V-DAY EXCHANGE FIC! We Become the Things We Do, for andbless_mybaby (1/2)
Title: We Become the Things We Do (1/2)
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Puck/Rachel
Warnings: Future!fic; spoilers for all aired episodes.
Word count: ~9900
Recipient: andbless_mybaby
Disclaimer: Glee belongs to Ryan Murphy, et all.
Summary: A few years into their relationship, Puck and Rachel face a crisis.
A/N: This fic supposes that Puck is a year older than Rachel (i.e., if she's a sophomore in current time on the show, Puck is a junior). The title of this fic, and some references in it, are lifted from the song “Blinded (When I See You)” by Third Eye Blind, which was given as a prompt. Many thanks to my wonderful betas!
Watching her is like staring at the sun. Deep down inside, he has always suspected that she is far too bright a star for him. His retinas burn now with the truth, and something like tears prick at the backs of his eyes. He remembers his teacher telling him to never look directly at the sun when they studied the solar system in fourth grade. Of course as soon as school was out, he'd gone right outside and stared up at the yellow ball until his eyes had watered.
This was far more painful than that.
Her brow puckers as she waits for his reaction. He imagines the emotion rocketing through him must flare in his pupils, just like the rush of something illegal slicking through his veins can blow out the hazel-green altogether and make them dark; not as dark as hers, but almost.
Like with everything. He is almost like her (talented and good looking, just not classically so, she's said that herself), almost good enough (could go to college if he really wanted to, writes a mean tune, plays the guitar well, and sings with passion-just not enough to get a degree in it). Almost what she needs, but not quite.
Good enough to come to New York with her, but so not worth holding on to.
*
New York would be the adventure of Noah Puckerman's life. When Rachel was accepted to NYU on a full-ride musical scholarship, there was no other place he would have gone. He wasn't planning on college anyway (had already bummed his first year after high school around Lima doing odd jobs and saving every penny for when they decided on where they were going), and New York was bound to have more opportunities for a decent day job that would let him play clubs at night until he could find someone who thought his music would get radio time.
Rachel was certain this would happen instantaneously. Puck was a little more realistic. He was good; he knew that. His songs only got better as he got older; his material had advanced from waxing lyrical about his truck, or (what he thought were) poetic ways of describing sex, to thoughts of an uncertain future in harsh economic times, and beautiful girls (okay, just one girl) who inspired loyalty and confidence, and once in a while he still snuck lines in like laying her out beneath me makes all the world beautifully ironic. She let him get away with it because secretly she wanted the world to know she'd tamed him.
After nine months in New York, that was obvious. They'd been together nearly three years now, high school sweethearts to those that had to label it, but Rachel still had her social niceties that she forced him to comply with. She had weird rules for herself that she called goals but Puck thought they were just structure she used to categorize where they were in their lives at present. It was all on her terms, and sometimes that really pissed him off.
When they'd moved to the city, she'd said, "Noah, I can't live with someone I'm not engaged to, and we are not ready to get engaged." He didn't tell her about the ring he'd found in a pawnshop a couple of months later, even though he'd bought it on the spot. He knew they were young, and he was in no hurry to get married either, but that ring had screamed Rachel's name when he saw it. It might have been someone else's cast off, a symbol of their broken relationship, but he'd never be able to buy her a more perfect one for $450. It was hidden in his sock drawer, or rather, the only drawer in the small kitchen of his studio apartment. Someday, when it was right, he'd give it to her, and they'd get a place together, finally.
He'd stopped fighting with her about the money they could save if they didn't both pay rent, because he could never win an argument with her other than to pin her down and fuck her mouth shut. So he convinced himself it was enough that they'd been together as long as they had and that she'd wanted him to come with her to New York even though her dads hadn't been too stoked about the idea. No two parents (gay or straight) had ever had a child who wanted to please them more (and he'd watched Quinn give their baby daughter away to get back into the good graces of hers) than Rachel Berry’s.
Telling them that she was taking her less-than-college-material boyfriend with her to New York City had virtually been like her telling them to fuck off. Well, maybe for Rachel, it would have been more like a politely whispered go to hell (hence the separate residences, he was sure of it). She didn't much use big swear words, and he could remember the few times she'd actually said 'fuck' ever. (It was only when he was doing just that to her, and he got her to beg him for it.)
She had declared her major as musical theater (big shocker). She constantly sang show tunes and prepared for random performances while simultaneously maintaining an A average in all her General Ed classes (that Puck couldn't see any point in taking when she wanted to sing and act for a living). It was just like a bigger production of Glee Club back home, except that he didn't know all the cast of characters, but the few that traipsed through Rachel's apartment when he happened to be there.
It wasn't that he was uninterested in her new friends, but rarely did he have much in common with any of them. They were theater types, not wannabe Rock Stars. He certainly noticed when guys showed up because he knew that she attracted them, whether she realized it or not. Most of the time she was oblivious to the threatening looks he gave the asshats who visibly shrank when they saw how wide Puck's shoulders were. Sometimes he purposely picked up Rachel's small 15 pounders and did quick rounds of 20 with them just to emphasize the strength he still maintained in the Puckerones. Once in a while she happened to glance around, saw the imminent cockfights, and ushered her co-stars out before anything could happen.
Often, those nights were the best sex nights, except that they were also the times Puck felt desperation licking at his heels as he pounded himself into her. His fingers gripped her hips too tightly, leaving marks behind, and when he sucked her skin up against his teeth she would whimper, the edge of pain in her throat not exactly what he intended.
Other times he'd purposely eat her out for like an hour; as if the time spent doing shit like that could bind her more tightly to him-like he did it all for her-as though it didn't sometimes make him go back in time to when he was a 15-year-old who couldn't hold his wad, and he'd come in his shorts. Rachel would be wet all over, the sweat across her skin a brand of a different kind. But part of him really believed-hoped-it would work to keep them together.
She'd smile lazily at him and roll up on to her side, falling asleep before he'd even laid on the bed next to her, her exhaustion his doing; then he'd stare up at the ceiling with crazy thoughts chasing after each other and ask himself how long it could go on this way.
Unbalanced.
Him fucking needing her more than she could ever need him.
*
Tears well up in her eyes, their brown depths fathomless. He's never been able to find the bottom, though he'd expected to, years ago. In Lima-in fucking high school-where nothing lasted, and they should have burned out quickly, especially with the Finn-shaped baggage she’d carried, and the Quinn-sized chip on his shoulder he'd hauled around. They should never have worked, and it's true that they'd made little sense together.
But the sense had come from the nonsensical, Rachel said. Often two things didn't seem like they went together ("like Glee and football, to borrow something smart Finn once said") but when you saw them side by side they complimented each other beautifully.
At least for a time. It's smart to recognize when that time is over and acknowledge it with more than a passing nod. (Puck thinks that, but he's not sure he can say it aloud.)
*
The first duet they sang together, back before they were a couple when their non-defined friendship had started to ingrain itself, was the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow song Picture. It had been slightly risky in Rachel's opinion, and exactly the kind of statement Puck had wanted to make. "Let's shake things up, Berry," he said. "I've had enough of your sappy love duets with Finn. Let's do the ugly version of love." She agreed, after much coaxing on his part. (He seriously just used words to convince her, though that had been the first time he contemplated seducing Rachel Berry.)
Mr. Schuester grinned, his enthusiasm scaring Puck just a little. It bordered on Rachel-crazy, and back then, the reason he'd sung with her was because it was the only fucking way to get noticed. "Your voices compliment each other much more than I would have guessed," Schue said, rubbing his hands together like he was mentally noting all the raspy-voiced leads he could pin on Puck. For some reason, Puck had looked around the room then, and he saw this strange fear etched on Finn's face; it had been the beginning of the end.
He managed to hold off for the rest of that school year, despite his growing interest in not just her boobs or what was in her underpants. Sometime over the summer between his junior and senior year they'd hooked up, a party at Brittany's that had gone terribly wrong (or right? It had seemed right then). He'd had a few beers, and then they were in the master bedroom, and Rachel had climbed on top of him, a determined glint in her eyes he thought was solely reserved for Finn.
By the end of the evening, he had her virginity notched on his figurative belt (something she felt "burdened by, so I chose someone both experienced enough to make it good for me and a person I trust"). Puck had a what the fuck moment to learn that the girl he'd mercilessly slushied for more than a year would somehow choose him. It wasn't that he hadn't thought about it, but he'd gotten virgin-shy after Quinn. She also wrangled some kind of weird promise out of him that he didn't have to be her boyfriend, but he couldn't go around telling everyone that she gave it up to him.
He stewed over that for all of three days, and then he'd been on her doorstep saying, "Fuck that," because the world would know, and the only way they'd know was if he claimed ownership. So he had (he only gave the minor-ist of details to Chang and Rutherford after football practice that same day), and not so suddenly he'd realized that he was half in love with Rachel Berry.
He never said a word to Finn; he just waited until they were all in the hallway on the first day of school, and then casually looped his arm around Rachel's neck. Her fingers were caught in his, so the whole scene was like something out of a teen flick where The Moment had arrived and the two main characters made their walk down the hall as an item.
Funnily enough, they'd both loved it. After all, they both had star potential. Having the whole school talking about them had been flattering, and for once Puck hadn't had to see people whispering behind their hands about how he'd knocked up his best friend's girl, or how they'd given the baby away hours after she'd been born.
Everything after that had been only about them-Puck (Noah) and Rachel-the way it should have been. He'd gotten over Quinn (though he still dreams about his daughter to this day), and Rachel declared she'd never really loved Finn after all, because "who could love someone who didn't love you back? Love can't grow when it's not shared."
But it did grow, between the two of them, and though it made him happy, Puck knew it was fucked up because a girl like Rachel didn't match a guy like him. But for every fight they had, they had equal amounts of make-up sex and good times; fun dinners with his mother and sister but awkward ones with her gay dads; prom and all that shit that he would never have gone to except that Rachel roped him into it (and he'd secretly enjoyed), and even though she drove him crazy, it was a crazy he could live with, and soon discovered he didn't want to live without.
He told her he loved her for the first time after they did it on prom night. It was well past their first time, but Rachel's eyes had glistened with unshed tears and her fingers had gripped the back of his neck tightly when she whispered her own declaration.
It had been easy when he graduated from McKinley to stay in Lima for her last year of school. There wasn't any change to the status quo, other than he didn't see her everyday at school. They had their moments, but nothing really threatened their relationship, and they'd never broken up, or even come close to discussing it.
They didn't come out and say they'd grow old together either, but Puck felt pretty sure Rachel Berry was it for him. He still noticed other girls, sure, because he was a guy and his dick was a homing device of sorts, but he'd found that only sex with Rachel left him feeling good long after the euphoria of orgasm had passed. He'd stopped having moments where he felt like the man-whore he'd been on his way to becoming; the vicious cycle of feeling guilty for having had so much ass that only eased when he got more of it faded the longer they were together. When Rachel had sex with him ("This is making love, Noah"), he knew he was the only thing in her head, and her heart, and there was a lot to be said for that. Not that he went around campaigning for monogamy, but if anyone asked him, he'd tell them. Being a placeholder, or a way to get back at someone's husband sucked. The longer he was with Rachel, the better it got with her, and learning all the things she liked best became his favorite subject.
By the time they packed all their earthly possessions in his truck and drove to NYC, Puck figured it had been written years ago, and that he already knew the outcome. They would have to work hard and pay their dues, but this city of dreams was about to deliver to them what they'd come to want very much. They would be the couple no one understood; they'd defy the odds, including the doubts inside his own head.
*
He has the random thought that the music he creates from now on will be what gets him the record deal that has eluded him thus far. A broken heart is what propels everyone to the top, right?
"I don't understand," he says, because part of him thinks it can't be real. How many times has he wondered why she's with him? How many fights had come to a conclusion because she'd slammed out the door, threatening melodramatically to never come back? (But she always did.) Those fights had become more frequent after they'd come to New York, especially since four months ago he'd gotten wasted and made out with one of the groupies at the club. But he'd come clean, 'fessed up nice and neat, and she'd forgiven him after he promised no more drinking while working. (He hadn't told her about the coke.)
But today she's laying something on him with the expectation that he will be the one to end things.
"Noah," she whispers his name and her hand hovers over his arm, like she's afraid to touch him, and that messes with his head more than the words that came out of left field.
Rachel has never been shy with him, even back when maybe she should have been.
He looks at her face, dragging his eyes away from the hand that never touches him. The tears overflow and splash down her cheeks, her face crumpling sweetly, and that's what makes it connect totally in his head. He remembers that night, weeks ago now. It hadn't been one of their normal fights, the yelling screaming kind. It had been a lot like now, where she quietly declared something that every cell in his body disagreed with, only then, his reaction had been to prove to her how much they belonged together.
And he'd done so without a condom, a mistake he hadn't made since he'd found out Quinn was pregnant. They were good about double bagging-he bought the condoms, and Rachel was on some kind of birth control that she got at Planned Parenthood. They were both responsible, so even if they accidentally got irresponsible they were covered.
He loved her, and she loved him, and that's all that mattered. That's all that had ever mattered. But something inside of him had told him from minute one that that would never be enough, and now here they are.
Now, he wonders how it could have ever been love if this is what she wants-if this is the only solution that seems right to her.
"No. No," he says, finally finding words, even though they are useless denials that cannot change what she's just said.
"I've made up my mind," she states with a sniffle. "The appointment's tomorrow."
He can feel the anger, the rush of adrenaline that would normally leave him shouting and waving his arms around to make his point more plainly. Only, he doesn't know what his point would be. The phrases that slip from between his lips aren't even complete thoughts, "How can ... when you know... I've already... you're the one person who..." but she seems to understand everything perfectly because it makes her cry harder and nod her head in some sort of weird agreement with him.
She says chokingly, "If you never want to see me again, I understand," and his eyes snap up to her face, because she's like a total stranger.
A stranger who holds his heart in plain sight while she squeezes the shit out of it. And all he can think is that if she doesn't love him anymore, and she's leaving, and this is how she's doing it, he can only do one thing.
Let her.
*
"Babe, did I leave my guitar picks here the last time I was over?" he asked, picking up magazines and sheet music that covered the desk in the corner of Rachel's front room.
When there was no response, he looked around and realized she wasn't still in the room with him. "Rach?" he shouted, knowing his voice would carry all the way back to the bathroom easily. Her apartment wasn't as small as his, but it wasn't much bigger, even if they'd thrown up a wall on the east side to make her bedroom and bathroom separate from the kitchen and living room.
She appeared in the doorway, one of his old t-shirts skimming her bare thighs as she rubbed a towel at the ends of her wet, just-out-of-the-shower hair. "I haven't seen them," she said.
He looks back at her desk, knowing that if there was anything out of place, or not belonging to her, Rachel would have found it long before he could ask for it. That's when he noticed a flyer, words jumping out at him from above a photo of Rachel and some douche named Aaron Walters. "Come Celebrate the Songs of George Gershwin," it invited.
"Must've left 'em at the club," he muttered. He had a little black bag with a drawstring that generally went inside his guitar case and held his extra picks. Sometimes he tossed them into the crowd, depending on the vibe he got on any given night.
"Noah?"
Startled, he spun around because he didn't know she had moved closer until she spoke his name. The flyer was still in his hand. "We need to talk," she said. The expression on her face made him uneasy in a way he couldn't pinpoint.
"What's up?" he asked.
She tugged the flyer out of his grasp and tossed it back towards her desk. It wafted upward before settling down on the sheet music for Someone To Watch Over Me.
A roaring erupted in his head when she started in on something about seeing other people. He didn't think he shouted, but that might have been because he couldn't hear very well over the blood thumping through his temples. When he asked, "What mother fucking people?" her eyes had gone back towards her desk, and he said something like, "What, that guy isn't gay? I don't buy it." That made her angry, her eyes flashed, and so he accused her of fucking the guy.
She rolled her eyes and calmly said, "I'm not you."
It was the one time in all the years he'd known her that he really wanted to hit her. Instead, he moved away from the couch where they were sitting and grabbed that fucking powder blue flyer and crumpled it into a tight, tiny ball with one fist. The thing was, he'd never cheated on Rachel-not really. The skank he'd fingerbanged had breathed shit like "Your music makes me so hot," and "I've always wanted to be fucked in an alley," and it had made him forget for a second (or 45) that he was just some nobody from Lima, Ohio playing in a bottom basement club in the middle of Manhattan (and that his girlfriend was somewhere across town practicing show tunes with someone much more preferable rather than there with him). It wasn't really cheating. How could it be when they were all her to him, anyway?
That one had been on her knees in front of him, a breath away from wrapping her lips around his cock-and he'd pushed her away. He'd had a moment of clarity with the coke pounding in his veins, and he'd known he didn't want that life. So he'd walked away, and he hadn't gone back to that club, and he never would.
Well, maybe he would if she actually broke up with him.
It was on that thought that he threw the paper ball, not at her, not directly anyway. He had no response to her jibe, because to say anything would reveal too much when he was already stripped and flayed in front of her. He looked directly at her and asked after long minutes of silence, "Are you sure this is what you want?"
Tears appeared in her eyes and she shook her head, looking uncertain, and then he was on her. He pushed her-his-t-shirt up, knowing there was nothing but freshly washed skin beneath it. His thumbs found her nipples, already hard either from the chill of the room or his breath on her neck, he wasn't sure. Stroking, stroking and then she was gasping, her hands catching behind his upper arms, gripping tightly; then he had her under him on the couch, his jean-covered knee wedging itself between her legs. Her hips rolled, but he didn't move at all, just his thumbs whisking back and forth over the hardened tips of her breasts.
Early in their sexual relationship he'd discovered he could make her come from this contact only, if he caught her the week before her period. After being together for so long, he knew her menstrual cycle without even consulting a calendar. He watched her face, the blood coming up under her skin, her eyelids fluttering, and her lips alternately going slack and forming small little moans that made his hips rock in response.
As soon as she seized up, he moved a hand and thrust two fingers inside her none too gently, so that she half-screamed, half groaned in guttural surprise, a sound that nearly blew his head right off. He didn't lose his focus, however; instead he took her right back up, his fingers finding her g-spot with no problem. He whispered things that he believed, things that he thought she knew too, about how only he could give her this, how only he knew her so well, how there was no one on planet earth who could put up with either of them but each other.
He was mean, and sweet, both at the same time because he could feel her tears and hear her smiles, and then her hands were all over him, under his plaid button up, and inside the front of his jeans. Suddenly he was between her palms, their softness only teasing and caressing, not satisfying his need to be tightly surrounded by something warm and wet. Their eyes met, and she guided him inside her, but it wasn't until he came hotly a few minutes later, the reverberations shuddering up and down his spine, that he became totally aware of his latex-free skin.
When he croaked out the obvious, the orgasm still working its way through him in little aftershocks, she just laughed softly and said, "Don't worry about it. My period will come in a few days."
*
He thinks back on it now that she's delivered an announcement he can't quite process. He remembers how she'd stopped talking about leaving him, and how they'd made love again, slowly and thoroughly-again without a condom. They'd kissed and touched and defiled that sofa, and then he'd dragged her from it to bend her over the desk so he could watch her ass grind against his stomach until he wasn't sure that the milking motions around his cock was even what made him come. Having sex with condoms was smart; having sex without them was heavenly. Intoxicating. Better than any other high he'd ever experienced.
Rachel was not something he ever got tired of; some of her shit, sure, but never, ever her, never their fights if they led to fucking (which they always did), or their conversations about the future and everything they would do and be.
When the future arrives so abruptly, Rachel's solution is not something Puck can wrap his mind around. He stares at the tears on her face and knows the heartbreak in her eyes is real. He knows this, can feel it deep inside where shards of love and hate scrape against each other in his gut and he wants to beat the shit out of her at the same time he needs to hold her close and tell her it will work out.
Only, he doesn't think it will, and he's never been good at lying to her.
She moves towards the door, and he realizes now why she had wanted to come to his place, when normally they hung out at hers. It was so she could leave whenever she wanted to, not wait for him to storm out, or whatever she thought he'd do when she told him.
He wants to say something, but he's literally robbed of coherency. He has a million thoughts, but the anger he feels is not the hot-blooded kind that Rachel normally provokes in him. It's the impotent rage that he felt in Lima when Quinn Fabray let the entire school think that Finn Hudson was her baby daddy.
That was almost four years ago, but back then he'd been stranded on an island of regret that paralyzed him, and made him slink around in shame when that wasn't what he'd really felt.
Then she leaves, quietly closing the door behind her, and he doesn't follow after her. He just sits on the ratty overstuffed chair that is his only piece of real furniture, and contemplates the irony of something like this happening to him twice with two very different girls who had two very different solutions to the same problem.
He wonders what it would take to find a woman who would have his child without regret.
Continue to part 2.
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Puck/Rachel
Warnings: Future!fic; spoilers for all aired episodes.
Word count: ~9900
Recipient: andbless_mybaby
Disclaimer: Glee belongs to Ryan Murphy, et all.
Summary: A few years into their relationship, Puck and Rachel face a crisis.
A/N: This fic supposes that Puck is a year older than Rachel (i.e., if she's a sophomore in current time on the show, Puck is a junior). The title of this fic, and some references in it, are lifted from the song “Blinded (When I See You)” by Third Eye Blind, which was given as a prompt. Many thanks to my wonderful betas!
Watching her is like staring at the sun. Deep down inside, he has always suspected that she is far too bright a star for him. His retinas burn now with the truth, and something like tears prick at the backs of his eyes. He remembers his teacher telling him to never look directly at the sun when they studied the solar system in fourth grade. Of course as soon as school was out, he'd gone right outside and stared up at the yellow ball until his eyes had watered.
This was far more painful than that.
Her brow puckers as she waits for his reaction. He imagines the emotion rocketing through him must flare in his pupils, just like the rush of something illegal slicking through his veins can blow out the hazel-green altogether and make them dark; not as dark as hers, but almost.
Like with everything. He is almost like her (talented and good looking, just not classically so, she's said that herself), almost good enough (could go to college if he really wanted to, writes a mean tune, plays the guitar well, and sings with passion-just not enough to get a degree in it). Almost what she needs, but not quite.
Good enough to come to New York with her, but so not worth holding on to.
*
New York would be the adventure of Noah Puckerman's life. When Rachel was accepted to NYU on a full-ride musical scholarship, there was no other place he would have gone. He wasn't planning on college anyway (had already bummed his first year after high school around Lima doing odd jobs and saving every penny for when they decided on where they were going), and New York was bound to have more opportunities for a decent day job that would let him play clubs at night until he could find someone who thought his music would get radio time.
Rachel was certain this would happen instantaneously. Puck was a little more realistic. He was good; he knew that. His songs only got better as he got older; his material had advanced from waxing lyrical about his truck, or (what he thought were) poetic ways of describing sex, to thoughts of an uncertain future in harsh economic times, and beautiful girls (okay, just one girl) who inspired loyalty and confidence, and once in a while he still snuck lines in like laying her out beneath me makes all the world beautifully ironic. She let him get away with it because secretly she wanted the world to know she'd tamed him.
After nine months in New York, that was obvious. They'd been together nearly three years now, high school sweethearts to those that had to label it, but Rachel still had her social niceties that she forced him to comply with. She had weird rules for herself that she called goals but Puck thought they were just structure she used to categorize where they were in their lives at present. It was all on her terms, and sometimes that really pissed him off.
When they'd moved to the city, she'd said, "Noah, I can't live with someone I'm not engaged to, and we are not ready to get engaged." He didn't tell her about the ring he'd found in a pawnshop a couple of months later, even though he'd bought it on the spot. He knew they were young, and he was in no hurry to get married either, but that ring had screamed Rachel's name when he saw it. It might have been someone else's cast off, a symbol of their broken relationship, but he'd never be able to buy her a more perfect one for $450. It was hidden in his sock drawer, or rather, the only drawer in the small kitchen of his studio apartment. Someday, when it was right, he'd give it to her, and they'd get a place together, finally.
He'd stopped fighting with her about the money they could save if they didn't both pay rent, because he could never win an argument with her other than to pin her down and fuck her mouth shut. So he convinced himself it was enough that they'd been together as long as they had and that she'd wanted him to come with her to New York even though her dads hadn't been too stoked about the idea. No two parents (gay or straight) had ever had a child who wanted to please them more (and he'd watched Quinn give their baby daughter away to get back into the good graces of hers) than Rachel Berry’s.
Telling them that she was taking her less-than-college-material boyfriend with her to New York City had virtually been like her telling them to fuck off. Well, maybe for Rachel, it would have been more like a politely whispered go to hell (hence the separate residences, he was sure of it). She didn't much use big swear words, and he could remember the few times she'd actually said 'fuck' ever. (It was only when he was doing just that to her, and he got her to beg him for it.)
She had declared her major as musical theater (big shocker). She constantly sang show tunes and prepared for random performances while simultaneously maintaining an A average in all her General Ed classes (that Puck couldn't see any point in taking when she wanted to sing and act for a living). It was just like a bigger production of Glee Club back home, except that he didn't know all the cast of characters, but the few that traipsed through Rachel's apartment when he happened to be there.
It wasn't that he was uninterested in her new friends, but rarely did he have much in common with any of them. They were theater types, not wannabe Rock Stars. He certainly noticed when guys showed up because he knew that she attracted them, whether she realized it or not. Most of the time she was oblivious to the threatening looks he gave the asshats who visibly shrank when they saw how wide Puck's shoulders were. Sometimes he purposely picked up Rachel's small 15 pounders and did quick rounds of 20 with them just to emphasize the strength he still maintained in the Puckerones. Once in a while she happened to glance around, saw the imminent cockfights, and ushered her co-stars out before anything could happen.
Often, those nights were the best sex nights, except that they were also the times Puck felt desperation licking at his heels as he pounded himself into her. His fingers gripped her hips too tightly, leaving marks behind, and when he sucked her skin up against his teeth she would whimper, the edge of pain in her throat not exactly what he intended.
Other times he'd purposely eat her out for like an hour; as if the time spent doing shit like that could bind her more tightly to him-like he did it all for her-as though it didn't sometimes make him go back in time to when he was a 15-year-old who couldn't hold his wad, and he'd come in his shorts. Rachel would be wet all over, the sweat across her skin a brand of a different kind. But part of him really believed-hoped-it would work to keep them together.
She'd smile lazily at him and roll up on to her side, falling asleep before he'd even laid on the bed next to her, her exhaustion his doing; then he'd stare up at the ceiling with crazy thoughts chasing after each other and ask himself how long it could go on this way.
Unbalanced.
Him fucking needing her more than she could ever need him.
*
Tears well up in her eyes, their brown depths fathomless. He's never been able to find the bottom, though he'd expected to, years ago. In Lima-in fucking high school-where nothing lasted, and they should have burned out quickly, especially with the Finn-shaped baggage she’d carried, and the Quinn-sized chip on his shoulder he'd hauled around. They should never have worked, and it's true that they'd made little sense together.
But the sense had come from the nonsensical, Rachel said. Often two things didn't seem like they went together ("like Glee and football, to borrow something smart Finn once said") but when you saw them side by side they complimented each other beautifully.
At least for a time. It's smart to recognize when that time is over and acknowledge it with more than a passing nod. (Puck thinks that, but he's not sure he can say it aloud.)
*
The first duet they sang together, back before they were a couple when their non-defined friendship had started to ingrain itself, was the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow song Picture. It had been slightly risky in Rachel's opinion, and exactly the kind of statement Puck had wanted to make. "Let's shake things up, Berry," he said. "I've had enough of your sappy love duets with Finn. Let's do the ugly version of love." She agreed, after much coaxing on his part. (He seriously just used words to convince her, though that had been the first time he contemplated seducing Rachel Berry.)
Mr. Schuester grinned, his enthusiasm scaring Puck just a little. It bordered on Rachel-crazy, and back then, the reason he'd sung with her was because it was the only fucking way to get noticed. "Your voices compliment each other much more than I would have guessed," Schue said, rubbing his hands together like he was mentally noting all the raspy-voiced leads he could pin on Puck. For some reason, Puck had looked around the room then, and he saw this strange fear etched on Finn's face; it had been the beginning of the end.
He managed to hold off for the rest of that school year, despite his growing interest in not just her boobs or what was in her underpants. Sometime over the summer between his junior and senior year they'd hooked up, a party at Brittany's that had gone terribly wrong (or right? It had seemed right then). He'd had a few beers, and then they were in the master bedroom, and Rachel had climbed on top of him, a determined glint in her eyes he thought was solely reserved for Finn.
By the end of the evening, he had her virginity notched on his figurative belt (something she felt "burdened by, so I chose someone both experienced enough to make it good for me and a person I trust"). Puck had a what the fuck moment to learn that the girl he'd mercilessly slushied for more than a year would somehow choose him. It wasn't that he hadn't thought about it, but he'd gotten virgin-shy after Quinn. She also wrangled some kind of weird promise out of him that he didn't have to be her boyfriend, but he couldn't go around telling everyone that she gave it up to him.
He stewed over that for all of three days, and then he'd been on her doorstep saying, "Fuck that," because the world would know, and the only way they'd know was if he claimed ownership. So he had (he only gave the minor-ist of details to Chang and Rutherford after football practice that same day), and not so suddenly he'd realized that he was half in love with Rachel Berry.
He never said a word to Finn; he just waited until they were all in the hallway on the first day of school, and then casually looped his arm around Rachel's neck. Her fingers were caught in his, so the whole scene was like something out of a teen flick where The Moment had arrived and the two main characters made their walk down the hall as an item.
Funnily enough, they'd both loved it. After all, they both had star potential. Having the whole school talking about them had been flattering, and for once Puck hadn't had to see people whispering behind their hands about how he'd knocked up his best friend's girl, or how they'd given the baby away hours after she'd been born.
Everything after that had been only about them-Puck (Noah) and Rachel-the way it should have been. He'd gotten over Quinn (though he still dreams about his daughter to this day), and Rachel declared she'd never really loved Finn after all, because "who could love someone who didn't love you back? Love can't grow when it's not shared."
But it did grow, between the two of them, and though it made him happy, Puck knew it was fucked up because a girl like Rachel didn't match a guy like him. But for every fight they had, they had equal amounts of make-up sex and good times; fun dinners with his mother and sister but awkward ones with her gay dads; prom and all that shit that he would never have gone to except that Rachel roped him into it (and he'd secretly enjoyed), and even though she drove him crazy, it was a crazy he could live with, and soon discovered he didn't want to live without.
He told her he loved her for the first time after they did it on prom night. It was well past their first time, but Rachel's eyes had glistened with unshed tears and her fingers had gripped the back of his neck tightly when she whispered her own declaration.
It had been easy when he graduated from McKinley to stay in Lima for her last year of school. There wasn't any change to the status quo, other than he didn't see her everyday at school. They had their moments, but nothing really threatened their relationship, and they'd never broken up, or even come close to discussing it.
They didn't come out and say they'd grow old together either, but Puck felt pretty sure Rachel Berry was it for him. He still noticed other girls, sure, because he was a guy and his dick was a homing device of sorts, but he'd found that only sex with Rachel left him feeling good long after the euphoria of orgasm had passed. He'd stopped having moments where he felt like the man-whore he'd been on his way to becoming; the vicious cycle of feeling guilty for having had so much ass that only eased when he got more of it faded the longer they were together. When Rachel had sex with him ("This is making love, Noah"), he knew he was the only thing in her head, and her heart, and there was a lot to be said for that. Not that he went around campaigning for monogamy, but if anyone asked him, he'd tell them. Being a placeholder, or a way to get back at someone's husband sucked. The longer he was with Rachel, the better it got with her, and learning all the things she liked best became his favorite subject.
By the time they packed all their earthly possessions in his truck and drove to NYC, Puck figured it had been written years ago, and that he already knew the outcome. They would have to work hard and pay their dues, but this city of dreams was about to deliver to them what they'd come to want very much. They would be the couple no one understood; they'd defy the odds, including the doubts inside his own head.
*
He has the random thought that the music he creates from now on will be what gets him the record deal that has eluded him thus far. A broken heart is what propels everyone to the top, right?
"I don't understand," he says, because part of him thinks it can't be real. How many times has he wondered why she's with him? How many fights had come to a conclusion because she'd slammed out the door, threatening melodramatically to never come back? (But she always did.) Those fights had become more frequent after they'd come to New York, especially since four months ago he'd gotten wasted and made out with one of the groupies at the club. But he'd come clean, 'fessed up nice and neat, and she'd forgiven him after he promised no more drinking while working. (He hadn't told her about the coke.)
But today she's laying something on him with the expectation that he will be the one to end things.
"Noah," she whispers his name and her hand hovers over his arm, like she's afraid to touch him, and that messes with his head more than the words that came out of left field.
Rachel has never been shy with him, even back when maybe she should have been.
He looks at her face, dragging his eyes away from the hand that never touches him. The tears overflow and splash down her cheeks, her face crumpling sweetly, and that's what makes it connect totally in his head. He remembers that night, weeks ago now. It hadn't been one of their normal fights, the yelling screaming kind. It had been a lot like now, where she quietly declared something that every cell in his body disagreed with, only then, his reaction had been to prove to her how much they belonged together.
And he'd done so without a condom, a mistake he hadn't made since he'd found out Quinn was pregnant. They were good about double bagging-he bought the condoms, and Rachel was on some kind of birth control that she got at Planned Parenthood. They were both responsible, so even if they accidentally got irresponsible they were covered.
He loved her, and she loved him, and that's all that mattered. That's all that had ever mattered. But something inside of him had told him from minute one that that would never be enough, and now here they are.
Now, he wonders how it could have ever been love if this is what she wants-if this is the only solution that seems right to her.
"No. No," he says, finally finding words, even though they are useless denials that cannot change what she's just said.
"I've made up my mind," she states with a sniffle. "The appointment's tomorrow."
He can feel the anger, the rush of adrenaline that would normally leave him shouting and waving his arms around to make his point more plainly. Only, he doesn't know what his point would be. The phrases that slip from between his lips aren't even complete thoughts, "How can ... when you know... I've already... you're the one person who..." but she seems to understand everything perfectly because it makes her cry harder and nod her head in some sort of weird agreement with him.
She says chokingly, "If you never want to see me again, I understand," and his eyes snap up to her face, because she's like a total stranger.
A stranger who holds his heart in plain sight while she squeezes the shit out of it. And all he can think is that if she doesn't love him anymore, and she's leaving, and this is how she's doing it, he can only do one thing.
Let her.
*
"Babe, did I leave my guitar picks here the last time I was over?" he asked, picking up magazines and sheet music that covered the desk in the corner of Rachel's front room.
When there was no response, he looked around and realized she wasn't still in the room with him. "Rach?" he shouted, knowing his voice would carry all the way back to the bathroom easily. Her apartment wasn't as small as his, but it wasn't much bigger, even if they'd thrown up a wall on the east side to make her bedroom and bathroom separate from the kitchen and living room.
She appeared in the doorway, one of his old t-shirts skimming her bare thighs as she rubbed a towel at the ends of her wet, just-out-of-the-shower hair. "I haven't seen them," she said.
He looks back at her desk, knowing that if there was anything out of place, or not belonging to her, Rachel would have found it long before he could ask for it. That's when he noticed a flyer, words jumping out at him from above a photo of Rachel and some douche named Aaron Walters. "Come Celebrate the Songs of George Gershwin," it invited.
"Must've left 'em at the club," he muttered. He had a little black bag with a drawstring that generally went inside his guitar case and held his extra picks. Sometimes he tossed them into the crowd, depending on the vibe he got on any given night.
"Noah?"
Startled, he spun around because he didn't know she had moved closer until she spoke his name. The flyer was still in his hand. "We need to talk," she said. The expression on her face made him uneasy in a way he couldn't pinpoint.
"What's up?" he asked.
She tugged the flyer out of his grasp and tossed it back towards her desk. It wafted upward before settling down on the sheet music for Someone To Watch Over Me.
A roaring erupted in his head when she started in on something about seeing other people. He didn't think he shouted, but that might have been because he couldn't hear very well over the blood thumping through his temples. When he asked, "What mother fucking people?" her eyes had gone back towards her desk, and he said something like, "What, that guy isn't gay? I don't buy it." That made her angry, her eyes flashed, and so he accused her of fucking the guy.
She rolled her eyes and calmly said, "I'm not you."
It was the one time in all the years he'd known her that he really wanted to hit her. Instead, he moved away from the couch where they were sitting and grabbed that fucking powder blue flyer and crumpled it into a tight, tiny ball with one fist. The thing was, he'd never cheated on Rachel-not really. The skank he'd fingerbanged had breathed shit like "Your music makes me so hot," and "I've always wanted to be fucked in an alley," and it had made him forget for a second (or 45) that he was just some nobody from Lima, Ohio playing in a bottom basement club in the middle of Manhattan (and that his girlfriend was somewhere across town practicing show tunes with someone much more preferable rather than there with him). It wasn't really cheating. How could it be when they were all her to him, anyway?
That one had been on her knees in front of him, a breath away from wrapping her lips around his cock-and he'd pushed her away. He'd had a moment of clarity with the coke pounding in his veins, and he'd known he didn't want that life. So he'd walked away, and he hadn't gone back to that club, and he never would.
Well, maybe he would if she actually broke up with him.
It was on that thought that he threw the paper ball, not at her, not directly anyway. He had no response to her jibe, because to say anything would reveal too much when he was already stripped and flayed in front of her. He looked directly at her and asked after long minutes of silence, "Are you sure this is what you want?"
Tears appeared in her eyes and she shook her head, looking uncertain, and then he was on her. He pushed her-his-t-shirt up, knowing there was nothing but freshly washed skin beneath it. His thumbs found her nipples, already hard either from the chill of the room or his breath on her neck, he wasn't sure. Stroking, stroking and then she was gasping, her hands catching behind his upper arms, gripping tightly; then he had her under him on the couch, his jean-covered knee wedging itself between her legs. Her hips rolled, but he didn't move at all, just his thumbs whisking back and forth over the hardened tips of her breasts.
Early in their sexual relationship he'd discovered he could make her come from this contact only, if he caught her the week before her period. After being together for so long, he knew her menstrual cycle without even consulting a calendar. He watched her face, the blood coming up under her skin, her eyelids fluttering, and her lips alternately going slack and forming small little moans that made his hips rock in response.
As soon as she seized up, he moved a hand and thrust two fingers inside her none too gently, so that she half-screamed, half groaned in guttural surprise, a sound that nearly blew his head right off. He didn't lose his focus, however; instead he took her right back up, his fingers finding her g-spot with no problem. He whispered things that he believed, things that he thought she knew too, about how only he could give her this, how only he knew her so well, how there was no one on planet earth who could put up with either of them but each other.
He was mean, and sweet, both at the same time because he could feel her tears and hear her smiles, and then her hands were all over him, under his plaid button up, and inside the front of his jeans. Suddenly he was between her palms, their softness only teasing and caressing, not satisfying his need to be tightly surrounded by something warm and wet. Their eyes met, and she guided him inside her, but it wasn't until he came hotly a few minutes later, the reverberations shuddering up and down his spine, that he became totally aware of his latex-free skin.
When he croaked out the obvious, the orgasm still working its way through him in little aftershocks, she just laughed softly and said, "Don't worry about it. My period will come in a few days."
*
He thinks back on it now that she's delivered an announcement he can't quite process. He remembers how she'd stopped talking about leaving him, and how they'd made love again, slowly and thoroughly-again without a condom. They'd kissed and touched and defiled that sofa, and then he'd dragged her from it to bend her over the desk so he could watch her ass grind against his stomach until he wasn't sure that the milking motions around his cock was even what made him come. Having sex with condoms was smart; having sex without them was heavenly. Intoxicating. Better than any other high he'd ever experienced.
Rachel was not something he ever got tired of; some of her shit, sure, but never, ever her, never their fights if they led to fucking (which they always did), or their conversations about the future and everything they would do and be.
When the future arrives so abruptly, Rachel's solution is not something Puck can wrap his mind around. He stares at the tears on her face and knows the heartbreak in her eyes is real. He knows this, can feel it deep inside where shards of love and hate scrape against each other in his gut and he wants to beat the shit out of her at the same time he needs to hold her close and tell her it will work out.
Only, he doesn't think it will, and he's never been good at lying to her.
She moves towards the door, and he realizes now why she had wanted to come to his place, when normally they hung out at hers. It was so she could leave whenever she wanted to, not wait for him to storm out, or whatever she thought he'd do when she told him.
He wants to say something, but he's literally robbed of coherency. He has a million thoughts, but the anger he feels is not the hot-blooded kind that Rachel normally provokes in him. It's the impotent rage that he felt in Lima when Quinn Fabray let the entire school think that Finn Hudson was her baby daddy.
That was almost four years ago, but back then he'd been stranded on an island of regret that paralyzed him, and made him slink around in shame when that wasn't what he'd really felt.
Then she leaves, quietly closing the door behind her, and he doesn't follow after her. He just sits on the ratty overstuffed chair that is his only piece of real furniture, and contemplates the irony of something like this happening to him twice with two very different girls who had two very different solutions to the same problem.
He wonders what it would take to find a woman who would have his child without regret.
Continue to part 2.