Cuck your classmate?

The late afternoon sun streamed through the bare windows of Annie Edison's small apartment, casting long golden rectangles across the empty hardwood floors. Cardboard boxes had filled this space just hours ago — towers of meticulously labeled containers in Annie's neat handwriting, each one color-coded by room and contents. "Kitchen — Fragile," "Bedroom — Books (Fiction)," "Bathroom — Supplies." Now there was nothing left but a few stray packing peanuts, some dust outlines where furniture had stood, and the faint echo of a place that had been lived in.

Annie stood in the middle of what had been her living room, her dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that had started the day far more polished. A thin sheen of perspiration dotted her forehead, and her oversized Greendale Community College t-shirt hung off one shoulder. She looked younger like this, more vulnerable — stripped of her usual cardigans and careful coordination. She was holding a single roll of packing tape that no longer served any purpose, turning it over in her hands like she'd forgotten what hands were for.

You watched her from the doorway, leaning against the frame with your arms crossed. The last box — a small one marked "Sentimental Stuff — DON'T TOUCH (yes, that means you, Troy)" — sat at your feet, waiting to be carried out. Everyone else had already gone. Troy had driven off with Britta in his van twenty minutes ago, arguing about directions despite the fact that your apartment was a straight shot down two roads. Shirley had left before them, promising to organize the kitchen boxes "the way Jesus would want." Even Pierce had contributed, loading his Cadillac with an impressive number of containers despite his complaints about his back.

Abed had lingered longer than most, watching everything with that quiet, cataloguing gaze of his, before finally saying, "This is the part of the movie where the camera lingers on the empty apartment. Romantic comedies use this to show emotional transition. Horror movies use it to show something bad happened." Then he'd smiled, grabbed the last of the small electronics, and headed out.

Jeff was the only one who hadn't come at all. A text that morning — "Migraine. Can't move. Sorry. Don't let Pierce put the heavy stuff on his back." That was it. No call, no offer to try, no "I'll come when I feel better." Just a clinical little message that Annie had read twice before putting her phone face-down on the counter without replying.

She hadn't mentioned him since.

Now it was just the two of you, standing in the hollowed-out shell of Annie's apartment, and the silence between you had shifted from the comfortable kind to the charged kind — the kind that makes the air feel thicker and the seconds feel longer.

"You know," Annie said, still staring at the tape roll in her hands, "I lived here for over a year. I moved in right after my mom and I stopped... well, after I needed to be on my own. I remember being so scared the first night. I triple-checked the locks and slept with the lights on like a little kid."

She laughed softly, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. Her blue eyes — wide, expressive, the kind of eyes that could communicate seventeen emotions before the rest of her face caught up — flickered toward you.

"And now I'm leaving. And it's not scary at all. It's just..."

She trailed off, biting her lower lip the way she did when she was choosing between saying exactly what she felt and saying the responsible thing. Her fingers tightened around the tape roll.

"Can I ask you something weird?"

You nodded, and something shifted in her expression — a tiny crack in the composed, put-together exterior she wore like armor. Her cheeks flushed pink, and she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with her free hand.

"I want — okay, this is going to sound so stupid, and I know it's weird, and you can totally say no, and I won't be mad, I mean I might be a little disappointed but I won't show it—"

She took a breath. Closed her eyes. Then opened them and looked directly at you with that laser-focused intensity that could pin a person to the wall.

"Will you kiss me? Just once? Here, in this apartment, before I walk out that door and never come back? I just — I want one good memory of this place to be the last thing I think about when I say goodbye. Not the nights I stayed up too late studying alone, or the mornings I couldn't eat because I was nervous about everything, or—"

Her voice cracked slightly, and she pressed her lips together, composing herself with visible effort.

"I want the last memory to be something beautiful. Something I chose. And I want it to be with you."

She was standing maybe five feet away from you, the afternoon light catching the edge of her hair, turning it almost auburn. Her chest rose and fell with careful, controlled breaths — the breathing of someone who had just said something terrifying and was waiting to see if the world would end because of it. The empty apartment hummed with quiet around you both, the rooms holding their breath too.

Annie Edison — the girl who overprepared for everything, who planned her outfits the night before, who treated every situation like it deserved a strategy — had just made herself completely, terrifyingly vulnerable. And she was waiting.

The study room was quiet in the particular way it only got on Thursday evenings — after the custodial staff had come through, after the last of the evening classes had let out, after the building had settled into that dim, muffled stillness that made the fluorescent lights buzz louder than they had any right to. The overhead panel above the study table flickered intermittently, casting brief shadows across stacks of textbooks, scattered flash cards, and the remains of a bag of gas station chips that Annie had disapprovingly tolerated for exactly forty-five minutes before quietly pushing it to your side of the table.

Anatomy. The midterm was in nine days, and while most of Greendale's student body considered "cramming the night before" a viable academic strategy, Annie Edison was not most of Greendale's student body. She had color-coded her notes weeks ago. She had a binder — a real, three-ring binder with tabbed dividers and laminated reference sheets she'd printed at the campus library. She had a skeleton of a study schedule that mapped out exactly which body systems you'd cover on which nights, broken into forty-five-minute focus blocks with ten-minute breaks designed to "maximize information retention without cognitive fatigue."

She had, in short, been preparing to study with you the way some people prepare for surgical procedures.

The study group had filtered out over the past hour. Troy and Abed had left first, lured away by a text from Abed about a new episode of "Cougar Town" that he claimed was "narratively essential." Britta had followed shortly after, claiming she needed to go home and "center herself," though everyone suspected she just wanted to watch the same episode from her own couch. Shirley had left to pick up her boys, offering a quick prayer over the study table that you'd both "absorb the Lord's anatomical knowledge" before heading out. Pierce had lasted longer than expected, mostly because he kept interrupting with unsolicited medical stories from his "wild years" that made Annie's eye twitch visibly before she finally thanked him for his contributions and suggested his "presence might be more needed at home."

Now it was just you and Annie, the way it usually ended up. The two of you, a pile of textbooks, and the rest of the world conveniently absent.

Jeff had left an hour ago with a text to the group chat that read: "Duncan says he needs emotional support at the pub. Translated: he's buying if I listen. Don't wait up." Annie had read the message, smiled politely, and gone right back to reviewing the musculoskeletal system without comment. Her relationship with Jeff existed in a careful, almost performative space these days — affectionate enough in public, comfortable enough on the surface, but hollowed out in the places that mattered. They still hadn't slept together. Annie hadn't told anyone that, but the way she deflected whenever the topic came up, the way her smile got a fraction too tight, made it clear enough.

She sat across from you now, legs crossed beneath the table, her textbook open to a detailed diagram of the female reproductive system. She was wearing a soft lavender cardigan over a white fitted blouse, her hair down and slightly tousled from where she'd been running her fingers through it while concentrating. Her reading glasses — small, rectangular, silver-framed — sat perched on her nose, and every few seconds she'd push them up with one finger in a gesture so unconscious and so precise that it seemed choreographed by someone who understood exactly how charming it looked.

"Okay," she said, tapping the textbook page with her pen, "so we've covered the skeletal system, the muscular system, and basic organ functions. Which means we should move into the reproductive system, because Professor Garret said it would be at least fifteen percent of the exam and last time people skipped it and she made the final harder out of spite."

She paused, her pen hovering over the page. A faint flush crept across her cheeks — barely visible, the kind of blush that only someone sitting close to her, someone who'd learned to read the micro-expressions of Annie Edison the way astronomers learn to read stars, would notice.

"I was thinking," she continued carefully, not quite meeting your eyes, "that maybe... the diagrams aren't enough. I mean, theoretically understanding something and actually understanding it are two completely different things, right? That's literally the foundation of applied sciences."

She set her pen down. Laced her fingers together on the table. Unlaced them. Laced them again.

"I could — and this is just a suggestion, a completely academic suggestion, totally professional — I could give you a more... hands-on demonstration. Of the female body. Mine specifically. For educational purposes."

The words came out fast, tumbling over each other like they'd been waiting behind her teeth for hours, and the moment they were free, Annie's eyes went wide — not with regret, but with the breathless, electric shock of someone who had finally said the thing they'd been holding in. Her cheeks were fully flushed now, pink spreading down her neck and disappearing beneath the collar of her blouse. Her fingers gripped each other white-knuckled on the tabletop.

She looked at you with those enormous blue eyes — innocent, eager, terrified, wanting — and the study room felt suddenly very small, the buzzing lights very loud, and the distance between your side of the table and hers very, very thin.

"I just think," she whispered, "that you'd learn better this way."

It was a Tuesday afternoon in late November, three days before the Glee Club Christmas Pageant, and the Greendale campus had settled into that specific brand of late-autumn lethargy where everyone was technically still attending classes but had mentally checked out sometime around Halloween. The trees on the quad were bare, the vending machines were restocking with suspicious frequency, and the cafeteria had introduced a "Seasonal Harvest Bowl" that was just regular salad with dried cranberries thrown in and a two-dollar markup.

You had been heading to the study room. That was the plan. Textbook in your bag, coffee in your hand, a reasonable expectation of a normal afternoon spent reviewing material with the group. Maybe Shirley would bring cookies. Maybe Pierce would say something offensive. The usual Tuesday ecosystem.

Instead, Annie found you.

She materialized from the east hallway near the vending machines — the one with the dead fluorescent light that flickered like a horror movie — with the focused, purposeful energy of someone who had been tracking your movements through the building like a heat-seeking missile in a cardigan. She was wearing a cream-colored knit sweater that fit her just right, a dark plaid skirt, and ankle boots, her hair down and glossy, falling past her shoulders in soft waves. She looked approachable and warm and composed in the way she always did when she was the exact opposite of composed underneath.

"Hey! Hi. There you are." She fell into step beside you, matching your pace with a casualness that was entirely manufactured. "So I have a tiny favor to ask — well, not tiny, it's actually kind of important, but it won't take long, I promise. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Definitely not more than fifteen."

She was already steering you — not physically, but through some gravitational force that Annie exerted on people when she wanted something — toward the old music wing. The hallway that most students forgot existed, where the carpet was a shade of institutional burgundy that had faded to something closer to dried wine and the walls were lined with framed photos of Greendale music recitals going back decades, all featuring performers wearing expressions that suggested they knew no one would ever see these pictures.

"The Glee Club lost their finale act," Annie explained as she walked, her voice bright and fast and carefully rehearsed. "One of the performers got mono, which is tragic but also statistically unsurprising given the hygiene standards of the Glee Club, and now Mr. Radison is spiraling and the Dean is spiraling, and they need a new number by Friday, and I told them I had the perfect idea."

She stopped in front of a door marked "REHEARSAL ROOM 4" and pushed it open. The room beyond was small and dim — a mirrored wall on one side, an upright piano in the corner that looked like it hadn't been tuned since the Cold War, and a single window high on the far wall letting in a beam of golden late-afternoon light. There was a folding screen in the corner — velvet-covered, faded, the kind of thing that had been used in a hundred Greendale productions and never once cleaned — and a garment bag hanging from a hook on the wall behind it.

Annie stepped inside and turned to face you as you followed. She reached back and closed the door. The click of the latch was soft but definitive, sealing the room into something private and separate from the rest of the building.

"It's a Christmas number," she continued, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed beneath her chest in a pose that was ninety percent casual and ten percent strategic. "Me, Britta, Troy, and you. The four of us. It would be really cute and fun and it would basically save the entire pageant."

She paused. Uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again. Then dropped them to her sides entirely and looked at you with those enormous blue eyes — the ones that could shift from sugary sweetness to laser-focused intensity in the space of a heartbeat.

"The only problem," she said slowly, her voice dropping to something quieter, something that lived in a register she didn't usually access, "is that I need to convince you to say yes."

She pushed off the doorframe and walked to the center of the room, her boots clicking softly on the worn wooden floor. The beam of window light caught her as she moved, and she turned to face you in it like she'd known exactly where it fell.

"I know performing isn't your thing," she murmured. "I know you think it'll be silly. I know you'd rather just study and go home and pretend this conversation never happened."

She reached the folding screen and stopped beside it, one hand resting on the faded velvet. Her fingers curled around the fabric edge. Her eyes hadn't left yours.

"So I thought... instead of asking you to imagine what the number looks like... I'd just show you."

She stepped behind the screen. You could hear the soft sounds of fabric — her sweater being pulled overhead, the rustle of her skirt sliding down her legs, a zipper, a pause. Then silence, filled only by the buzz of distant fluorescent lights and the old piano sitting mutely in its corner like it had seen things it wished it hadn't.

When she stepped back out, the room recalibrated.

She was wearing a Christmas outfit in the way that a bonfire was technically just a campfire. The dress — and the word was doing heavy lifting here — was a deep, sinful red that clung to every curve of her petite frame. The neckline plunged into territory that had no business existing in an educational institution, her full breasts pressed together and pushed upward, held in place by thin glittering straps that seemed to be operating on faith alone. The skirt barely grazed mid-thigh, a frothy cascade of red velvet and white faux fur that moved with her every breath. White thigh-high stockings disappeared beneath the hem, held up by red satin garters. On her head, slightly askew, sat a tiny Santa hat that was so small it barely qualified as clothing.

She stood in the light, one hand on her hip, her cheeks flushed pink, her pulse visibly fluttering at the base of her throat.

"Well?" she whispered, her voice rough and soft and shaking at the edges. "Is this convincing?"

The second annual Greendale Paintball tournament had descended into chaos approximately eleven minutes after it started, which was actually twelve minutes longer than the first one. The campus had been transformed into a warzone of neon paint splatters, overturned furniture, and students who had never held a weapon in their lives suddenly developing military-grade paranoia about every shadow and doorway. The prize — priority registration, the holy grail of Greendale's crumbling academic infrastructure — had turned normally rational people into tactical savages and normally irrational people into something worse.

The study group had split early, the way they always did when self-preservation kicked in. Jeff and Shirley had peeled off together near the library, with Abed trailing behind them with his paintball gun held like a camera, narrating the experience to no one. "Tracking shot," he'd murmured as he jogged after them. "Two unlikely allies. The soldier and the mother. Their bond will be tested." Jeff had told him to shut up. Abed had smiled.

Troy, Britta, and Pierce had formed what Troy optimistically called "The Unholy Trinity," though their actual tactical cohesion was limited to Troy doing all the shooting, Britta accidentally providing cover by being so unpredictable that no one could aim at her, and Pierce sitting on a bench claiming his hip was acting up until someone got close enough for him to ambush with a burst of surprisingly accurate fire and a cackle that echoed across the quad.

That left you and Annie.

She had grabbed your wrist seventeen minutes ago — right as the starting whistle blew — and pulled you into the narrow maintenance corridor behind the cafeteria with the urgency and precision of a special forces operative. The corridor was dim and cramped, lined with pipes and utility panels, the kind of space that existed between the walls of buildings where the actual infrastructure lived. It smelled like bleach and old coffee and the faint metallic tang of paint from stray shots hitting the exterior wall somewhere above.

Now you were both crouched behind an overturned table that Annie had dragged into position with a strength that seemed improbable given her size, and she was peering through a gap in the barricade with her paintball gun raised, her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail, her cheeks flushed with adrenaline. She was wearing the standard paintball gear — loose cargo pants, a long-sleeved henley she'd rolled to her elbows, protective goggles pushed up on her forehead — and somehow she still looked like she'd planned the outfit. The cargo pants fit differently than her usual skirts and tights, sitting lower on her hips, and the henley was unbuttoned one button more than was strictly necessary, revealing the edge of a white tank top beneath.

She had been strategizing for the past ten minutes. Plotting enemy movements. Estimating trajectories. Drawing a crude map on the back of her hand with a Sharpie she'd brought specifically for this purpose. She had been, in short, exactly Annie Edison — intense, prepared, determined to win.

Then she had gone quiet.

It started when a paintball hit the wall above you with a sharp crack, and you both ducked instinctively, and in the compressed space your shoulder pressed against hers and she stayed there for a beat longer than the danger required. Her breathing changed. Not faster — slower. Deeper. Her eyes, which had been scanning the corridor for threats, drifted from the gap in the barricade to your face. Her lips parted slightly.

The silence between you shifted from tactical to something else entirely.

"So," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that had nothing to do with stealth, "we're safe here for a few minutes. The nearest team is at least two corridors away. I calculated their movement patterns based on the trajectory of their last shots, and they're heading toward the east quad."

She set her paintball gun down on the concrete floor. Slowly. Deliberately. The click of plastic against stone was the loudest sound in the corridor.

"I also calculated," she continued, turning to face you fully, her back against the wall, her legs drawn up, her blue eyes finding yours in the dim light, "that we have approximately seven to nine minutes before anyone comes through here."

Her cheeks were already flushing — not from exertion or paintball adrenaline, but from something else entirely. She pressed her lips together. Swallowed. Her fingers found the hem of her henley and twisted the fabric.

"Which is enough time," she whispered, "for something I've been thinking about since before the tournament started. Since last night actually. Since—" She broke off, closed her eyes, and let out a small, frustrated breath through her nose. "Okay, I've been thinking about it for a while. I have a list. Well, not a list list, but there are bullet points in my head and I just—"

She opened her eyes. The flustered, over-organized exterior cracked, and underneath it was something raw and honest and so hungry it made the air in the corridor feel thick.

"I want you," she said simply. "Right now. Here. I know it's not — I know this isn't the ideal setting, there are pipes and the floor is concrete and I didn't bring anything to — that's not the point. The point is I can't focus on winning this stupid tournament because every time you crouch next to me I forget how breathing works and I just—"

She reached out and grabbed the front of your shirt, pulling you toward her with a grip that was firm and trembling at the same time.

"Seven minutes," she breathed against your lips. "I can make seven minutes work. I'm very efficient."

The study room had that particular 11 PM quality to it — the overhead lights humming at a frequency that seemed designed to slowly erode sanity, the table buried under textbooks and empty coffee cups and the detritus of a group that had been holed up since six o'clock trying to survive a collective academic crisis. Professor Garret had moved the midterm up by a week, which had triggered something in Annie that was somewhere between a stress response and a religious experience. She had called an emergency study session with the precision and urgency of a general mobilizing troops, and everyone had shown up because no one in the group had figured out how to say no to Annie Edison when she made that face.

The session had been four hours long. Shirley had left first, citing her boys. Pierce had left second, citing boredom. Abed had left third, citing the new episode of something. Jeff had been the last to go, peeling himself out of his chair with a stretch and a groan and a "good luck with whatever this is" before disappearing into the parking lot with the easy confidence of a man who would ace the midterm based on a fifteen-minute review session and sheer audacity.

That left the four of you.

Annie sat to your left, her textbooks organized in a perfect arc around her laptop, her notes rewritten three times in progressively neater handwriting. She was wearing a soft burgundy cardigan over a white fitted camisole, dark fitted jeans tucked into brown leather ankle boots. Her hair was down, slightly frizzy from hours of running her fingers through it while stressing, and her reading glasses were pushed up on top of her head where they'd migrated sometime around hour two. Her cheeks were flushed from caffeine and concentration, and there were faint pencil smudges on her fingers. She looked like a college student in a commercial — pretty, earnest, slightly frazzled in a way that was somehow still attractive.

Troy sat across from you in his signature combination of comfortable and enthusiastic — a bright blue Greendale hoodie, loose joggers, and sneakers he'd kicked off under the table two hours ago. His short hair was slightly mussed from where he'd been resting his head on his hand during the boring parts, and he had a smear of red paint on his cheek from earlier that he hadn't noticed and no one had told him about. His brown eyes were bright despite the late hour, carrying that perpetual warmth that made Troy Troy — the kind of guy who could propose something ridiculous and somehow make it sound like a reasonable life choice.

Britta was next to him, legs folded beneath her in the chair, her body angled toward Troy in a way that was casual but unmistakably possessive. She was wearing a vintage band tee — the Clash, slightly too big, cut into a rough crop top that showed a sliver of her toned stomach — over black skinny jeans with a rip at the knee that was either fashion or wear and tear. Her blonde hair was pulled into a messy bun that was more mess than bun, loose strands framing her angular face. She had dark circles under her eyes that she would absolutely call "character" if anyone mentioned them, and her lips were slightly chapped, the dark pink of them catching the light when she talked. She looked tired and sharp and like she was about to say something that would change the energy of the room entirely.

Which she was.

The silence after everyone else had left had been settling for approximately two minutes when Troy looked at Britta. Britta looked at Troy. Some wordless communication passed between them — the kind that couples develop after enough time together, a shorthand built on raised eyebrows and barely perceptible nods.

Then Troy looked at you. Then at Annie. Then back at you.

"So," he said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his hands clasped together like he was about to conduct a business meeting, "we've noticed some things."

"Oh God," Annie said immediately, her spine straightening to its full five-foot-three-and-a-half inches. "What things? What did I do? I swear I didn't forget anyone's birthday, I have a spreadsheet—"

"Not about birthdays," Britta cut in, her voice low and direct, the way it got when she was about to be uncomfortably honest about something she had no business being honest about. "About you two."

Annie's mouth closed with an audible click. Her eyes went wide. The flush on her cheeks deepened from caffeine pink to something significantly more incandescent.

Troy held up his hands in a calming gesture. "We're not being weird about it. We're being cool. We're being so cool right now. But we sit in this study room like four times a week and the way you two look at each other is—" He glanced at Britta for help.

"Obvious," Britta supplied. "It's obvious. And also kind of beautiful? In an intense, slightly overwhelming way. Like watching two people try to set each other on fire with eye contact."

Annie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. No sound came out. She looked like a very attractive fish experiencing a system error.

"What Troy and I are trying to say," Britta continued, reaching over and placing her hand on Troy's knee with a squeeze that was clearly pre-arranged, "is that we think there's something real happening between you two. And we've also been together long enough to know that sometimes the best experiences are shared ones."

Troy nodded vigorously. "Shared experiences. That's exactly what we're saying. Britta and I have talked about it and we think—" He took a breath. "Would you guys be interested in maybe, possibly, the four of us, right now, here, together?"

The study room went very quiet. The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere in the building, a pipe gurgled. You could hear your own heartbeat.

Every expectation in the room pointed toward Annie. Annie, who would normally launch into a ten-minute monologue about boundaries and propriety and the emotional implications of physical intimacy. Annie, who once gave a twenty-minute speech about the importance of "appropriate study room conduct" after catching two students sharing a headphone. Annie, who would absolutely, certainly, inevitably—

"Yes."

The word came out immediately. Not a stammered, tentative, qualified yes. A clear, firm, unwavering yes that left zero room for interpretation. She didn't look at you first. She didn't hesitate. She didn't overthink.

Annie Edison, who overprepared for everything, had never been more certain of anything in her life.

She turned to you, and her blue eyes were dark and bright and completely, terrifyingly serious.

"Yes," she said again, quieter this time, meant only for you. "I want this. I want you. And right now, right here, with them—" She glanced at Troy and Britta, who were both watching with expressions of surprised delight. "—I don't have to wait anymore."

She reached across the table and took your hand. Her fingers were warm. Her grip was firm. Her pulse was racing against your wrist.

"So," Britta said, a slow grin spreading across her face as she pushed her textbook aside and stood up, "should we lock the door?"

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