course you’re pretty! You’re like, the prettiest!”

“Right!” says Annie, “And you’re handsome—”

Troy gives her a bashful brush off.

“—and so that’s, you know, that’s what attractive people do, right? To let off steam?”

“I guess,” says Troy doubtfully, but he’s got his arms above his lap, and that might mean—oh, god, thinks Annie, and quickly looks at the ceiling. “But this is— really out of character for you, Annie.”

“You sound like Abed,” says Annie, and Troy beams.

“Really?” he asks, pleased, and then shakes his head. “I mean— but it’s true, this is totally out of nowhere! What if it made things super weird?”

“It won’t if we don’t let it!” she says. “But only if— I mean. We don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, I’m sorry. It was a stupid idea.”

Troy pulls a face. “I don’t not want to?” he says, like he’s figuring it out himself. “This is just— not what I thought you were going to say today.”

Annie shrugs and crosses her arms in front of her, looking away. “Well, sor-ry, I guess. It’s not like I don’t have desires, you know? Just because I’m— I’m straight-laced and I haven’t done it a bunch of times doesn’t mean I don’t have interests and wonderings and— Troy!”

Troy darts his eyes back up to her face. “You said we were going to have sex!” he defends, and Annie’s mouth drops open.

“Well— that’s just— are we?”

“I think so?” says Troy, and Annie sits up straight, her folded arms forgotten.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, good!”

She stands up. The chair scrapes on the wooden floor and she feels all of a sudden aware of her body and the fact that Troy is looking at her.

“I guess it is!” cries Troy, and rises to his feet. They look at each other for a moment and then Troy says, at a pitch approaching those only dogs can hear: “I’m not sure how we should do this!”

“Neither am I!” she says. “Maybe we should take a breath!”

“Okay!”

“In separate rooms!”

“Okay!”

*

Annie throws her back against her bedroom door, burying her face in her hands. She is stupid, she is so stupid. Who does she think she is, Britta? She’s not the kind of girl to have casual sex, and definitely not with her roommate. Everything Shirley warned her about is coming true, Annie should’ve known it was dangerous to live with two attractive young men, who is she kidding—

She digs her nails hard into her palms and squirms a bit. She just wants— to try it. That’s all. To put a toe in the water while at the same time being reassured that she can jump back to dry land at any time, and Troy is nice. Troy is her best friend after Abed, and he’s kind and funny and sweet and ridiculous and Troy Barnes. She feels flushed just thinking about it.

“Um, Annie?” calls Troy, and she jumps away from the door, hand flying to her chest. He doesn’t come in, though the handle does jiggle just slightly. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” squeaks Annie, and then repeats, slightly more sexily (she hopes), “I mean, yeah.”

She gets up to open the door, and the instant she sees his face it’s like she mellows out, because it’s just Troy. He’d never hurt her and he’d stop if she asked.

 “Hi,” manages Annie, and Troy blows out a big breath, bouncing on his feet.

“Hey,” he says, and then he smiles at her, and all of it melts away. “I’m sorry I was being so weird before.”

“You were being weird? I was being weird. I mean, who does that? That was crazy!”

“No, it’s okay, it’s fine,” says Troy, “I was just surprised, that’s all. Um, I know Jeff says that we should all look at each other as sexual prospects, but I don’t really do that, so. I was just weirded out.”

“I don’t think he said we should,” corrects Annie, “Just that there was nothing, you know. Stopping us.”

“Yeah,” says Troy, and they look at each other. He’s not un-attractive. He’s really attractive, actually. Handsome. Leading man material. He’s the face Annie used to moon over in high-school and now she knows him as a person, too, and Troy-the-person is so indescribably awesome and wonderful that sometimes it makes Annie’s toes curl that he ever decided to be her friend. Troy shrugs a little.

“Plus, you’re my best friend, and things like that always ruin stuff, you know? And I didn’t wanna ruin it or make it weirder, because that would be stupid. But then, you said it, so I guess if anyone’s ruining it then it would be you.”

“Gee, thanks,” says Annie. She leans against the doorframe, hugging herself. She hasn’t talked about this with anyone but Abed, and even then, not in ways that didn’t involve make-believe. “I don’t know. I’ve been feeling so weird lately, in myself, and I guess I just wanted to try it? That sounds bad. It’s just that, um —sex— has never really been very… fun? For me. Like, with the guys that I’ve, you know, with, it just hasn’t been… that good. And I’ve been feeling insecure about my lack of experience, I guess,”

“Oh,” says Troy, blinking slowly. “Oh, well, I get that, too.” He flushes and tugs on his ear. “I mean, I like girls and all, but— yeah. Sometimes it isn’t, like, everything that you think it will be, you know? Sometimes I think— don’t laugh at me—"

Annie shakes her head, her eyes wide. Troy looks at the floor and then back up at her.

“But sometimes I think that’s because I’ve never been in love with anyone. That I’ve slept with, I mean. Like, I liked Vanessa a lot—” (His high school girlfriend, Annie remembers because she had hated that girl so much and for no good reason) “—and she was super cool and knew lots about space, but she didn’t, like, make hearts fly around my head or anything.”

“I didn’t know that,” says Annie softly, and Troy shrugs.

“Yeah, I’ve basically only told Abed. But, um. I do really like you, Annie. And— look, definitely don’t laugh, okay, but it’s kind of— been a while. So that, uh, lack of experience— I hear you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” says Troy, wincing. “I mean, I don’t really— get it? Or understand the big deal, I guess.”

“But me neither!” says Annie frantically. “That’s what I’m saying, and I feel like I’m missing out, you know? Like there’s something wrong with me.”

“Yeah,” says Troy. “I mean, getting off is awesome—”

Annie pulls a face.

“—but like, I can do that myself, you know? And like— what if, say, you really liked someone. Like, really liked, so much so that to screw it up would be just totally awful. Like, that can’t happen.”

“Yes, totally,” says Annie, and then: “Wait, do you like someone? Troy!”

Troy flushes. “Maybe? I don’t know. I just— I just mean that maybe a practice run wouldn’t be a totally bad idea, if you were into that.”

“I can be into that!” assures Annie, nodding frantically. “Troy, that’s exactly what I want, too, a practice run! I mean, I barely— I barely know what I’m doing, you know? And I don’t know how I can know if I like it, if I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

“Cool,” says Troy happily, and they grin dopily at each other for a moment. “Um, should I kiss you?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Annie, and Troy moves his face in, but then they start giggling.

“Oops,” he says, and tries again. Annie smiles into his mouth, and then tries to figure out what to do with her hands. Her brain is too focused on the mouth touching her mouth, and all her brain-power is on making sure her lips are responding right and on making sure that she’s not thinking, and then she realises that her arms are just hanging awkwardly by her sides. She puts them on Troy’s waist and accidentally touches skin.

Troy giggles. “Cold,” he explains, but he cuts off Annie’s apology. “It’s fine. Hey, you know, this is kind of like being friends with benefits, except we’re actually friends about it.”

Annie nods. She thinks about what she likes with Abed, and says, “Hey, could you—could you put your hand on my back?”

“Like this?”

It brings them closer together, and Troy is warm. Annie hums.

“Cool.”

He kisses her again, and Annie realises they should probably move out of her doorway, so she starts walking them back until her knees hit her bed.

“Still okay?” checks Troy, and Annie nods. She slowly lowers herself to sit down.

“I’ll tell you if it’s not,” she says, looking up at him. “And— you’ll do the same?”

“Promise,” says Troy. “Although, um, maybe don’t touch my belly button? They’re weird, I don’t like them. It’s like a mouth that got sewn shut.”

“They don’t really get sewn,” Annie says, as she wriggles back to be against the pillows and Troy climbs on after her, popping his chin up on his hand. “I think they kind of just close up after the umbilical cord falls off.”

“But how do they close up?” emphasises Troy, pulling his conspiracy face. “It’s weird.”

“Well it’s probably like any injury, where your body starts healing itself? Although I guess it would have to happen before the baby’s born, which means— I don’t know. Do you think I should know this? Are they going to kick me out of Hospital Administrator School for not knowing how belly buttons work?”

“There’s a school for that?”

“I don’t know, maybe! Do you want to keep kissing?”

“Oh, right,” says Troy, and so they do, and eventually it doesn’t even feel that weird to Annie. Since Vaughn, she’s only ever kissed people the once; Abed during paintball, and this one guy at a party that she feels really bad about not being able to remember his name. Her and Abed are kissing lots at the moment, yes, but that’s different somehow. She’s learned how to turn her brain off. Here she’s still hyper-aware of everything and how she could be doing it wrong.

She wonders if Troy can feel it too, the weird disconnected feeling between her head and her body. That would be terrible. She turns her head a little and her hair catches in her fuzzy pillow, which actually maybe they shouldn’t be doing anything near in case fluids get on it. Troy has his tongue in her mouth and that feels strange. She forgets to do anything with her hands.

“Okay, this isn’t working,” says Troy, pulling away and flopping onto his back. Annie sighs, and they both stare at the ceiling.

“Maybe it’s because we’re not in love with each other,” she suggests. “We could try pretending that we are.”

She’s getting really good at pretending. Troy is silent for a little while.

“We could—" he starts. “I dunno if this is bad manners. But we did agree, right at the start, so I dunno. But we could always think about— other people. If that would help.”

“You mean the girl you’re interested in?” asks Annie, and Troy doesn’t say anything. She considers it, and pulls a face. “I don’t think that would bother me. Is she pretty?”

“Really pretty,” Troy says. Annie thinks about all the other girls Troy has dated, which isn’t really all that many, but sometimes (especially during their first year) he would go out with a girl just the once and Annie feels like that’s given her a good idea of his type.

They’re usually confident, like Troy is, and also they’re usually sporty. Annie racks her brain for a good example and lands on Brenda, who plays on Greendale’s netball team. Brenda has thick, strong thighs and is confident, and she always has that silver ring on her thumb. She’s older than them, so Troy probably wouldn’t be interested in her, but she’s easy for Annie to cast herself as, can understand how introducing Brenda would ramp up the sex appeal.

“Okay,” says Annie. “We’ll think of other people and see if that helps.”

*

Annie and Troy make out for a long time. It’s kind of boring but kind of interesting, and eventually Annie feels her body get into it, even if it is with a kind of reluctance. There’s a thrill to be had at feeling Troy getting hard against her hip and knowing that she played a part in it, that it’s because of her, and she feels sexy and desirable and like she could be Britta.

She tugs at the hem of Troy’s t-shirt and pulls it over his head, and the feeling of his skin on hers is also nice. This is good, she’s learning things: she likes the roughness of his jeans against her tights and her bare skin, and she likes his hands pushing her skirt up around her hips. She likes scratching lightly at his head. She hopes it feels nice to him as well— she thinks that it would. Sometimes girls have buzzcuts too.

Annie whimpers.

She knows they’re meant to be having sex, but Troy hasn’t tried to touch her below the waist even though his jeans are off and her skirt’s hitching higher and higher, she doesn’t know if she wants to follow through on it either. Eventually things start moving in tandem anyway, like their bodies don’t care that there are still layers in the way, and it feels good. It feels really good.

Troy tucks his head into her neck and Annie’s mouth falls open with her gasps, and in her head she’s seeing more things than she can reasonably think about. She sees her and Abed on Paintball Day, and Abed doing his Inspector voice, and this one memory from high school of Troy turning around at his desk and smiling. She thinks about Britta’s blonde hair and pink lips and the way her lip gloss always shines under the fluorescents, especially that one time they lost Annie’s pen and all had to get naked. Then she’s thinking about Jeff and Britta having sex, which is weird, and then she thinks about that time her and Britta got in an argument over an oil-spill and their bodies were slip and sliding all over each other.

Annie curls her hand in Troy’s hair. She thinks about Rachel’s cute little cardigans and Brenda with her car keys, turning them over and over in her hands. Her hands are large and square and her nails are always trimmed and clean, and Annie appreciates clean hands over probably anything else. She thinks about Abed in lipstick that one time. She thinks about kissing him. She thinks about all of the music-swelling, magic movie moments they’ve had together, and feels her body jerk.

It’s on the tip of Annie’s tongue, and she feels so close to figuring out something, and she doesn’t want to say it, except she does, and they did agree they could think of other people, so she gasps out: “Abed.”

“Yeah,” pants Troy.

Annie freezes.

Troy stutters to a halt.

Opening her eyes, Annie finds Troy’s Le Var Burton Face out in full force, staring down at her in unblinking horror. She opens and closes her mouth. Then she does it again.

“Um?” she squeaks, her hands clenched tight on his shoulders. She can still feel his everything right by her everything, except now it feels horrible and wrong and cold, very very cold. Troy’s eyes get wider and wider and his mouth starts to part, and she can see his bottom row of teeth, and all of these are bad signs. “I can explain?”

“Uhhh—” starts Troy, and he’s gearing up for what Annie can tell is going to be a scream to end all screams, still looking at her with those penny-dropped eyes, and Annie’s heart starts ka-thump-ka-thump-ka-thumping in her chest, and Troy is yelling, and Annie can feel her own start to build in her chest—

She grabs his shoulders tight and says: “Troy!”

Troy sucks in a breath and holds it, but he can’t quite wipe the look of dread off his face.

“You too?” he demands, high-pitched, and Annie gapes.

“Me too?” she accuses, “What about you too?”

“Of course me too!” yells Troy. “Why wouldn’t I me too? It’s Abed, Annie, of course me too!”

Annie covers her face with her hands. “Oh my god,” she says, sinking as low as she can. Her leg slips between Troy’s and she shudders while he jerks his hips back, finally scrambling off her with the duvet-cover in tow.

“Why would you do this?” hisses Troy, wrapping himself and his modesty in the duvet while Annie flails around for her throw blanket, drawing it around her shoulders and letting it fall over everything important. She grabs a pillow for extra protection, holding it in front of her chest.

“Me?” she repeats, blinking fast. The floor is cold against her bare feet. “You’re the one who— who said we could think of— that we didn’t have to—”

“Not Abed, Annie,” cries Troy, and that makes Annie’s face twist up too, and then Troy’s bottom lip wobbles even more. “If you wanted to sleep with Abed, you should’ve just slept with Abed!”

“Are you joking?” shrieks Annie. “I can’t have sex with Abed!”

“Why not?!”

“Because!” she says, and when Troy keeps looking at her: “I don’t— I don’t want Abed—”

Tory’s eyes bug. “What does that mean? It’s Abed, Abed is perfect, why wouldn’t you—”

“I don’t know-w-w,” cries Annie, in a dog-pitched whine. Everything she’s been feeling comes out all in a rush, with tears flowing over her cheeks and her mouth contorting downwards. “I don’t know what I want anymore, I haven’t ever, and this was supposed to h-h-h-help—”

“This is so weird-d-d,” sobs Troy at the same time, and Annie flaps her hand at him.

“I know!” she cries, and then they stand there sobbing for another couple of minutes, hiding in opposite corners of Annie’s room and bursting into fresh tears every time they catch each other’s eye.

*

Abed comes home at 4pm. The door swings shut behind him and knocks Indiana Jones off the model. “Uh oh,” he says immediately.

“Annie and I tried to have sex,” mumbles Troy. Annie doesn’t know what Abed’s face does, because she’s gazing resolutely at this one specific squiggle in their rug, but the silence lasts for three beats too long. She wraps the blanket tighter around her shoulders, her arm brushing against Troy’s duvet, and they both flinch.

“Oh,” says Abed, in a weird voice.

“Yeah. It didn’t go very well.”

“Well?” repeats Annie. “It was a disaster.”

She whips her head around to look at Troy, meets his eye, and then they both whip their heads in the opposite direction, jumping. Annie’s jaw quivers.

“Look, let’s just forget about it, okay? We made a mistake, it was weird, we shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” says Abed, and he comes and stands in front of them both, pointing first at Annie, and then at Troy. “Why did you try and have sex?”

“Why do people do anything, Abed?” says Troy helplessly. “She asked me and I said yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Annie?” says Troy. “I don’t know, we made a, an arrangement, it was supposed to— to help with stuff, not turn into this. ”

“Hm,” says Abed. He looks at Annie. “Why did you ask him?”

Annie sinks into the couch, drawing her shoulders in. She’s messed up so, so badly, they’re going to hate her, they’re probably going to kick her out, and it’s all Annie’s fault, she’s so stupid—

“I don’t know,” says Annie, looking at her knees. “I guess I just thought— everything that you and I have been doing, trying to figure out my, my problem? It made me think that maybe I shouldn’t be as happy as I am with being repressed, and like maybe I really have been missing out on things, and today I felt weird and Troy said— it seemed like— I don’t know. You sounded happy to help.”

“It’s sex, Annie,” says Troy. “Guys are always happy to help girls with sex.”

“Uh!”

“What? They are.”

Abed squints at them. “Okay,” he says, slowly. “So, just to be clear, this wasn’t a renewal of your love-interest status brought about by the introduction of the roommate arc?”

Annie shakes her head, and sees Troy do the same. Abed’s posture relaxes a little as he breathes out, nodding to himself.“Good,” he says, still to himself. “That’s good. So what went wrong?”

Annie’s fingers, which had been twisting around a loose thread from the blanket, freeze in her lap. Troy shifts beside her.

“Annie said— she— Annie said something,” he says. “During— Before. While we were. She said something.”

Annie bristles. “I only said that because of all of the— the Dreamatorium stuff we’ve been doing, which, by the way, is not helping.”

“What Dreamatorium stuff?” asks Troy. He looks between them and his volume kicks up a notch. “You guys play in the Dreamatorium without me?”

“Annie and I have been acting out romance scenarios while you have dance class.”

“What?” says Troy loudly, and Annie hits his arm.

“It doesn’t mean anything!”

“Oh, sure,” says Troy. “I cannot believe you guys.”

Abed frowns at him, apparently thrown off by Troy’s indignation. “What?” he asks. “This isn’t any different from you and me playing Kickpuncher.”

“I know that, that’s the point—"

Abed cocks his head. “Is this a cheating metaphor—?”

Troy cries: “Annie’s in love with you!”

“No I’m not!” cries Annie, making fists with her hands. She holds the blanket tight around her, so tight she knows she’s putting strain on the fabric. “Abed, I’m sorry, I do love you, so much, but I’m not— I’m not in love with you, I would know. I would— I would know.”

“I know that,” says Abed, like it’s easy, and Annie sighs in relief.

“You do?”

“Of course I do,” says Abed. Annie’s never been so glad as she is now to hear his simple, matter-of-fact explanation for it. “We had a very clear conversation about it, remember? No falling in love with each other. It was a rule.”

“Yeah,” agrees Annie, the weight falling off her. “And it’s not— the Dreamatorium stuff. Would it be weird if I still wanted to do that?”

Abed shakes his head. “No, it’s friend-kissing. We agreed.”

“Friend-kissing?” repeats Troy, and Abed does that thing with his eyebrows that Annie hasn’t figured out yet but Troy is fluent in, a sort of double raised eyebrow. She presses on, ignoring Troy entirely.

“Okay, cool,” she says, happily. “And you’re not in love with me?”

Abed shakes his head. She loves how simple it is, how sure she feels. Abed wouldn’t lie to her, because friends don’t lie, and that’s basically the same as being given a dot-pointed checklist of how to be a good friend.

Abed says, “I like helping you and making you happy. And you always brush your teeth before we kiss.”

Annie smiles, curling into herself. She feels shy. “You asked me to.”

“Exactly,” says Abed, and Annie abandons her blanket to throw her arms around him.

“Oh, Abed!”

He hugs her back, the touch as light as usual. Annie leaves her hands on him as she turns back to Troy. “See? I told you it wasn’t weird.”

“It’s a little weird, Annie,” protests Troy, head poking out from her duvet. “Me and Abed are supposed to be the ones with the indefinable relationship, remember? Not— whatever this is.”

Abed shrugs, but he looks pleased when he looks down at Annie again, and she feels it too. “I guess that’s just what it’s like to have friends,” he says, and Annie’s heart sings in her chest.

*

That night, Annie lies in her bed under fresh sheets and listens to Troy and Abed get ready for bed. It should feel like eavesdropping, but she knows that Troy and Abed know that she can hear them if her door’s open, so they must just not mind. Sometimes Annie leaves her door open on purpose and they call back and forth to each other from their beds. Other times it’s just nice to fall asleep to the sound of their voices, wrapped up in a conversation she can’t follow.

Tonight, Annie tells herself that she’s listening because she’s worried they’re going to ask her to leave the apartment, but she knows she doesn’t actually believe that. Abed said it was okay, and Troy said it was okay, and she trusts that they wouldn’t lie to her, even if she did make things awful. But it all turned out fine and Troy and her were even looking at each other by dinner time, and he kissed her cheek goodnight like usual. So maybe she is eavesdropping.

They talk about their screenplay for a bit and then Abed’s media class, and then she has to tuck away a smile as they parrot their Jeff-impressions back to each other. She rolls onto her side and snuggles into her duvet, cosy and warm. She listens to them invent the next instalment of their ongoing bedtime story, which seems to Annie to be fifty percent improvisation, forty percent Dungeons & Dragons, and ten percent Transformers. She blinks slowly at her wall, drifting off.

After a while:

“Hey, Abed?”

Abed hums.

“You know you could tell me if you were in love with Annie, right?”

Annie freezes.

“I know.”

“So, are you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” asks Troy, while Annie curls her duvet tight in her fist. She holds her breath.

“Yes. Why? Are you in love with Annie?”

There’s a rustling noise, and the creak of the bunkbed.

“No. Kinda? I don’t know.” Troy pauses. “I discovered I definitely don’t want to have sex with her. But then I don’t feel this way about anyone else except for you.”

After a minute, Troy adds:

“I mean, that’s not right. I don’t feel about anyone the way I feel about you. But Annie is pretty and I think it’s messing with my brain and making me think that my friend-feelings are love-feelings.”

“I don’t know,” says Abed, quietly. Annie only really hears the gist of the three syllables. When he continues, his voice is careful and considered, like he’s talking around something. “Movies and TV tend to tell us that romantic and platonic love are different, but I’m not so sure. I think it’s the different acts of intimacy that tell the audience which kind of love it is.”

“So I could have love-feelings for Annie but not want to kiss her?”

“Maybe,” says Abed. “Or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t mind kissing Annie, and if she asked me to have sex, I’d probably say yes too. But I don’t want it the way I do with— other people. I don’t know what that means.”

“Yeah,” says Troy. “It’s hard putting all this stuff into words.”

After a moment, Abed adds: “You’re my favourite people. I don’t want to screw it up.”

“You won’t,” says Troy sleepily. There’s some rustling noises, and the squeak of a mattress shifting under his weight. “Love you, Abed.”

“I know,” says Abed, and Annie rolls over in her bed, squeezing Ruthie tight against her chest and closing her eyes so her tears don’t fall.

*

Annie has an eleven o’clock class while Troy and Abed start at eight, so she makes her own way to campus, wringing her hands the entire while. It’s not that she wants to end it, exactly, but in the wake of everything, it feels like there is one large, momentous bridge that she has to cross.

“Abed,” says Annie, in her debater voice, “I wanted to thank you for all your help over the past few months, with figuring out my— my problem.” She says the word in a hush. “But I think, given the events of yesterday, that it would be better to call it off.”

Abed blinks. “Okay,” he says, after a moment. They’re in the study room, Annie hovering awkwardly on her feet and Abed blinking up at her from his seat, and her ears are buzzing.

“Really?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

She swallows. “Oh. Well, good. Um, would it be too much to ask for a—a last hurrah?”

Abed cocks his head. Troy’s belongings are strewn across the desk, so he can’t be far away, but Annie finds she wants this conversation to be done before he gets here. “What did you have in mind?”

“Um. Well, we. We never did Pride & Prejudice.”

Her hands are shaking, so she tucks them behind her back. Abed tilts his head, considering, and says, “Okay. But I think Troy might find it weird.”

“Do we have to tell him?”

Abed looks at her. “Yeah,” he says. “I think so. Now that he knows.”

Annie swallows, and even if she could find an argument against it, she doesn’t get the time—Troy bounds in as chipper as ever, flushing a little when he sees her but recovering quickly. He kisses her cheek and her blood flourishes hot underneath it.

“Hey, Annie,” he says, sitting on the desk and tucking his fingers under his thighs, feet kicking this way and that. He glances whip-sharp at Abed, smiling wide and nervous. “What’re you talking about?”

Annie’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth, but Abed saves her, just like always.

“Annie and I are going to do Pride & Prejudice,” he says.

“The one with the Mamma Mia guy?” he asks, and Annie nods.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, if that’s, um. If that’s okay with you, anyway. You could—” She flushes even worse, “You could chaperone, if you really wanted.”

Troy looks at Abed and they have another wordless conversation, and Annie fights against putting a hand to her stomach. She’s going to hurl, she’s going to be sick so awfully, all over her favourite yellow cardigan, and she was so stupid to think they wouldn’t have talked about it this morning, out of the apartment where she couldn’t overhear.

Abed looks at Annie and then Troy.

“We could all do it,” he suggests, his eyes flicking between them. He smiles a little. “We could make it an event, for your birthday.”

Annie blinks. Her mouth opens. “For my— really?”

Abed shrugs. Troy looks at him like he’s hung the moon. “Why not? I know it doesn’t really keep on theme with why we started doing it, but it would be fun, and we’d have a bigger cast to work with which would make it more realistic.”

Troy taps Abed’s shoulder in excitement, one two three four five. “We could get the Dean to host a dance! We could have a school-wide birthday party!"

Abed nods, up and down in quick succession. He looks at Annie. “Would you want that?”

She nods, pressing her fingers against her mouth. It’s not the size of it that gets to her, but the thought, the intention, the idea of Troy and Abed going all out for her because it’s her, because they love her, because they’re friends.

“I don’t know what to say,” says Annie, lip trembling under her hand. “That’s so sweet, you guys!”

Troy beams at her, nodding excitedly, and Abed smiles too. “You like it?”

“I love it!” she says, and wraps them both in a hug. They jump up and down a few times, and when Annie pulls away, she has to wipe at her eyes and sniff loudly. “This is the coolest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“Well, we haven’t done it yet,” says Abed, and falls into planning mode. “We’ll have to assign characters. You’ll be Lizzie, of course, and Britta should play Jane or Charlotte, maybe both, depending on who else is involved—”

“Oh!” says Annie, grabbing his arm, “We can ask the girls from The Student Organisational Body!”

Abed clicks his tongue. “That will work. And then there’s Mr Darcy, who if we’re going by tradition, should be played by me, but it’s okay if you want someone else to do it.”

Annie tries to picture who her dream Mr Darcy would be, but she can’t come up with anyone beyond Colin Firth. Rachel would tell her to pick Abed, probably, so she says: “It’s got to be you! This whole thing is part of Annie and Abed’s Amazing Adventures, right?”

“You guys gave it a cool name?”

Abed fires off a finger gun twice, one to her and one to Troy. “Yup. And Troy should be Bingley, obviously, and in order to maximise Jeff’s participation, Jeff should be—”

“Mr Bennet,” finishes Annie, and Abed grins.

“Exactly.”

Annie beams at him and digs out her notebook so they can start mind-mapping. Abed leans in close to her, tucking his head over her shoulder as she scribbles and making suggestions. Troy settles into his seat and grins warmly up at them, and he hooks his ankle around hers. Annie feels warm and flushed all over.

The study group wanders in eventually and Annie flips closed her notebook, Abed stepping away from her and the two of them returning to their proper seats. She feels a little caught out but still has that spring in her step, so that she has to tuck a smile into her chest as she gets seated, grinning stupidly down at the desk.

She’s so lost in it that she only says a cursory hello to Shirley, pulling out her Biology binder and flicking to her latest notes without even getting out her highlighters, which is really saying something.

Abed dings a fork against Troy’s water bottle, silencing the group.

“If you’ll all listen up, Troy and I have an announcement.”

Annie looks over, at Abed in DM mode and Troy hanging off his every word, and Abed spreads his hands wide. “We’re planning a birthday party for Annie.”

“Cool,” says Britta, after a moment, and Shirley says, “Oh, thank goodness.”

Annie whacks her on the arm.

“It’s going to be an epic, school-wide LARPing event starring us—” Abed gestures around the table. “—in our very own edition of Pride and Prejudice. Your role and lines will be assigned to you at a later date.”

Jeff squints. “Won’t that be kind of weird, us all playing love interests? What if it creates a false reality of feelings?”

Abed shakes his head, dismissing it. “Annie and I have been doing it for months. As long as there are clear rules and boundaries established, it’ll be fine.”

“You— what?”

Annie gulps.

“Annie and I have been playing love interests for months,” repeats Abed. He says it in his usual flat way, but Annie sees how sharply he’s paying attention and knows he’s said it on purpose. “In the Dreamatorium.”

“The dream-a-whatta?” asks Shirley. Annie intervenes as smoothly as she can, drawing herself up to her full height and only sounding vaguely like a very tiny, squeaky mouse.

“What Abed means to say,” she says briskly, “Is that he and I have been indulging in, um, roleplay. At home. On occasion.”

“Oh, good lord,” says Jeff.

Shirley turns to her all a flutter, her eyes wide and distressed. “Annie, if you and Abed were dating you could have come and told me.”

“It’s not like that,” protests Annie, crossing her arms. “We’re friends.”

“Just friends,” adds Abed. “And not the When Harry Met Sally kind, either.”

“That’s pretty weird behaviour for just friends, Abed,” says Jeff, and the two of them glare at him in unison.

“I think you’ll find that’s for us to decide, actually,” says Annie, high-and-mighty, and Abed points at her. Jeff looks between them.

“And you’re fine with this,” he says to Troy, who shrugs.

“Abed and I do stuff in the Dreamatorium all the time,” he says, and Britta mutters, “I’ll say.”

Annie’s pretty sure Jeff kicks her, because their corner of the table wobbles something fierce, and Britta glares at him.

“Look, just leave it alone, okay?” begs Annie, trying to regain control. “Abed and I don’t have to explain ourselves to you, we’re just two friends who enjoy acting out romance movies together. It doesn’t mean that we’re in love.”

“Exactly,” agrees Abed, and looks around at the table. “Being friends with Annie is like being friends with myself, but instead of self-esteem falling out of my butt, it’s love.”

“Awesome,” says Troy.

“Eurgh,” says Jeff.

*

Annie brings up the party to her girlfriends the next time they all meet up on Monday afternoon, and explains what will and won’t be required. She doesn’t know too much, because everyone insisted that she shouldn’t be involved in planning her own surprise party, but she gives them the general gist of what to expect and asks if they have a character preference. Abed shows them his spreadsheet.

“Brenda? Who do you want to be?” asks Annie, holding her notebook to her chest and fiddling with the spirals. Brenda smiles.

“Oh, I’m easy,” she says, and Annie’s tongue trips over in her mouth.

“I’ll mark you down as one of the gentlemen,” says Annie, and Brenda’s smile lingers in her brain long after she leaves, keys clinking on her carabiner. Annie stares wistfully after her.

“I like her,” says Abed, twirling his pencil around in his fingers as he watches Brenda sashay from the room. “She’s like Gina Gershon in Bound.”

“I haven’t seen that one,” says Annie, swinging her feet. “But I find it a little hard to believe there’s anyone out there like her. She’s so— Brenda.”

“Hm,” says Abed, and then he holds his hand out for the list. “Do you think Britta could convince Jeff to grow mutton-chops?”

Annie snorts. “If she sleeps with him, maybe,” she says, and holds up a finger before he can say anything else. “It’s rude to ask.”

He frowns, and crosses out a long line in the notebook.

*

On Annie’s birthday, they all convene in the study room at lunch time and Shirley starts them off with her best Mrs Bennet, and Annie lives out what has easily been her biggest fantasy of all time since she was ten. Abed proposes to her and they stand very chastely side by side, and then at seven head down to the cafeteria for the dance.

She has to dance with Abed, of course, but Troy is the first to take her for a spin. She can’t believe they did all this for her, that they learnt a regency dance for her. Three dances. Annie feels like she’s going to cry.

“Milady,” says Jeff, offering his hand, and Annie slips her own into his.

“Milord,” she returns, letting him lead her to the dance floor. It’s not an official dance that’s happening now, instead just a general slow dance, and Jeff waltzes them around until he finally works up enough courage to share whatever thought is on his mind.

“Hey, Annie,” he says, and Annie looks up at him. “You’re happy, right?”

Annie blinks. “Pardon?”

“You know,” says Jeff. “Living with Batman and Robin over there. You’re all good?”

“Yeah,” says Annie slowly, and Jeff nods.

“Good. That’s good.”

“Why do you ask?”

Jeff shrugs. She feels the movement of his shoulders under her hands, and it does absolutely nothing for her. Her eyes catch on Troy and Abed goofing off on the other side of the cafeteria, and then on Rachel standing and sipping on her drink. She played Charlotte Lucas in the simulation. “Just. Looking out for you. You’re a good kid.”

Annie awws. “Are you worried about me, Jeff Winger?”

Jeff winces. “Okay, don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“The Jeff Winger thing. Calling people by their first and last name is so utterly embarrassing.”

Annie pushes lightly at him. “Okay, Mr Buzzkill,” she says, and he spins them around, and they sway. “But to answer your question: I’m fine. I’m really good.”

“Good,” says Jeff, and grins at her. “Just, make sure it stays that way, okay?”

“I’m not going to muck it up, Jeff,” she says, and Jeff shakes his head, looking off above her head.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says, going oddly sentimental on her. It must be because it’s her birthday. “I just mean that… what you guys have, it’s something special. What we all have is something special. But I’m not delusional enough to think that you guys don’t have… the bonds of youth, or whatever. So. Yeah. You get it.”

Annie smiles helplessly, lifting her hands from his shoulders a little. “I really don’t,” she says, “but I’ll take your word for it?”

“Fair enough,” says Jeff, and he spins her out and under his arm, then tucks her into his chest. She rests her head on it, still grinning a little, and thinks bizarrely of dancing around with her feet on her dad’s shoes, wonders if Jeff would let her if she asked him. He probably would—Jeff likes to pretend he’s really cool, but she knows he’d do anything for them.

He walks her back over to the party table when they’re done, dropping her hand with a wink and heading off to take Shirley for a spin, which makes Annie grin so widely that her cheeks hurt. She watches Shirley smack him lightly on the arm, but she looks pleased at whatever flattery he’s peddling and takes him up on it. Annie rests her chin on her hand and is gazing at them when Rachel sits down beside her, fidgeting with her clutch.

“Hey, Rachel,” says Annie, smiling wide under the disco ball (not very historically accurate, but she’ll take it). “How amazing is this?”

“It’s really cool, Annie.”

Rachel is dressed up in a nice white dress, the empire waistline nestled under somewhere Annie deliberately avoids looking at. Her hair is in a low bun and Annie wishes she could pull off that sort of laid-back effortless look, even more so because she knows it probably really was effortless. Rachel doesn’t wear as much make-up as Annie, but then she has such lovely bone structure instead, and the lights cast shiny reflections on her cheeks and collar bones and other places.

Rachel sips on her water and her lips sparkle. Annie tugs at the neckline of her own dress, self-conscious, and sits up a little straighter.

“Are you having fun?”

“Yeah,” says Rachel quickly, so quickly that Annie wonders if she’s lying. Her cheeks go a pretty pink, and she looks down and out to the side. “Hey, Annie, I was wondering—”

Someone holds out her hand to Annie, and Rachel stops talking. Annie takes in the hand and the silver ring and the navy sleeve and most of all the face, and knows her expression hurdles into Disney territory.

“Hi Brenda,” she says, breathless. Brenda grins down at her, all lopsided and gorgeous and made out of marble. Keira Knightley kissed Mr Darcy’s bust in the film. She wiggles her fingers.

“Can I take the birthday girl for a dance?” she asks, and Annie slides her hand into Brenda’s without a thought.

Brenda pulls her to her feet and Annie’s breath catches like a scared rabbit in her throat, but Brenda’s in her mock-up tailcoat and it’s all part of the game, so it’s fine. Annie reminds herself of this as they take their places in the lines, tries to remind herself of the steps she learned so carefully. Brenda’s dressed herself as a man, but she’s pretty much always a little butch; closer to Britta’s age than Annie’s, with her big work boots and her cropped hair and her strong Roman features. She cuts a convincing gentleman; Annie admires her as the song starts.

Brenda’s palm is smooth against hers. She twirls Annie around the room and asks questions about the Organizational Body and whether Annie’s doing anything else to celebrate her birthday, and Annie stumbles through an explanation about her and Troy and Abed having ramen and a boardgame night for a quieter celebration, and then the song is ending and Brenda is dropping Annie back off at the food table like the pumpkin carriage in Cinderella.

Her legs wobble as she sits down beside Abed, reaching out and sliding her fingers through his. He returns the favour even as he doesn’t skip a beat in his conversation with Britta, winding his fingers with hers.

“Do you want to dance?” asks Rachel suddenly, and Annie blinks as she comes back to herself, looking to her left at Rachel’s flushed face.

“Not— not right now,” Annie says, flustered. “Sorry. Maybe later?”

“Okay,” says Rachel, and Annie downs what’s left of her root beer in one.

*

They’re all weaving their way through the corridors to Biology when Annie next sees Brenda, carving her way through the sea of people. Annie’s walking arm in arm with Shirley and Brenda smiles as she passes, and something takes a hold of Annie’s throat and impulses and sanity.

“Wait, wait, I just have to—” She slips her arm out of Shirley’s and jogs after Brenda, catching her by the arm and flushing when she turns around. Brenda smiles again.

“Hey, Annie,” she says, easy as anything. “What’s up?”

Annie stammers a little. “Oh, um, nothing,” she says, and nervous energy shakes her shoulders as she laughs. “Um, no, I just wanted to say thank you, you know, for the party. For coming and everything. That was really cool of you.”

“Oh, no worries,” says Brenda, with a shrug. “It was fun. Everyone looked really cute in their outfits.”

“Oh,” says Annie, and feels her smile flutter like it can’t decide what to do. “Thank you.”

Brenda clicks her tongue, winking in her over-confident and charming way, and Annie half follows her before remembering that she’s meant to be going the opposite direction. “Bye,” she says breathlessly, and watches Brenda’s form cut through the students, her shoulders moving under her leather jacket. She wants to run after her, although she doesn’t know what she’d say.

Swallowing, Annie forces herself to turn around and walk back to where the group is waiting. They all start moving again and Jeff and Britta are having one of their not-fights, which are usually entertaining, but Annie’s thinking about other things like the jumpy feeling in her chest. She stumbles into Troy.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, and starts to panic. If she stays like this, then she’s not going to be able to concentrate in class, and if she can’t concentrate in class, then she’s going to get behind, and the study group won’t be any help because god knows she’s the only person keeping this study group a study group. She’s got to do something to get rid of this, and now. 

“Abed,” hisses Annie, and latches onto his sleeve, tugging him to hang back from the rest of the group. Abed looks her up and down, and Annie shifts from foot to foot. “Do you— would you— would you kiss me? Could we kiss, quickly? Is that alright?”

Her heart is dancing and her palms feel all itchy. She’s not even sure she wants Abed to kiss her, but she has to do something, and if Abed doesn’t mind—

Abed furrows his brow, and looks over her shoulder. Then he looks back at her. Annie jumps around some more, bouncing on the balls of her feet while she waits. Abed cocks his head, his figuring-out face on, but Annie doesn’t pay it any mind. She’s too swept up in it all, in this beehive that’s taken root in her ribs. She sees something change in his eyes, some kind of realisation, and then he settles into character and slides a hand around her waist.

“No, I don’t think I will kiss you,” murmurs Abed, as Annie swoons against him. His hand is hot on her back, holding her close and firm, and his voice is low and sultry. “Although you need kissing badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.”

“Totally,” breathes Annie, feeling dizzy, and Abed kisses her, not with a friend-kiss but with a Dreamatorium-kiss, right here in the hallway where people can see. Annie winds her arms around his neck, gasping into his mouth when he lifts her off her feet, and it’s so perfect and wonderful and Brenda said she was cute.

Abed lowers her back down to Earth, relaxing his hold on her into something more gentle. She blinks her eyes open, swaying, and Abed says:

“How was that?”

Annie nods.

“Cool,” she says, dazedly. “Cool, cool, cool.”

“Cool. Can we go to class now?”

“Yeah,” sighs Annie, and lets him lead her there by the hand.

*

“You seriously don’t mind that she does that?” asks Troy as they sit down, though Annie’s not sure if she’s meant to hear. Sometimes Troy goes so deep into Abed-mode that he forgets everyone else is there too. He sounds envious and wistful all at once, and Annie arranges her books on the desk. She still feels fluttery, but she feels kind of sated, too.

“Nope,” says Abed, popping the ‘p’. “It’s fun. I like being the leading man.”

“I’ll be your leading man,” says Troy, like it’s an insult, and Abed says: “What?”

“What? Nothing. No-one. Hey, Professor Kane, word up!”

Annie jots down her notes, but her foot is bopping restlessly under the table. Lots of guys have called her cute, she’s pretty sure, but it’s never made her feel like this. It’s never made her lose her head and need something, desperately and instantly. But Brenda said it and Annie wanted to fall at her feet, wanted Brenda at her own, wanted to hear it again and again and again. It means something, Annie knows it does. It has to.

She wants someone to put their hand on her thigh, Troy or Abed or anyone. She pulls the chocolate Abed slipped her earlier out from her bag and pops it in her mouth, relishing the sugar. There is something somewhere that Annie needs but isn’t getting, and her body is neighing at her like a grumpy horse and she doesn’t know how to make the feeling stop, and it is better and worse around Brenda and Britta and Rachel.

Surreptitiously, she flips to the very back of her binder, to the page of notepaper that is still just a heading, from what feels like so long ago. With a pink, sparkly pen, she crosses out the word “boys”, and then doesn’t get any further. She moves her pen down a few lines.

Girls I would kiss just to see, writes Annie, and each letter feels absolutely traitorous, and her ears are so, so hot and everyone must be looking at her, they must, and she has to resist the urge to look over her shoulder. Six different names come to mind instantly, and Annie flips the binder shut so suddenly that it smacks loudly closed, and Abed jumps.

“Sorry,” whispers Annie. He looks at her for a moment, brow creasing, and she tucks her hair behind her ear and pretends not to see.

*

It was a warm and sunny afternoon when Abed first kissed her and changed her life, and it’s a warm and sunny afternoon when he upends it all over again.

“Hi Annie,” says Abed, and she feels herself frown, gradually coming to a stop. He has his notebooks arranged out on the table, sitting at the window like he would for their Dungeons & Dragons game, fingers steepled in front of him. Annie checks the kitchen for Troy.

“Is this an intervention?” she asks, and Abed shakes his head.

“No. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay,” says Annie, and pulls up a chair. “Shoot.”

Abed nods. Then he says: “Do you remember when I accidentally tracked your menstrual cycle and you decided it was creepy? But then you moved in and you changed your mind and you said it was okay for me to know things like that?”

“Of course,” says Annie. “We got closer and I didn’t mind anymore.”

“Exactly,” says Abed. “Well, the thing is, I did the same thing again with something else.”

Abed pauses, and looks down at the paper on the table. “And, again, I didn’t know at first what I was charting, and now that I do, I think that I probably shouldn’t have. But I thought that since I already did it and because of everything you’ve been saying this year, that maybe I should show you anyway, in case it helps. Also, before I show you I wanted to stop and tell you that I love you.”

He nods. Annie blinks. “Abed…”

“I made charts,” says Abed, and pushes some pieces of paper towards her. “Because I started noticing that you would want to go into the Dreamatorium more often on Tuesdays and Thursdays than any other day. And then, when the Dreamatorium started to become trans-liminal, I noticed that certain events seemed to trigger you into rendering environments.”

Annie picks up the first sheet of letter paper, her throat dry. It has her classes on it, as well as Student Organisational Body meetings. She swallows. “What are you trying to say?”

Abed shrugs. “I’m not trying to say anything, I just thought that you might like to see the findings. I thought it might help you.”

“Abed,” says Annie, as she compares the two charts. Her chest is so light that she might float out of her chair. “Are you calling me gay?”

Abed looks at her.

“Abed!”

Abed opens his mouth, then closes it. “They’re just correlations. They don’t mean anything unless you say they do.”

Annie clutches the papers to her chest. “You can’t just go around accusing people of being gay, Abed!” she says.

“I’m not accusing you,” says Abed simply, and then: “Are you gay?”

Annie shakes her head once, twice, three times. “No!” she hisses.

“Okay. Do you have a crush on Brenda?”

“Do you have a crush on Troy?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Uh!” says Annie, and they fall into silence. Her ears are buzzing and she can’t get her eyes off a scratch in the table. It wasn’t there when she cleaned it last week, she’s sure of it. She needs to buy walnuts so that she can use one to fix the scratch in the table. She read that somewhere and found out it worked a treat when they scraped the floors moving said table. She fidgets with the corner of the chart.

“Would,” starts Annie, and then clears her throat to stop sounding so much like a little mouse. “I’m not, but—would it be okay? If I was, y’know, I mean. If I— felt that way. About Brenda. Or— or anyone. Would that be fine?”

“Yes,” says Abed immediately. “We love you, Annie. It would be okay.”

Annie sniffles, pressing her lips tightly together. The piece of paper flaps in her trembling hand. “And I could still live here? It wouldn’t send down the ratings?”

“No,” says Abed.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Abed smiles softly at her. “It doesn’t matter what we do. I worked it out. The ratings don’t matter; we’re more of a cult classic.”

Annie wails. Abed stands up and walks around the table, and he puts his hand on her shoulder. Annie sobs some more. Her hand gets all wet and snotty and gross as she tries to hide the worst of it, but then Abed hands her a tissue box because he loves her, and she cries even harder.

“But I’m not supposed to be gay!” Annie sobs, and Abed moves his hand from her shoulder to her hair. She clutches his shirt, careful to keep the tissue between the fabric and her snot, and Abed strokes her hair the way Troy does to calm him down. It’s really sweet. “I’m supposed to be happy living with you guys forever!”

“You can still live with us forever,” says Abed, and Annie shakes her head.

“Not when you get married,” she cries, “Not when, not when you decide that you don’t n-n-need me anymore or when—”

“Annie,” says Abed, somewhere far above her. “I told you, I’m not going to get married—”

“To Troy, Abed!”

Abed’s hand freezes briefly in her hair.

“That’s not going to happen,” says Abed, “That’s not how it works, you’re not— Troy and I don’t— you’re our Annie, Annie. You’re our Annie. Even if— we wouldn’t— Troy and I don’t ever wanna live without you. You can be happy living with us forever. Stop being upset.”

Annie hiccups, snatching another tissue from the box. She blows her nose once and then another time for good measure, heaving one final sniff as she starts to calm down. Abed resumes stroking her hair, and she swallows hard.

“You have terrible bedside manner,” Annie says, wiping her eyes, and Abed peers back to look at her.

“Are you still crying?”

She shakes her head, her eyes sore and sinuses blocked. “Okay.” His fingers twitch in her hair. “Nothing is going to change, I promise. We don’t change, not fundamentally. We stay the same forever and you can live here forever and it’s going to be awesome, and we’re going to keep having whacky hijinks until we all die together in a meteor explosion.”

She looks woefully up at him. “What if you become a big-shot director? What about when I’m a hospital administrator?”

“Irrelevant,” says Abed. “We can still live here forever.”

Annie blinks, hard, and finally realises what’s happening. She looks up at him. “Abed? Did I freak you out? Are you freaking out?”

“No,” says Abed stubbornly, as he keeps tapping his fingers on her head in rapid-fire rhythm. “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t really mean it, that things were going to change,” she says.

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, yeah, but not when it makes you this upset.”

“That’s how I feel,” says Abed, tap, tap, tap, “when you’re upset.”

“Oh.” Her eyes well up again. She sniffs and rests her head against his stomach, arms wrapped around his waist. “Do you want to watch Buffy?”

“Yes,” says Abed immediately, and Annie closes her eyes. “I’ll make you some tea.”

*

Her and Abed have been watching Buffy together whenever they get the chance, Annie for the first time and Abed for the third. She really likes it, but Troy won’t watch it with them because he gets freaked out by the vampire faces. They’re only on season three, but they’re supposed to finish it tonight and Annie’s really nervous about how it’s all going to end.

It’s possible Annie’s recent revelations are affecting her media analysis skills, though.

“Um,” says Annie, blinking fiercely as if it’ll change what she’s seeing, “Is this what I think it is?”

Abed nods. “It’s a metaphor for sex, yeah.”

Annie feels her cheeks heat up, sinking a little further into the couch. “This feels so explicit.”

“But it’s not. It’s clever like that. This whole season is about Buffy’s pent-up sexual frustration; Angel is out of her reach, and although her interactions with Faith are sensual, they’re prevented from being anything more by the powers of the narrative. This is Buffy’s release.”

Buffy kicks over a table. Annie shrinks further. “So… hunting with Faith. That was all metaphor?”

“Characters do that when they’re not ready to face something. Or just to make a better story. It’s boring if every episode announces the season’s theme in black and white.”

“Like Supernatural,” says Annie, even though she likes that show because the lead actors are pretty. Abed shoots a finger-gun at her. She fiddles with her skirt.

“Do you think people can use metaphors in real-life?” Annie asks eventually, and Abed cocks his head in thought.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Two years ago I would have said yes, but I’m trying to be more careful about accidentally reducing people only to TV tropes and characteristics. I think sometimes when people are dealing with something, it can come across like a TV metaphor to other people, but to the person themselves the situation is probably much richer. It doesn’t reduce itself to something as simple as needing to have sex.”

Annie focuses on Buffy. “Do you think I’ve been creating a metaphor?”

Abed shrugs. “I don’t know. I think if you were on TV you would have been creating a metaphor.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“I don’t think so.”

Annie presses her lips together, and tugs her cardigan around her. “If I was on TV,” she starts, pulling her sleeves over he knuckles, “what do you think the metaphor would have been for?”

Abed looks at her. The TV reflects in his eyes, and Annie understands what Troy means when he says Abed’s eyes are gentle and mysterious. Abed has a way of looking at her that Annie will never really get, but she always feels safe and warm and loved anyway.

“Is this the thing where you want me to tell you what I think you’re feeling, as a student of human character?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, I don’t know. I think you think a lot of things about yourself and don’t really feel them, like me. I think it’s probably confusing and hard to pin down.”

Annie nods, pressing her tongue against her teeth. “I don’t know what it feels like to want to have sex,” she whispers, and Abed doesn’t say anything. “I think maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong. I don’t know what you and I are doing, and I’m scared that— I’m scared that the way I feel around, around Brenda, and Britta, and, and everyone— is how it feels to want something. I don’t wanna be like that.”

She sniffles again, and wipes under her eyes. They feel sore and itchy and tender. Abed takes her hand and squeezes it, interlacing their fingers together. Buffy kicks vampire butt on the TV, and Annie holds on tight.

*

“Abed,” says Annie quietly, her head poking through the blanket fort. “Hey. Are you awake?”

“Not really,” mumbles Abed, and Annie twists the blankets in her fingers, mindful that if she tugs too hard the whole thing will come crashing down. She swallows in an attempt to clear her voice.

“Could you help me with something?”

“It’s midnight,” says Abed, and Annie’s eye adjust enough that she can see the lumpy shape of Troy sprawled out on top of him. It makes her want to cry even more than she already does. “Can we do it tomorrow instead?”

Annie nods. “Yeah,” she whispers. “Okay.”

Abed’s gaze feels assessing even in the darkness, even when she knows he can’t see her.

“You can sleep on the top bunk if you want,” he offers, and a couple of tears do make their way out and over Annie’s cheeks.

“Okay,” she says, and shuffles in. Abed makes a rustling noise, and then their lava lamp is there to wash the fort in soft pink and purple hues. Troy snuffles.

“Wha’s happening?” he asks, and Annie watches him nose at Abed’s neck, watches Abed’s face melt out into something soft and lovely, his palm resting sure and comfortable on Troy’s shoulder blade. It’s almost worse that she knows it doesn’t mean anything.

“It’s just Annie,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” murmurs Troy, tucking his head in even closer.  “Love you, Annie.”

Annie climbs up to the top bunk and slips under Troy’s Spiderman duvet, and it smells just like Jeff’s cologne, which is weird and makes her wrinkle her nose, but it’s kind of cute, too. She tucks the duvet tightly around herself, Miss Hospital Corners, and below her she can hear the even breathing of Troy and Abed, in tandem even in that. She closes her eyes and counts back from ten, and then she does it again.

*

“Hey,” says Abed in the morning, handing her her smiley yellow mug, “What did you want to ask me last night?”

Annie flushes, and tugs her pyjama sleeves around her palms. She wishes they were her adventure pyjamas, but they’re just a sweatshirt and pink fuzzy pants. “Oh,” she says. “Um, it was stupid, probably.”

Abed raises an eyebrow. Annie sighs.

“I wanted to know if we could go into the Dreamatorium,” she admits, her face still feeling pink. “I wanted to, um. I wanted to try Pride & Prejudice again.”

Abed cocks his head. “Was something wrong with the party?”

“No!” says Annie. “No, of course not, I just— I wanted to try, um. I wanted to try— reversing it. It’s stupid. I just thought that maybe you could be— you could be Lizzie, and that I could be—”

“Mr Darcy,” finishes Abed, when it becomes clear that Annie isn’t going to. “Okay.”

Annie nods, staring at her coffee so she won’t cry. She doesn’t know why she thought it would be weird, not when it’s compared to everything else she’s made Abed do, but she thought it might be. She wishes she could be like him sometimes, that everything could just make sense and that she didn’t care about what anyone outside of this apartment thought of her, even though she knows he isn’t like that at all.

With the help of YouTube, Abed helps her tie Troy’s spiderman tie in a cravat-like creation, holding the collar of her shirt up high against her neck. Her heart races the entire time. They swap and Annie holds his jaw in one hand and her lipstick in the other, and they barely exchange two words together. He looks really pretty in red.

“You have bewitched me, body and soul,” says Mr Darcy. “And I love— I love—”

Her voice fails, and she has to lick her lips before she can keep speaking. “I love you. And I never wish to be parted from you from this day forth.”

Lizzie steps forward, and she slips her hand into Mr Darcy’s, pulling it up to her mouth.

“Well, then,” says Lizzie, and she kisses Annie’s hand. Abed’s lips are soft.

“Your hands are cold,” he murmurs, and Annie presses her forehead against his, a tidal wave within her, and the music fades out of Annie’s phone’s crappy speaker. The sunrise is warm on her face and Lizzie’s hand is warm and Annie is Mr Darcy and she is probably going to cry very hard and for a very long time when this is over. She takes a deep breath.

“Stop simulation,” whispers Annie, and they stay there for a moment longer before they pull away. Abed looks at her, Meg Ryan crinkle in full force, and then he leans down and kisses her softly on the mouth, just for a moment. Annie hugs him.

“I love you,” she says, and he holds onto her really tight.

*

Annie hates and loves thunderstorms in equal measure; she likes bundling up in a blanket with her books and a cup of cocoa, but she dislikes the summer rainstorms, when the air is muggy and her head hurts from the pressure. It’s still perfect movie-watching weather, though, so she lies back with her head in Troy’s lap and half drifts to sleep while Scary Movie plays. Troy spins and smooths and curls strands of her hair in his fingers.

She’s warm and comfortable and nearly dozing when the doorbell rings, and she listens to Abed’s footfalls with the contentment that comes from living in the same place, with the same people, for almost a year. The footfalls pad back over to the couch.

“Um, Annie?” says Abed, “There’s a romance trope at the door for you.”

“A what?” asks Annie, and looks up.

Rachel is standing in the doorway, water-logged and with fogged-up glasses, and dripping onto their welcome mat. Annie blinks at her, and Rachel blinks back. Her cheeks are flushed.

“Oh my god,” says Annie, rising to her feet. “Are you okay? Come inside, you’re soaked! Did you walk here?”

“Um,” says Rachel, as Annie leads her gently by the wrist into the kitchen, looking her over for signs of distress. Rachel follows with a bit of a blank expression, like she wasn’t expecting to see Annie at all, which is ridiculous because Annie lives here.

“Abed, can you get us a towel?”

“On it.”

She pushes Rachel to sit on a stool and it squeaks when she does, a horrible sound of wet material on vinyl. She squeezes Rachel’s wrist and water pools out of her cardigan, slipping over Annie’s fingers and onto the floor. “Seriously, did you come via river?”

“No, I— I came in my car,” Rachel says. “I just, uh. Was thinking. Outside. Before I came up. It was stupid, and I kind of knew it was stupid, but I did it anyway, for some reason. Hence the dripping. I don’t know.”

“Right,” says Annie, after a beat, and Abed silently hands her a towel. She wraps Rachel’s hands in it, rubbing her own over the top to try and warm her up. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Rachel. “I just— came to ask you.”

She fiddles with her glasses, pushing them up her nose slightly, and then draws up her shoulders. “I was wondering if you wanted to go have coffee.”

Annie blinks. Rachel powers on.

“You don’t have to, obviously. I’m not going to flip out, or anything, but I just thought… we're friends, and I like you, and I know you and Abed are you and Abed, but I thought, maybe— well. I just. Thought I could try my hand at the movie thing, maybe? I know I’m doing this all wrong. I guess I forgot that in movies they have lines. Can I go back outside for a second?”

“I—what?” asks Annie, still blinking. She pauses, Rachel’s pulse beating out under Annie’s fingers, and dissects. “Are you—?” There is one obvious but impossible conclusion, because Abed said romance trope. “Are you asking me out?”

Rachel nods. “Yeah. I’m doing it really badly, I know. I didn’t actually know it was going to rain, I thought we could do, like, a meet-cute thing? But instead it’s kind of turned into a love confession and I thought that was probably, like, way too much, because I don’t even know if you like me, and I didn’t wanna, you know. Make it weird.”

“Of course I like you,” says Annie, automatically. “I mean, you— you like me? You like-like me?”

Rachel smiles. It’s a really pretty smile, full of white square teeth. “Yeah,” she says, and her nose gets a little Abed Nadir crinkle above it. “I do.”

“Oh,” says Annie. “Wow.”

Over Rachel’s shoulder, Troy’s giving her a thumbs-up. She glares at him to go away.

“Um, look, Rachel,” she says, swallowing. “I like you, and you’re really cool and all, but I’m kind of only just coming to terms with the whole lesbi-Annie thing, and I don’t know if—”

“It’s okay,” says Rachel immediately, and Annie feels like it isn’t, but Rachel does look okay, and she’s even smiling again. Rachel likes her. A woman is into her, and came to ask her about it in the rain. Annie feels dizzy. “Seriously, it is. Like I said, this was meant to be way more casual than it turned out.”

She pulls her hands out of Annie’s and folds up the towel. “Let me know if you change your mind, okay?” she says, and Annie nods at her, and Rachel waves robotically at them all, and Annie’s heart clenches from the familiarity of it. “Okay. Bye.”

She leaves. The door swings closed.

Annie opens her mouth.

“Uhhhhhmmm,” she says, and then breaks off, staring at Troy and Abed. She wishes Abed had his camera out, so she could watch the last two minutes in replay. “What just happened?”

Troy bounces in front of her on his toes, the biggest smile on his face. “Annie!” he says, eyes shining. “You got Act Three-d!”

She looks at Abed nodding seriously beside him, and falls a bit more heavily onto her stool. “Act Three-d?” she asks, and Abed nods again.

“You know, I hadn’t considered Rachel,” he says. “She was kind of a background character, but I suppose that makes sense, if this is a coming-of-age storyline instead of a romance. The pay-off comes from your own self-realisation rather than a romance consummation, but it’s still better than pairing you off with somebody random. I thought it’d be Brenda.”

“Brenda?” repeats Annie, and then gazes back at their door. She likes Brenda, but she knows Rachel, knows her coffee order and her cardigans and that she makes Annie laugh. Didn’t know she liked girls, apparently, but there’s a first time for everything. Annie blinks a couple more times, and then she realises what it means.

“Oh my god,” says Annie, and looks at Abed. “She did the speech. Abed, she did the speech!” She runs her hand through her hair and then it drifts to her open mouth, the world spinning and the music swelling around her. The words fall out of her mouth without effort. “I’m Chad Michael Murray.”

“Movie moment,” agrees Abed. His eyes are gentle and serious, and Annie says: “Shit.”

“I have to tell her!” she says, and Troy beams at her in a way that seems to say go on!, nodding excitedly at her. She stumbles to the door, digs out two mismatched ballet flats from their shoe pile and tugs them onto her feet.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, and starts jogging, because— because. Because Annie loves the movie moments, and she loves the way they make her feel, all flushed and flustered and hopeful, and now there’s one right on her doorstep and she’d be an idiot not to go for it.

Later, Annie will take a moment to berate herself for being surprised— what did she expect, having lived with Troy and Abed?

Annie trips down the staircase, jumps over the brick everyone uses to prop open the entry door, and is hit with sixteen tonnes of rain.

“Oh my god,” she cries, spluttering, as it hits her right in the face. She feels her shoulders hike up to her ears and it’s cold, but she can see the headlights of Rachel’s beat-up Holden by the kerb, so Annie heads for that. She raps her knuckles on the windshield, one two three four five six seven eight, and squints.

Rachel gets out of the car, even though it would have made more sense to roll down the window. Annie knows she does this because the driver’s window is broken and doesn’t open properly. She knows this because they’re friends. “Annie? What the hell?”

Annie stares at her, lost for words, to the point that rain collects in her mouth.

“Um,” she finally says, as Rachel’s hair is flattened even more against her forehead, and the cute little cats on her sweater become water-logged. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it’s just that I’m— new to this? A little. But, yes. To coffee. Do you want— do you wanna do it now, inside? The coffee?”

Rachel smiles at her, pearly, neat teeth on display, and she lights up like a lightbulb, like Claire Danes in Stardust. “Really?”

Annie nods, pressing her lips tightly together so that she doesn’t start losing it, and glows pink from right under her sternum. “Really,” she says.

*

Rachel comes back upstairs. Her clothes are wet, of course, so Annie gives her a pair of jeans, t-shirt and a hoodie to borrow, and then directs Rachel to the bathroom to get changed. She stares at the door until Troy nudges her in the arm.

“Um, Annie?” he says. “You’re also dripping.”

“Huh?” asks Annie, and then looks down at herself and the puddle she’s creating. “Oh, right. Back in a second.”

She closes herself off in her room. She feels both too cold and too warm, the rainwater steaming on her skin, and she peels off her cardigan and hangs it carefully over her bedframe. She should have done this in the bathroom too, probably. Her camisole sticks to her skin as she lifts it over her head and her skin feels cool, and she catches a look at herself in the mirror once it’s off, her skin flushed and her eyes bright. She looks at her top. Rachel likes her. Rachel might have pulled this off, if Annie had asked her to.

She thinks of undressing in the same room as her. Of Rachel’s fingers dragging against her ribs. She thinks about how they would have been stood too close together when Rachel was done. About water clinging to Rachel’s eyelashes, about a droplet sliding over Rachel’s bottom lip. She thinks about putting her thumb there.

Annie reaches out and clutches the end of the bedframe as her knees shudder. She swallows hard.

She redresses in a pair of new tights and a new dress, and then she deliberates too long over how many buttons to do up on her cardigan. It’s her yellow one, her favourite colour. She undoes a button, decides that’s too much, then feels like a prude. Undoes it again. She doesn’t want people looking at her, she gets teased enough as it is, but it’s not just the guys who are going to be looking this time. Has Rachel been paying attention this whole time? Their whole friendship feels recontextualised, but Annie doesn’t feel unnerved or creeped out, or anything else she thought she might have. She feels kind of sexy. Like she hopes Rachel’s been looking.

Annie pokes her head out the door and hisses for Abed. His eyes, wide and blinking, find hers, and she gestures at him to come closer. When he’s near enough that she can snag her fingers in his sleeve, she tugs him inside and closes the door behind him, so that there’s no one but her and Abed and her fairy-lights, and Ruthie.

“I don’t know what to wear,” says Annie desperately, holding onto his arm. “Be honest, what’s a good costume for this scene?”

Abed looks her up and down, then tilts his head. He says, in his matter of fact way, “Well, that depends on what look you’re going for. Your buttons are currently indicating that the clothes aren’t going to be on for long.”

Annie whacks his arm. “Abed!”

“What? You asked me to be honest. You look really nice just like this.”

“I do?”

Abed nods and Annie scrunches up her face, peeking up at him with one eye. “I couldn’t decide on the buttons.”

Abed hums. “Do up another one?”

Annie does. He frowns. “Undo it?”

She does. Abed shrugs. “Either works.”

Annie breathes out. “Do you think— what do you think I should do? About Rachel?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” says Annie, a little frantic. “Don’t you get it, Abed? I never know! My whole life, there’s all these questions and tests and pop quizzes and I never know how to answer them! I had to— I had to act out a bunch of romance movies with you just to figure out if I even liked movies! I’m crazy, Abed! I’m just some weird lesbian closet case and I miss my mom and—”

She breaks off, face quivering, and breathes deep breaths. Abed hesitates, and then tucks her hair behind her ear, his hand hovering over her neck. Annie looks up at him, his face haloed by her little flower fairy-lights, casting him in a beautiful pink glow.

Abed leans forward, and he kisses her.

Annie kisses back.

When she pulls away, Abed is already searching her face, his eyes going up and down and side to side. Her hands have looped around his wrists, and she leaves them there while Abed looks at her, the two of them meeting in their understanding.

“Okay,” says Annie calmly, and Abed does a small nod, looking pleased. She lets go of his hands. “Okay. Thanks, Abed.”

Abed gives her that smile, the Inspector smile, and Annie grins back. “I love you,” she says, and Abed says:

“I know.” He fiddles with a button on his cardigan, and adds: “I love you, too.”

Annie beams. He cocks his head towards the door. “I’m really proud of you, Annie,” he says, and she flushes right down to her toes. “Now, go get the girl.”

Annie takes a deep breath and nods. It’s just coffee, it doesn’t mean the rest of her life, and it couldn’t anyway because she knows what she’s doing forever, even if it isn’t done in this shitty little Greendale, Colorado apartment. She gets her fingers on the door handle before she has to turn round, looking back over her shoulder and finding his eye. “Cult-classic, right?” she asks, and Abed grins at her.

“Promise,” he says, and Annie knows they’re going to be fine. Troy, Abed, and Annie: a truth universally acknowledged. It’s just fine by her.