Chapter Text
When you're a young, conservative, well-bred Jewish man living in the most affluent area of Greendale, Colorado, being gay is not exactly an option. Andrew Cohen had always known this, on some level, even if it had never been explicitly stated to him.
It wasn't until much later in life that he started to understand that his sexuality wasn't about options, and before that happened, he broke Annie Edison's heart.
Andy had known Annie since Hebrew school. She was always a little bit heavy and she knew the answers to things they hadn't learned yet, and he could tell there was a pretty girl inside her just dying to get out who didn't know how. In ninth grade she got braces and she stopped smiling, despite the fact that she used to smile all the time. But she was still sweet, and driven, and somehow completely free of guile in a way that made Andy feel wise, even though her grades were markedly higher than his and they both knew it but never mentioned it. Andy knew his parents loved her, and her mother loved him, and despite himself, Andy liked Annie a lot too. And so junior year of high school they went to homecoming together. And then they went to the movies together most weekends, and by the time Annie asked him to Sadie Hawkins that year they were hanging out almost every night, and by the time prom came up they had just been a couple for some time. Annie had even started smiling again, even if it was only around him and the grin was full of metal and occasionally some leftover food.
So when homecoming rolled back around their senior year, it was kind of their one-year anniversary. At least, Annie claimed it as such, because it was the anniversary of their first date and their first kiss, so it was more their anniversary than any other date and they had to have an anniversary. So along with the corsage, Andy brought her a whole other bouquet of flowers and a tasteful silver necklace that she adored and immediately put on to wear to the dance. She even smiled wide, with teeth and all (her shiny braces were free of food) in the pictures their parents took in the gazebo in Andy's backyard while cooing about how cute they were. When they were safe from their parents in his car, Annie touched his thigh boldly (if rather close to his knee) and told him he'd be getting his present later that night. Andy smiled tightly and gently moved her hand so he could shift into drive.
They met up with some of his golf team pals and their dates for dinner. Annie didn't really have any friends that weren't Andy's friends; she used to hang out with a girl named Leah before she and Andy started dating, but now the two hadn't spoken in a few months and nobody mentioned it anymore. Andy knew while he was doing it that he was paying more attention to his friends than to Annie, especially his buddy Matt who was sitting across from him, but Annie seemed happy enough, if a bit quiet, sitting on his left side at the end of the table, clearing her whole plate slowly and daintily.
The dance was fun, in that high school homecoming dance way. Andy glanced around and saw guys grinding on girls in that way that he and Annie had agreed was totally distasteful, especially in public. He twirled her around expertly and she shrieked with laughter, catching Matt's attention where he was dancing nearby with his own date, Meghan, who was on the girls' golf team at Liberty High one town over. Andy met Matt's eye and Matt grinned brilliantly at him. Andy grinned back and twirled Annie again.
A few songs later Meghan and the other girls from the group took a mass trip to the bathroom. Annie hung back uncertainly until Meghan beckoned to her in a way that was less than affectionate but certainly more friendly than the treatment Andy knew Annie was used to from the girls at Riverside. When she looked at him hopefully for confirmation, Andy smiled and nodded at her encouragingly and she scampered off with the rest of the girls.
They were gone for a while and when they came back their eyes all seemed to be shining, but none more than Annie's. She tripped up to Andy happily and flung her arms around his neck, planting a kiss on his lips. She tasted like gin and Andy spotted, out of the corner of his eye, one of the other girls slipping a slim silver flask into her fancy beaded evening purse.
"Meghan's nice," Annie breathed in Andy's face.
"That's cool," said Andy, genuinely happy that Annie was getting along with the other girls, but wishing she had sucked on a breath mint or something before coming back out. "So we were just saying we'd probably get out of here soon. You know, before they do the court presentations...it's all downhill from there, right?"
"Yup!" Annie agreed, popping the "p" at the end of the word.
Andy couldn't help shaking his head and chuckling affectionately at her. Despite the gin taste, he kissed her gently before untangling her arms from around his neck and leading her back to the corner of the gym where they had all stashed their coats and purses.
The group all went to a burger joint for ice cream desserts to cram around a table meant for half the number of customers and wait out the other dance attendees until the after-party circuit started. The girls took two more bathroom trips and, while most of them just seemed to keep getting a little more giggly and snuggling closer to their dates, Annie started to have trouble getting the straw of her diet soda into her mouth. Andy nudged her with his shoulder.
"Annie," he ventured, "are you okay?"
"Yeah," she said distractedly. "Why does this straw keep moving?!" She nearly tipped the glass over before Andy caught it in time and she broke into laughter, which soon became a cough, which then morphed back into laughter.
Andy turned to Meghan on his other side, burrowed under Matt's arm. "Has she had a lot?"
"No," said Meghan, "why?" Andy gestured to his right and she grimaced after leaning forward to get a good look. "Yeesh. She didn't have any more than the rest of us. Is she on something?"
Andy just shook his head, not knowing if he was telling her "no" or that he didn't know.
"Andy," came Annie's voice from his other side, and she suddenly sounded miserable, "I don't feel very good."
"Oh god." Andy started to panic.
"It's okay," whispered Meghan. "She probably just needs to puke and she'll feel better." She slid out from the cramped mass around the table and touched Annie's arm. "Hey, Annie, do you want to go to the bathroom?"
Annie nodded and allowed Meghan to lead her there like a blind person, leaving her purse and the melting remnants of her dessert behind. Andy looked across the empty space that Meghan had left between them at Matt, who shrugged.
"I guess your girlfriend's a lightweight, huh?" Matt punched Andy in the arm. It wasn't hard enough to hurt, but Andy's other hand automatically drifted towards the spot to rub at it. "Who would have guessed?"
Andy frowned and Matt, to his credit, looked a little repentant. "Sorry, man."
Andy shook his head again. "Sorry about your date having to take care of mine. Maybe I should get her home."
"No," Zach protested from across the table, and Andy glanced over at him, having been unaware there was anyone else even listening. "Just bring her along to Carson's and get her stashed in one of the guest rooms. We were all supposed to stay there tonight anyway, right? This way you have a legit excuse to lay claim on one of the actual beds before you get stuck hooking up on the floor like the rest of us, man!"
Andy didn't get a chance to answer before a scream was heard from the direction of the restrooms. He and Matt both stood up in time to see Meghan hightailing it out of the ladies, her dress covered in...oh.
Oh shit.
Matt took Meghan home to change before they went to Carson's, and Andy, after a very awkward trip into the girls' bathroom, managed to haul Annie back to his car.
She moaned from the backseat where she was lying down, "I ruined our senior homecoming."
"No," Andy denied, but only halfheartedly, because whether she meant to or not the rest of the night was pretty shot, and she probably wouldn't remember this in the morning anyway so the vehemence with which he defended her honor was probably of little importance.
"I did. And I ruined our anniversary," she said sadly and quietly before making a horrifying little gagging noise that thankfully seemed to come to nothing. "I didn't even get to give you your present."
"it's fine, Annie," Andy said inattentively, looking for an opening to turn left onto Route 34. He saw one that he could probably make, but would have put him directly in front of what he was sure was a cop, so he let it pass. "You can give it to me some other time."
"But it was supposed to be tonight." Andy's girlfriend suddenly sounded like she was about four years old and he could tell that the waterworks that he had coaxed so precariously closed in the bathroom were about to open up again.
Andy sighed as he finally pulled out into traffic. "Well, is it in your room at home? You can give it to me when I'm sneaking you in, because there's no way you can do that by yourself right now."
"Andy!" Annie wailed. "The present was supposed to be sex!"
Andy hit the brakes for the upcoming stop sign a little too fast and heard Annie, stretched across the backseat like it was a bed, tumble to the floor of the car. "OW!"
And the tears began again.
Miraculously, Andy and Annie made it inside Annie's house without waking Annie's mother. And their floor plan was one of those that had the master bedroom on the first floor and the other bedrooms on the second, so once they got upstairs Annie was pretty much home free. Andy thought he heard her mumble something about sleeping pills and remembered her telling him once, long ago, before she stopped talking about him, that her father was a chemist for a pharmaceutical company and that both her parents thought homeopathic remedies and all that were a load of crap, preferring the scientifically proven power of strong drugs. Andy had privately thought that was a shame, because Annie and her mother could probably both benefit from some yoga and a few calming teas. He wondered if either of them had ever considered Xanax.
Andy managed to get Annie to drink some water and take the pins out of her simple up-do so she could sleep on her hair. She was out of her shoes and in her bed and Andy was searching for the trash can in the dark to set by her bed when Annie slurred, "Meghan's not going to like me anymore."
"I'm sure it's fine," Andy lied smoothly, because he saw the look on Meghan's face when she came storming out of that bathroom with Annie's secondhand ice cream sundae covering the front of her slinky homecoming dress, so he kind of agreed with Annie on that count, but the last thing he wanted to do was upset her more.
"Andy?"
"Yeah, sweetie?" Andy sat on the very edge of her bed and stroked her hair. It was nice hair, a deep rich brown as opposed to a dull one, and while it was too long and a little damaged and stringy at the ends, the roots were thick and healthy with a nice sheen, and soft to the touch. Annie's hair was like Annie, Andy reflected, trying so hard to be healthy and beautiful without knowing what was going wrong to keep it from its goals. He made a mental note to suggest that she cut off the several inches of waste at the ends, sometime when she would remember him making the suggestion.
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
Andy found out from a text the next afternoon that Annie was okay, if excruciatingly hung over, and that her mother didn't seem to be any the wiser. He was a little nervous that Annie might try to give him her belated anniversary gift the next weekend, even though she acted normal for the next week (perhaps she didn't remember the conversation, or maybe she was just embarrassed that she had yelled the word "sex" in his car when she had spent days putting together a three-minute oral presentation in health class because she had to design it around the avoidance of that very word), which Andy was thankful for. He still hadn't decided what it meant that his response to Annie's drunken declaration of her intentions was to slam on the brakes of his car so that she fell over. So Andy was strangely relieved when he noticed a lone folded dollar bill sticking out of the back pocket of Annie's knee-length denim skirt when she was sitting in front of him in algebra on Thursday, knowing that gave him another five to seven days to mull it over (if that health class had taught him correctly). So instead, they went to the movies to see the remake of "The Women."
The next weekend, Annie had a Mock U.N. event.
The weekend after that, Andy had a weekend retreat with the rest of the golf team. He roomed with Matt at the hotel, a swanky one attached to the course they were going to be playing the next day. Zach and a few other guys sneaked in to hang out after they were sure the coach was asleep. Zach and Matt got into a brief wrestling match on Matt's bed, which Matt won, and after everyone had left Andy spent what he was sure was too much time thinking about if he had been the one Matt was wrestling.
The next weekend, Andy and Annie had sex.
They were in Andy's room, having another one of their marathons of "The O.C." on DVD, which meant Andy was watching the show and Annie had her U.S. History book out and was filling out flashcards with important terms and looking up very briefly upon the completion of every card to check in with the show and take a handful of popcorn, able to switch her focus with a proficiency that Andy, accustomed to this routine, still occasionally had trouble believing. She had just finished the card for the second assassination attempt on Gerald Ford, and Ryan Atwood, predictably, had just punched someone, and Annie said, with a piece of popcorn halfway to her mouth, "Oh! Doesn't Benjamin Mackenzie look a little bit like your friend Matt from this angle?"
That particular kernel of popcorn never made it to Annie's mouth, but instead got squished somewhere underneath her back as Andy tackled her to the bed, kissing her.
The foreplay was brief, consisting mostly of the move from the bed to the floor of Andy's walk-in closet with a quick pit stop to his underwear drawer for a condom, and the removal of only the necessary clothes. He had looked around the room at one point, seeing the brightness of it with the sunlight streaming in the tastefully treated windows, and suggested the relocation to Annie as a way to keep his parents from hearing them. It wasn't like it wasn't big enough, anyway. It was Annie who had taken the suggestion a step further and grabbed the remotes from his bedside table, pausing "The O.C." and pressing play on the remote to the music player on his laptop.
"Erotica" began to play as Andy slammed the door of the closet behind them. By the time the pulsing beat of "Fever" drifted through the closed door into the dark space, it was over. Andy lifted his forehead from where he had practically glued it to Annie's soft white shoulder and looked at her, his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness. He expected to find her crying, whether from the overwhelming emotions or the discomfort he had heard all girls were supposed to have their first time, or simply because she was Annie and crying was what she did. He was surprised to find that her eyes were dry, and even more surprised to find that his own were not. He rolled off of her quickly and rearranged his clothes so that he was no longer in a state of disarray, and tried to catch his breath and stop his tears. He wondered if Annie noticed. She said nothing, just snuggled up to his side and kissed him near his ear with a little sigh.
They didn't do it again. Three weeks later, Andy broke up with her. He knew she was devastated, easily apparent to him by the way that she doubled her already considerable efforts in classes and started coming to school showing obvious signs of sleep deprivation. Andy also knew that she probably thought it was because of the sex. And, well...frankly, it was, though she had nothing to do with it. But before Andy got the chance to explain this to her, before he got the chance to work it out enough to even explain it to himself, he found himself watching, as if it were a movie in slow motion, as Annie Edison propelled herself through a plate glass door during Andrew's lunch period and was taken away in an ambulance.