That the Moon Elbowed the Stars 7/17
Title: That the Moon Elbowed the Stars
Chapter: 7/17
Rating: R
Pairing: Puck/Rachel
Word Count: 5,900
Summary: And maybe it's an awful thing to think, but he wonders what's worse for her, losing New York or losing her dad.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rachel makes a resolution on the night that she moves back into her Columbus apartment.
This year, she's going to do college right.
See, last year didn't feel like any version of college she's familiar with. It definitely wasn't like her own fantasy of college, for obvious reasons, but it wasn't like the college experience she's seen in movies or on television or read about in book either, and she thinks that at least some portion of those stories must be accurate. She isn't expecting to be Elle Woods (near-travesty of a Broadway musical notwithstanding), nor does she want to recreate Animal House or any other iconic college experience, but she does want some piece of that for herself.
She thinks that being back with Finn can only help with this. (And the parallels between Finn bringing her into the college social scene the same way he did back in high school, in a lot of ways, don't go unnoticed by Rachel.) Being with Finn is just so comfortable, so easy. She never really stopped loving him. They broke up because they started drifting apart and they were going in different directions, not because they didn't love each other, and now that she's going to be in Columbus for another year, well...
It isn't the first time she's walked into a relationship with Finn knowing that it probably has an expiration date, but this time, she isn't going to let that nag away at the back of her mind like she did when she was seventeen. She's just going to let herself have fun and be in love.
And if she's being inappropriately honest? After a year of not even kissing anyone, it's nice to be having sex again on a regular basis.
This year, she isn't going back to Lima every weekend, so she intends to be at home football games, to spend more time with her friends, and she may even entertain the idea of making some new friends even if she is leaving in a year. (Not every friendship has to be lifelong, something else she's learned in the last year.)
Of course, she's still Rachel Berry, and even though Noah and Santana invite her over to the house they're sharing the night before classes start, she declines. She has night-before-the-first-day-of-school routine (ritual, if you will) that she needs to go through, and even her "more fun" resolution isn't going to keep her from organizing her new school supplies or taking her traditional bubble bath.
She's sitting in a seat in the middle of the lecture hall for her pop culture course on Monday morning, writing the date and the course title at the top of the first page in her new notebook and waiting for the professor to begin class when Noah lowers himself into the seat next to hers. "Hey," he greets simply.
She blinks at him. "I didn't know you were taking pop culture," she says, which is silly considering that she doesn't know what he's taking at all. She can't actually remember the last time she had a real conversation with Noah.
He smirks. "I guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other." It's a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class, his first each of those days, and really, he can think of a lot worse people to sit next to for an hour first thing in the morning.
He takes a second to look her up and down, to take in the little red sun dress she's wearing with a white cardigan that has sleeves that stop just below her elbows, the way she's got her bangs pinned back away from her face. "What else do you have today?"
"Public speaking," she answers, grinning when he snorts out a laugh. "I know, it's ridiculous given my experience with speaking in front of groups," she notices that he rolls his eyes, "but it's a requirement, and it's just a Monday, Wednesday class."
He starts to say something else, but Rachel shushes him when the professor starts talking down at the front of the lecture hall.
They walk out of the lecture hall together after she spent the whole hour nudging him with her elbow while he doodled random shit in the margins of his syllabus. (Whatever, he doesn't need to keep his shit pristine and perfect like she does.) Campus has that super-busy feeling that it always has at the beginning of the semester, and this year, Puck notices just how young all the freshmen look, how easy it is to pick them out from everyone else.
The house he's sharing with Santana is about four blocks from Rachel's place, so they cross campus together, and when they get to the place where they have to split up and go their separate ways, Rachel stands on her toes in her flat little sandals and wraps her arms around his neck ."I'm glad we have a class together this semester," she murmurs against his shoulder. She pulls away and looks up at him with excited eyes. "We should meet up and walk together!"
He looks at her skeptically. "I don't show up for classes fifteen minutes early, Rachel."
She rolls her eyes, but she's not surprised that he says it. "I only do the first day. I'm not expecting you get up early."
Honestly, a ten o'clock class is early, especially on Fridays since he usually spends Thursday nights drinking. "We'll try it on Wednesday, all right?"
She claps her hands together quickly, just barely making noise, and smiles. "Excellent. Have a good day, Noah!"
He's shaking his head when she walks away from him, because this Rachel? Totally different than the one he got used to seeing last year, and he's not entirely sure what to make of it.
*
Rachel doesn't get to spend as much time with Finn as she'd like, but she finds that it doesn't bother her the way it would have two years ago. Football is an enormous demand on his time (though he's still third-string this year) between practices and weight training and study sessions and travel to away games. And since she has her own classes and things going on, she doesn't really see that much of him.
She doesn't hate it though. She still has her Monday night House viewing with Santana, which they usually do at Rachel's place. (After the time Noah decided he was going to watch with them and spent the entire show asking questions and talking about how bad ass House is, they decided to avoid watching with him again.) She makes a point of doing something social every weekend, whether it's going to a party or a club with Santana or hanging out and playing silly video games in Sam's dorm room while he's on duty. She goes to each home football game, once with Santana (who she only convinces with a bottle of Hot Damn purchased with her fake ID) and once with Sam and some of his new RA friends (who are all lovely and far less stuffy than she would have expected of resident advisers).
Finn comes over after practice on a Wednesday night, carrying a frozen vegan pizza and a backpack full of books. It's been over a week since she's seen him, and it'll be at least another week before she sees him again with his away game this weekend and her economics exam next Tuesday, but they try to make an effort to spend time together when they can.
They're sitting on opposite ends of the couch after dinner, facing one another with their legs tangled together while they each focus on their own reading assignments. At least, they're pretending to focus on their reading assignments. It's hard to pay attention to an analysis of World War II propaganda when Finn's hand is on the top of her foot, his fingertips tracing lightly over the inside of her ankle bone.
He's grinning when she looks over the top of her textbook at him. "Stop it," she orders without conviction, twitching her foot a little in an imitation of a girl trying to make a boy stop touching her.
"What?" he asks, feigning innocence and failing miserably when the corners of his mouth quirk up.
Rachel's shaking her head when she sets her book aside and moves so she's straddling his thighs. "You're supposed to be studying," she reminds him, taking his book and putting it on the floor.
He shrugs, setting his hands on her hips and sliding them upwards, just beneath the sweater she's wearing. "It's kind of boring."
She quirks an eyebrows, then says a mental 'screw it.' She hasn't seen him in over a week, and now he's right in front of her, right between her legs, and she can't for the life of her figure out why they're talking.
So she leans forward to kiss him, threading her fingers into his hair to keep him close while she has him.
*
Living with Santana is kind of a trip, honestly. It's not like he can forget that she's a girl, what with the boobs and the tampons under the bathroom sink and the way that she sometimes takes fucking forever to get ready to go out places. But then she does something a dude would do, like open a beer at eleven on a Saturday morning just because or bring home some hot-as-fuck blonde chick from a party and have loud ass sex, and he doesn't know what to think.
Sometimes, Puck actually wonders if it's easier with Santana than it would be with another girl because the sexual tension stuff is a non-issue. They haven't slept together in years, but there isn't any of that 'forbidden fruit' bullshit going on - if they wanted to fuck, they'd fuck - and they don't have to wonder what the other person is like in bed because they already know. And yeah, she's still hot, and he's going to look, especially when she walks around the house without a bra on or whatever, but he's not gonna do anything about it.
He knows that Mia was worried about the whole thing when he told her, but he and Santana were already planning to live together when he and Mia made things official, and they'd been talking about since Sam decided to be an RA.. And now his girlfriend knows for sure that there isn't anything going on with Santana, having seen the way they act with one another. It's kind of awesome that the girl isn't all crazy jealous.
He's never been a relationship with anyone as long as he has with Mia, and that includes all the time that he and Quinn were whatever they were after the whole baby secret thing came out. And he's not like, thinking about marrying the girl (fuck, he's not even twenty yet), but he isn't looking for an out either. He likes being with her, plain and simple.
She takes school really fucking seriously, and it's the only thing they really fight about, the fact that she thinks he's not working as hard as he should or that she can't believe that he hasn't declared a major yet or that he's trying to distract her from what she's doing. And honestly, she's a creative writing major, so he's not sure why she's up on her high horse about shit. What the fuck is she going to do with an English degree? Poets and novelists aren't exactly rolling in it, except for that lady who wrote Harry Potter, so fuck that. But whatever. It means she basically freezes him out during midterms. Like, he doesn't see her at all for a week and a half, legit, and her text messages get all bitchy.
(Santana mentions something about writers being temperamental when he's complaining about it one morning. He tells her to fuck off, and she throws a wet dish towel in his face and tells him to go jerk off, 'because you're a real bastard when you're horny.')
He's sitting on the couch fucking around on his guitar on Friday afternoon when Mia lets herself into the house. He knows her last midterm was due today (some short nonfiction story she's been working on since August), so he's not surprised when she comes in. He is, however, a little pissed off that she's been such a raging bitch all week, so he doesn't put the guitar aside like he normally would. Instead, he just keeps playing, transitioning into a little melody he wrote forever ago that he still doesn't have lyrics for, watching as Mia drops her keys on the coffee table and lowers herself onto the couch beside him.
"Hi." Puck just raises his eyebrows and watches her tilt her head at him. "Puck," she sighs.
"You kinda suck," he tells her evenly.
She shakes her head, her eyes on his hands as he plays. "School is important."
"That doesn't mean you have to be a bitch about it," he points out. Maybe telling his girlfriend she's being a bitch isn't the smartest thing, but he's not going to hold back when it's the truth.
She just watches him for a moment, then bites her lip. "Didn't you miss me?"
He snorts out a laugh. "Babe."
He lets her take the guitar from his hands when she wraps her fingers around the neck, watching as she sets it gently on the coffee table, on top of a scattering of issues of In Style and Playboy and Maxim (all Santana's subscriptions). She stands, taking his hands in hers and pulling him to his feet. "I missed you," she tells him quietly, walking backwards towards the hallway. "I could show you how much, if you'll let me."
Puck just smirks and lets her lead him into his bedroom, because yes, he would like to see how much she missed him, especially since he's pretty sure that it's going to involve her getting on her knees before she gets naked.
*
Finn gets just as excited about OSU's homecoming football game as he did for McKinley's homecoming back in high school, and Rachel thinks it's sort of sweet, especially considering that he isn't the star quarterback here. (Truth is, Finn probably won't ever be a starting quarterback at OSU, which she knows bothers him more than he lets on.) Walking around campus the week before the game, Rachel starts to realize what a big deal everyone else seems to think this is, and she wonders idly how she managed to miss all of the hoopla last year. There are campaign posters and banners everywhere for people running for the royal court (she has high school flashbacks of the Quinn Fabray variety, and she figures that Quinn will probably be running for homecoming queen with the endorsement of whatever sorority she's joined in Kentucky in two years), fliers promoting the parade before the game, and countless mentions of alumni reunions of every organization imaginable.
Sam has committed to being involved with his residence hall's parade float, and Santana refuses to buy into any of the hype whatsoever, so Rachel ends up convincing Noah and Mia to come with her to the game. In true Rachel Berry fashion, she makes an event of it, dressing in school colors and putting a temporary tattoo on her cheek, and in an effort to keep Noah and Mia as happy as possible during the game, she makes an enormous thermos of hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.
She gets caught up in the game, which is easy to do in a huge crowd of people when her team is winning, even if Finn isn't playing, but it's not at all a surprise that the halftime show is her favorite part. Marching band is its own particular animal, and while it's not something she would ever want to do - the uniforms are always hideous - she likes watching the shapes they make and the way the color guard weaves through the rest of the band.
Rachel excuses herself to the restroom after the band finishes their performance, which turns out to be a mistake. The line at the ladies' room feels endless, and the third quarter is half-finished when she makes it back to her seat, weaving through the crowd until she's with Noah again. "Where's Mia?" she asks when she realizes that he's alone.
He smirks lazily. "Her roommate texted her to tell her that she clogged the toilet and flooded their bathroom," he tells her a little gleefully. She knows that he drank the majority of the hot chocolate, and she wonders if he's maybe just a little bit tipsy.
"That's disgusting."
"I think it's hilarious," he counters. "Her roommate's a bitch."
"But now Mia has to deal with the mess, too," she points out.
He shrugs. "Sometimes Mia's a bitch, too." Like, he likes her - he might love her, though he's never told her that - but he doesn't know a woman who isn't a bitch sometimes. Fuck, he lives with Santana Lopez. He knocked up Quinn Fabray. His mother is Marlene Puckerman, for fuck's sake. He knows bitchy women.
She looks at him disapprovingly. "That isn't a very nice thing to say about your girlfriend."
The Buckeyes' defense chooses that moment to sack the opposing team's quarterback, which brings Noah to his feet with a cheer, effectively ending their conversation.
Puck and Rachel leave right after the Buckeyes win, not even bothering to go down to the field to meet up with Finn. He has some team bullshit that he's doing all evening, and Puck's actually sort of surprised that Rachel isn't throwing a fit about not getting to hang out with Finn. Back in high school, she always whined about away games and how they meant that she wouldn't get to see him again until Monday because she had dance class or whatever the hell. But like, Finn's busy all the fucking time now, and he hasn't heard Rachel bitch about not seeing her boyfriend once since they came back to school.
It's not the first time he's thought about this. He sees Rachel quite a bit, and not just in the class they have together. She hangs out with Santana at their place sometimes, and they all go out together pretty frequently. The thing is, he pays more attention than people think, and he figures that as long as Rachel's with Finn, she thinks she's somehow proving to everyone that everything is back to normal since her dad died. But he knows better than that, too, because he knows that she still calls his mom sometimes just to talk, which started after Andrew died, and he's seen the way she shuts down a little when one of their friends says something about their dad.
He waits until they get to a part of campus that isn't totally flooded with people, so he can walk beside her and talk without yelling. It reminds him, a little, of that game they went to last year, when he walked her back to her place because she was drunk. "So, why aren't you all bent out of shape about not getting to hang out with Finn?" he asks.
She looks up at him strangely because it's a strange question. "What do you mean?"
"The Rachel I used to know would have thrown a fit about a boyfriend she never got to hang out with," he answers with a shrug, because it's really hitting him how little time they have to spend together. And like, she probably sees Santana more than she sees Finn, because they hang out a couple of times a week.
"How well did you ever really know me, Noah?" she asks, glaring up at him. Her relationship with Finn isn't any of his business.
He rolls his eyes. "Whatever, Rachel. Get all defensive. That's gonna convince me."
"Convince you of what, exactly?" she demands meanly. She has no idea where this conversation even came from, but it's making her mad, and he isn't drunk enough to use alcohol as an excuse. (Not that she'd accept alcohol as an excuse.)
Puck grins, because he obviously flipped her bitch switch, and there's something he likes about pissing Rachel off. "That you're with Finn for more than sex and convenience." Because in the last five minutes, he's decided that that's what this has to be for her; it keeps her from being 'alone' and horny, but doesn't require her to really do anything else.
"You're vulgar and an ass," she snaps, and she hates herself for letting him get a rise out of her, especially over something so stupid.
"Not a revelation," he reminds her with a smirk, and fuck, watching her get all defensive is kind of awesome.
"You need to learn to keep your mouth shut." She rolls her eyes when she looks up and sees the little grin on his lips. "God, just go home, Puck."
He doesn't get a chance to say anything else, because she stalks away as fast as her little legs will take her, and since they're pretty close to the place where they'd have to separate to go to their respective homes, he doesn't bother following her. Plus, now that she's mad, he's kind of over it.
Rachel spends the rest of her weekend thinking about what Noah said about her relationship with Finn. And as much as she hates that he brought it up and made her think about it at all - because it wasn't any of his business - she realizes that he's right.
She hates that Noah is right.
Being with Finn is easy because they have half a relationship. They converse more in text messages than they do in person, and they only spend more than one night a week together if they're lucky. It's just so easy to be with him. Finn knows the best and the worst of her, and she knows all of that about him, too. They have history together, and she does love him. It's just...she doesn't miss him when he's gone, not like she should. At least, not like she would have when they were together before, and when she pictures her life in New York, Finn is never part of it.
There was a time when Finn was always a part of the life she saw herself having in New York, in one way or another, and knowing that that isn't the case any longer really puts things in perspective.
She decides that she has to end things before either of them gets a chance to really get hurt.
They don't get to see each other until Thursday afternoon, when she drives over to the house that he shares with two other football players after her ballet class. She finds him at his desk, typing away at something in his word processor. He has a bunch of notes and a textbook spread out around him, so she assumes that he's working on a paper for a class, and she doesn't understand why he told her to come over if he was just going to do homework.
Not that it's going to matter. She's here to break up with him.
"Hi," she greets quietly. He's grinning when he looks over at her, an expression she's always loved on him. "What are you working on?"
"Sociology," he answers, closing the lid of his laptop and turning his chair to face her when she perches on the side of his bed. "How was ballet?"
"Fine. We need to talk."
"Sure." He turns his chair the rest of the way so that her legs are between his. "What's up?"
She tucks her hands under her thighs so he can't reach for them. "I think we should break up," she says evenly, taking a little breath when she sees the way his face falls before plowing on when the speech she's spent the last few days rehearsing. "This isn't a real relationship, Finn. We barely spend any time together, and I don't think you miss me when I'm not around any more than I miss you."
He blinks at her, like he's putting it all together, but he doesn't look particularly hurt or upset, not like the last time they broke up. (And that one was mutual.) After a minute, he shrugs one shoulder. "I do love you," he says, almost reluctantly.
"I know," she whispers, because she does. "I love you, too. But we haven't been in love for a long time, Finn. This," she pulls one hand from beneath her thigh to gesture between them, and he catches it in one of his, "this is just easy," she finishes, squeezing his hand gently.
He smiles. "It is really easy. Being with you."
"I know," she says with a nod. "But I don't think it's good for either of us in the long run."
"So...we're done?"
"Yeah. We're done."
It turns out that breaking up with Finn, this time around at least, is just as easy as being with him.
Noah actually beats her to the pop culture class they share on Friday morning, which she finds inexplicably annoying. She glares at him a little while she unbuttons her coat and takes the seat next to his.
"What's your problem?" he finally asks when she doesn't greet him like usual.
She fixes him with another glare, this one more deliberate. "You'll be happy to know that I ended things with Finn last night thanks to your unsolicited advice."
"Whoa, what advice?" Puck asks, looking at her like she's crazy. Yeah, he pointed out that their relationship was bullshit, but he didn't tell her to do anything about it, mostly because he knows how fucking hard-headed she is. Nothing he could have said would have made her do anything.
She doesn't get a chance to answer because the professor starts class, and she spends the entire hour pretending that she can't see him glancing at her out of the corner of her eye.
"So, what? You're all pissed off at me now because you decided to break up with Finn?" he asks after class. He watches her button her gray wool coat as they walk down the steps of the building their class is in.
"Not really," she admits. She doesn't feel much of anything about ending her relationship with Finn. Not feeling anything is sort of turning into a theme in her life, one that she's not really ready to look into any deeper.
"You wanna admit that I was right?"
She rolls her eyes at the smug little grin on his lips. "Shut up."
*
Puck's sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoon, plowing through a bowl of Cap'n Crunch, when Santana comes bursting into the house. She didn't come home last night, so she's still wearing the jeans and the white backless shirt she wore out to whatever bar or party she went to, and her hair's up in a ponytail.
"'Sup, walk of shame?"
"Fuck off, Puck," she says, pulling open the tiny little purse in her hand and upending it on the table as she sits across from him. "I stayed with Amber last night."
Puck just rolls his eyes and takes another bite of cereal. Amber is her tall, blonde, hot friend, and this is Santana 'I bat for both teams' Lopez; the girl has a history with her hot blonde friends.
"Fuck off," she repeats seriously. "You're the one with the cheating whore of a girlfriend."
He stops with his spoon halfway to his mouth and stares at her. "What?"
She quirks an eyebrow at him, then turns her attention back to sorting through whatever the hell accumulated in her purse in one night. "I went out with Amber last night, and we ran into Amy and her friend Sarah, who is in the same program as Mia," she explains quickly, making Puck roll his eyes again. Santana knows fucking everybody somehow. "So we started talking about Mia, and I was informed that Mia and Chris, some guy in their program, have been the scandal of their poetry class since the day that they were caught fucking in the bathroom down the hall fifteen minutes before class started."
She says it all very casually, looking at a receipt from whatever bar she was at before crumpling it up with a napkin he can see has a number scrawled on it, but he knows her well enough to know that she's not just fucking him around right now. Still...
"Seriously?"
She pushes away from the table and stands. "I think she's been cheating on you for a while." She grabs her phone and walks out of the room, leaving the rest of the mess on the table for Puck to stare out while he tries to figure out what the hell he's going to do.
In the end, he does what's easiest: He takes a shower, gets dressed, and drives over to Mia's apartment to ask her if she's fucking around on him.
When the first words out of her cheating mouth are, "Who told you that?" he's pretty fucking sure that it's all true.
And it could probably be some big, dramatic, drawn out thing, but Mia really isn't like that, and neither is Puck. (Unless, of course, you add Quinn, Rachel, Finn, or Santana into the mix. Then shit gets explosive.) He just tells her to fuck off and not call him again and deletes her number when he's walking back to his car.
He calls Rachel when he's about halfway back to his house. "So, I just found out Mia's a cheating slut," he tells her when she answers. "Wanna get drunk tonight?"
She makes this strangled noise that's almost a laugh. "What exactly did you have in mind?"
She meets Noah at an Irish-style pub called Finnegan's Wake. They each take a shot of Jameson, then Rachel decides to try pear cider when just the sight of Noah's Guinness turns her stomach.
It turns out that pear cider is delicious and doesn't taste at all like alcohol (though not quite like pink), which makes it easy to drink a lot of it quite quickly. Noah is drinking with a purpose, so just two hours into the night, they're both very drunk.
"Being cheated on sucks," he tells her seriously. He's already told her the whole story, though Noah was far less concerned with the details than Rachel would have been. She would need to know why, and with whom; he just needed confirmation and the opportunity to call her a slut. (Though Rachel doesn't think that 'cheater' and 'slut' are exactly synonymous.)
She takes a tiny sip of cider, watching him over the rim of her glass. "Do you think this is karma?" she asks gently. "No, really," she says when he rolls his eyes. "How many times have you been with a girl who had a boyfriend?"
"Including you?" he asks pointedly, earning himself a glare. But really, fuck that, and for that matter: "How many times now have you and Finn broken up? Seventeen?"
She huffs out a breath. "Officially, only three. Or four, depending on your definition of break up."
"That's fucked up." He drains the last of his beer and tilts his head at her. "Have you ever fucked anyone else?" She nearly chokes on her drink.
"Oh, my god," she manages after a minute of gasping for air. "That is none of your business."
Puck just stares at her incredulously, because her refusal to answer the question is all the answer he needs. "You didn't have sex for a year?"
She hisses his name, glancing around to see if anyone else is listening, then lets out a sigh when she realizes that they're being completely ignored.. "Fourteen months, actually."
"Jesus fucking Christ."
"After a while, you kind of forget about it all together," she admits, shrugging one shoulder. She gestures for the waitress to bring her another drink. She's already drunk, but she wants more. It's just so tasty, and if Noah is going to start talking about sex, she's going to need it.
"You don't forget about sex," he insists. "Fuck, at least tell me you gave yourself a hand."
He watches her cheeks turn pink. "Stop it." She changes the subject, and he lets it go. It's not like this is his only opportunity to get her all worked up.
They take a cab back to her apartment after last call, and she puts Puck in charge of microwaving the popcorn when she goes into her room to change into pajamas. He's sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for her when she comes in in a pair of purple pajamas patterned with little yellow flowers. He watches her reach up into a cabinet for a bowl, then into the fridge for two bottles of water. "What?" she asks with a laugh, handing him one of the bottles.
And since he's fucking drunk, he tells her the truth. "I'm trying to figure out if you'd go classic and just use your hand, or if you'd actually buy a vibrator." Her eyes go wide, which is kind of awesome.
"Just for that, you're sleeping on the couch," she finally manages.
They find some Family Guy reruns to watch while they eat their popcorn, and Rachel ends up falling asleep on the couch with her feet in Noah's lap and her head pillowed on the armrest.
Chapter: 7/17
Rating: R
Pairing: Puck/Rachel
Word Count: 5,900
Summary: And maybe it's an awful thing to think, but he wonders what's worse for her, losing New York or losing her dad.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rachel makes a resolution on the night that she moves back into her Columbus apartment.
This year, she's going to do college right.
See, last year didn't feel like any version of college she's familiar with. It definitely wasn't like her own fantasy of college, for obvious reasons, but it wasn't like the college experience she's seen in movies or on television or read about in book either, and she thinks that at least some portion of those stories must be accurate. She isn't expecting to be Elle Woods (near-travesty of a Broadway musical notwithstanding), nor does she want to recreate Animal House or any other iconic college experience, but she does want some piece of that for herself.
She thinks that being back with Finn can only help with this. (And the parallels between Finn bringing her into the college social scene the same way he did back in high school, in a lot of ways, don't go unnoticed by Rachel.) Being with Finn is just so comfortable, so easy. She never really stopped loving him. They broke up because they started drifting apart and they were going in different directions, not because they didn't love each other, and now that she's going to be in Columbus for another year, well...
It isn't the first time she's walked into a relationship with Finn knowing that it probably has an expiration date, but this time, she isn't going to let that nag away at the back of her mind like she did when she was seventeen. She's just going to let herself have fun and be in love.
And if she's being inappropriately honest? After a year of not even kissing anyone, it's nice to be having sex again on a regular basis.
This year, she isn't going back to Lima every weekend, so she intends to be at home football games, to spend more time with her friends, and she may even entertain the idea of making some new friends even if she is leaving in a year. (Not every friendship has to be lifelong, something else she's learned in the last year.)
Of course, she's still Rachel Berry, and even though Noah and Santana invite her over to the house they're sharing the night before classes start, she declines. She has night-before-the-first-day-of-school routine (ritual, if you will) that she needs to go through, and even her "more fun" resolution isn't going to keep her from organizing her new school supplies or taking her traditional bubble bath.
She's sitting in a seat in the middle of the lecture hall for her pop culture course on Monday morning, writing the date and the course title at the top of the first page in her new notebook and waiting for the professor to begin class when Noah lowers himself into the seat next to hers. "Hey," he greets simply.
She blinks at him. "I didn't know you were taking pop culture," she says, which is silly considering that she doesn't know what he's taking at all. She can't actually remember the last time she had a real conversation with Noah.
He smirks. "I guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other." It's a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class, his first each of those days, and really, he can think of a lot worse people to sit next to for an hour first thing in the morning.
He takes a second to look her up and down, to take in the little red sun dress she's wearing with a white cardigan that has sleeves that stop just below her elbows, the way she's got her bangs pinned back away from her face. "What else do you have today?"
"Public speaking," she answers, grinning when he snorts out a laugh. "I know, it's ridiculous given my experience with speaking in front of groups," she notices that he rolls his eyes, "but it's a requirement, and it's just a Monday, Wednesday class."
He starts to say something else, but Rachel shushes him when the professor starts talking down at the front of the lecture hall.
They walk out of the lecture hall together after she spent the whole hour nudging him with her elbow while he doodled random shit in the margins of his syllabus. (Whatever, he doesn't need to keep his shit pristine and perfect like she does.) Campus has that super-busy feeling that it always has at the beginning of the semester, and this year, Puck notices just how young all the freshmen look, how easy it is to pick them out from everyone else.
The house he's sharing with Santana is about four blocks from Rachel's place, so they cross campus together, and when they get to the place where they have to split up and go their separate ways, Rachel stands on her toes in her flat little sandals and wraps her arms around his neck ."I'm glad we have a class together this semester," she murmurs against his shoulder. She pulls away and looks up at him with excited eyes. "We should meet up and walk together!"
He looks at her skeptically. "I don't show up for classes fifteen minutes early, Rachel."
She rolls her eyes, but she's not surprised that he says it. "I only do the first day. I'm not expecting you get up early."
Honestly, a ten o'clock class is early, especially on Fridays since he usually spends Thursday nights drinking. "We'll try it on Wednesday, all right?"
She claps her hands together quickly, just barely making noise, and smiles. "Excellent. Have a good day, Noah!"
He's shaking his head when she walks away from him, because this Rachel? Totally different than the one he got used to seeing last year, and he's not entirely sure what to make of it.
*
Rachel doesn't get to spend as much time with Finn as she'd like, but she finds that it doesn't bother her the way it would have two years ago. Football is an enormous demand on his time (though he's still third-string this year) between practices and weight training and study sessions and travel to away games. And since she has her own classes and things going on, she doesn't really see that much of him.
She doesn't hate it though. She still has her Monday night House viewing with Santana, which they usually do at Rachel's place. (After the time Noah decided he was going to watch with them and spent the entire show asking questions and talking about how bad ass House is, they decided to avoid watching with him again.) She makes a point of doing something social every weekend, whether it's going to a party or a club with Santana or hanging out and playing silly video games in Sam's dorm room while he's on duty. She goes to each home football game, once with Santana (who she only convinces with a bottle of Hot Damn purchased with her fake ID) and once with Sam and some of his new RA friends (who are all lovely and far less stuffy than she would have expected of resident advisers).
Finn comes over after practice on a Wednesday night, carrying a frozen vegan pizza and a backpack full of books. It's been over a week since she's seen him, and it'll be at least another week before she sees him again with his away game this weekend and her economics exam next Tuesday, but they try to make an effort to spend time together when they can.
They're sitting on opposite ends of the couch after dinner, facing one another with their legs tangled together while they each focus on their own reading assignments. At least, they're pretending to focus on their reading assignments. It's hard to pay attention to an analysis of World War II propaganda when Finn's hand is on the top of her foot, his fingertips tracing lightly over the inside of her ankle bone.
He's grinning when she looks over the top of her textbook at him. "Stop it," she orders without conviction, twitching her foot a little in an imitation of a girl trying to make a boy stop touching her.
"What?" he asks, feigning innocence and failing miserably when the corners of his mouth quirk up.
Rachel's shaking her head when she sets her book aside and moves so she's straddling his thighs. "You're supposed to be studying," she reminds him, taking his book and putting it on the floor.
He shrugs, setting his hands on her hips and sliding them upwards, just beneath the sweater she's wearing. "It's kind of boring."
She quirks an eyebrows, then says a mental 'screw it.' She hasn't seen him in over a week, and now he's right in front of her, right between her legs, and she can't for the life of her figure out why they're talking.
So she leans forward to kiss him, threading her fingers into his hair to keep him close while she has him.
*
Living with Santana is kind of a trip, honestly. It's not like he can forget that she's a girl, what with the boobs and the tampons under the bathroom sink and the way that she sometimes takes fucking forever to get ready to go out places. But then she does something a dude would do, like open a beer at eleven on a Saturday morning just because or bring home some hot-as-fuck blonde chick from a party and have loud ass sex, and he doesn't know what to think.
Sometimes, Puck actually wonders if it's easier with Santana than it would be with another girl because the sexual tension stuff is a non-issue. They haven't slept together in years, but there isn't any of that 'forbidden fruit' bullshit going on - if they wanted to fuck, they'd fuck - and they don't have to wonder what the other person is like in bed because they already know. And yeah, she's still hot, and he's going to look, especially when she walks around the house without a bra on or whatever, but he's not gonna do anything about it.
He knows that Mia was worried about the whole thing when he told her, but he and Santana were already planning to live together when he and Mia made things official, and they'd been talking about since Sam decided to be an RA.. And now his girlfriend knows for sure that there isn't anything going on with Santana, having seen the way they act with one another. It's kind of awesome that the girl isn't all crazy jealous.
He's never been a relationship with anyone as long as he has with Mia, and that includes all the time that he and Quinn were whatever they were after the whole baby secret thing came out. And he's not like, thinking about marrying the girl (fuck, he's not even twenty yet), but he isn't looking for an out either. He likes being with her, plain and simple.
She takes school really fucking seriously, and it's the only thing they really fight about, the fact that she thinks he's not working as hard as he should or that she can't believe that he hasn't declared a major yet or that he's trying to distract her from what she's doing. And honestly, she's a creative writing major, so he's not sure why she's up on her high horse about shit. What the fuck is she going to do with an English degree? Poets and novelists aren't exactly rolling in it, except for that lady who wrote Harry Potter, so fuck that. But whatever. It means she basically freezes him out during midterms. Like, he doesn't see her at all for a week and a half, legit, and her text messages get all bitchy.
(Santana mentions something about writers being temperamental when he's complaining about it one morning. He tells her to fuck off, and she throws a wet dish towel in his face and tells him to go jerk off, 'because you're a real bastard when you're horny.')
He's sitting on the couch fucking around on his guitar on Friday afternoon when Mia lets herself into the house. He knows her last midterm was due today (some short nonfiction story she's been working on since August), so he's not surprised when she comes in. He is, however, a little pissed off that she's been such a raging bitch all week, so he doesn't put the guitar aside like he normally would. Instead, he just keeps playing, transitioning into a little melody he wrote forever ago that he still doesn't have lyrics for, watching as Mia drops her keys on the coffee table and lowers herself onto the couch beside him.
"Hi." Puck just raises his eyebrows and watches her tilt her head at him. "Puck," she sighs.
"You kinda suck," he tells her evenly.
She shakes her head, her eyes on his hands as he plays. "School is important."
"That doesn't mean you have to be a bitch about it," he points out. Maybe telling his girlfriend she's being a bitch isn't the smartest thing, but he's not going to hold back when it's the truth.
She just watches him for a moment, then bites her lip. "Didn't you miss me?"
He snorts out a laugh. "Babe."
He lets her take the guitar from his hands when she wraps her fingers around the neck, watching as she sets it gently on the coffee table, on top of a scattering of issues of In Style and Playboy and Maxim (all Santana's subscriptions). She stands, taking his hands in hers and pulling him to his feet. "I missed you," she tells him quietly, walking backwards towards the hallway. "I could show you how much, if you'll let me."
Puck just smirks and lets her lead him into his bedroom, because yes, he would like to see how much she missed him, especially since he's pretty sure that it's going to involve her getting on her knees before she gets naked.
*
Finn gets just as excited about OSU's homecoming football game as he did for McKinley's homecoming back in high school, and Rachel thinks it's sort of sweet, especially considering that he isn't the star quarterback here. (Truth is, Finn probably won't ever be a starting quarterback at OSU, which she knows bothers him more than he lets on.) Walking around campus the week before the game, Rachel starts to realize what a big deal everyone else seems to think this is, and she wonders idly how she managed to miss all of the hoopla last year. There are campaign posters and banners everywhere for people running for the royal court (she has high school flashbacks of the Quinn Fabray variety, and she figures that Quinn will probably be running for homecoming queen with the endorsement of whatever sorority she's joined in Kentucky in two years), fliers promoting the parade before the game, and countless mentions of alumni reunions of every organization imaginable.
Sam has committed to being involved with his residence hall's parade float, and Santana refuses to buy into any of the hype whatsoever, so Rachel ends up convincing Noah and Mia to come with her to the game. In true Rachel Berry fashion, she makes an event of it, dressing in school colors and putting a temporary tattoo on her cheek, and in an effort to keep Noah and Mia as happy as possible during the game, she makes an enormous thermos of hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.
She gets caught up in the game, which is easy to do in a huge crowd of people when her team is winning, even if Finn isn't playing, but it's not at all a surprise that the halftime show is her favorite part. Marching band is its own particular animal, and while it's not something she would ever want to do - the uniforms are always hideous - she likes watching the shapes they make and the way the color guard weaves through the rest of the band.
Rachel excuses herself to the restroom after the band finishes their performance, which turns out to be a mistake. The line at the ladies' room feels endless, and the third quarter is half-finished when she makes it back to her seat, weaving through the crowd until she's with Noah again. "Where's Mia?" she asks when she realizes that he's alone.
He smirks lazily. "Her roommate texted her to tell her that she clogged the toilet and flooded their bathroom," he tells her a little gleefully. She knows that he drank the majority of the hot chocolate, and she wonders if he's maybe just a little bit tipsy.
"That's disgusting."
"I think it's hilarious," he counters. "Her roommate's a bitch."
"But now Mia has to deal with the mess, too," she points out.
He shrugs. "Sometimes Mia's a bitch, too." Like, he likes her - he might love her, though he's never told her that - but he doesn't know a woman who isn't a bitch sometimes. Fuck, he lives with Santana Lopez. He knocked up Quinn Fabray. His mother is Marlene Puckerman, for fuck's sake. He knows bitchy women.
She looks at him disapprovingly. "That isn't a very nice thing to say about your girlfriend."
The Buckeyes' defense chooses that moment to sack the opposing team's quarterback, which brings Noah to his feet with a cheer, effectively ending their conversation.
Puck and Rachel leave right after the Buckeyes win, not even bothering to go down to the field to meet up with Finn. He has some team bullshit that he's doing all evening, and Puck's actually sort of surprised that Rachel isn't throwing a fit about not getting to hang out with Finn. Back in high school, she always whined about away games and how they meant that she wouldn't get to see him again until Monday because she had dance class or whatever the hell. But like, Finn's busy all the fucking time now, and he hasn't heard Rachel bitch about not seeing her boyfriend once since they came back to school.
It's not the first time he's thought about this. He sees Rachel quite a bit, and not just in the class they have together. She hangs out with Santana at their place sometimes, and they all go out together pretty frequently. The thing is, he pays more attention than people think, and he figures that as long as Rachel's with Finn, she thinks she's somehow proving to everyone that everything is back to normal since her dad died. But he knows better than that, too, because he knows that she still calls his mom sometimes just to talk, which started after Andrew died, and he's seen the way she shuts down a little when one of their friends says something about their dad.
He waits until they get to a part of campus that isn't totally flooded with people, so he can walk beside her and talk without yelling. It reminds him, a little, of that game they went to last year, when he walked her back to her place because she was drunk. "So, why aren't you all bent out of shape about not getting to hang out with Finn?" he asks.
She looks up at him strangely because it's a strange question. "What do you mean?"
"The Rachel I used to know would have thrown a fit about a boyfriend she never got to hang out with," he answers with a shrug, because it's really hitting him how little time they have to spend together. And like, she probably sees Santana more than she sees Finn, because they hang out a couple of times a week.
"How well did you ever really know me, Noah?" she asks, glaring up at him. Her relationship with Finn isn't any of his business.
He rolls his eyes. "Whatever, Rachel. Get all defensive. That's gonna convince me."
"Convince you of what, exactly?" she demands meanly. She has no idea where this conversation even came from, but it's making her mad, and he isn't drunk enough to use alcohol as an excuse. (Not that she'd accept alcohol as an excuse.)
Puck grins, because he obviously flipped her bitch switch, and there's something he likes about pissing Rachel off. "That you're with Finn for more than sex and convenience." Because in the last five minutes, he's decided that that's what this has to be for her; it keeps her from being 'alone' and horny, but doesn't require her to really do anything else.
"You're vulgar and an ass," she snaps, and she hates herself for letting him get a rise out of her, especially over something so stupid.
"Not a revelation," he reminds her with a smirk, and fuck, watching her get all defensive is kind of awesome.
"You need to learn to keep your mouth shut." She rolls her eyes when she looks up and sees the little grin on his lips. "God, just go home, Puck."
He doesn't get a chance to say anything else, because she stalks away as fast as her little legs will take her, and since they're pretty close to the place where they'd have to separate to go to their respective homes, he doesn't bother following her. Plus, now that she's mad, he's kind of over it.
Rachel spends the rest of her weekend thinking about what Noah said about her relationship with Finn. And as much as she hates that he brought it up and made her think about it at all - because it wasn't any of his business - she realizes that he's right.
She hates that Noah is right.
Being with Finn is easy because they have half a relationship. They converse more in text messages than they do in person, and they only spend more than one night a week together if they're lucky. It's just so easy to be with him. Finn knows the best and the worst of her, and she knows all of that about him, too. They have history together, and she does love him. It's just...she doesn't miss him when he's gone, not like she should. At least, not like she would have when they were together before, and when she pictures her life in New York, Finn is never part of it.
There was a time when Finn was always a part of the life she saw herself having in New York, in one way or another, and knowing that that isn't the case any longer really puts things in perspective.
She decides that she has to end things before either of them gets a chance to really get hurt.
They don't get to see each other until Thursday afternoon, when she drives over to the house that he shares with two other football players after her ballet class. She finds him at his desk, typing away at something in his word processor. He has a bunch of notes and a textbook spread out around him, so she assumes that he's working on a paper for a class, and she doesn't understand why he told her to come over if he was just going to do homework.
Not that it's going to matter. She's here to break up with him.
"Hi," she greets quietly. He's grinning when he looks over at her, an expression she's always loved on him. "What are you working on?"
"Sociology," he answers, closing the lid of his laptop and turning his chair to face her when she perches on the side of his bed. "How was ballet?"
"Fine. We need to talk."
"Sure." He turns his chair the rest of the way so that her legs are between his. "What's up?"
She tucks her hands under her thighs so he can't reach for them. "I think we should break up," she says evenly, taking a little breath when she sees the way his face falls before plowing on when the speech she's spent the last few days rehearsing. "This isn't a real relationship, Finn. We barely spend any time together, and I don't think you miss me when I'm not around any more than I miss you."
He blinks at her, like he's putting it all together, but he doesn't look particularly hurt or upset, not like the last time they broke up. (And that one was mutual.) After a minute, he shrugs one shoulder. "I do love you," he says, almost reluctantly.
"I know," she whispers, because she does. "I love you, too. But we haven't been in love for a long time, Finn. This," she pulls one hand from beneath her thigh to gesture between them, and he catches it in one of his, "this is just easy," she finishes, squeezing his hand gently.
He smiles. "It is really easy. Being with you."
"I know," she says with a nod. "But I don't think it's good for either of us in the long run."
"So...we're done?"
"Yeah. We're done."
It turns out that breaking up with Finn, this time around at least, is just as easy as being with him.
Noah actually beats her to the pop culture class they share on Friday morning, which she finds inexplicably annoying. She glares at him a little while she unbuttons her coat and takes the seat next to his.
"What's your problem?" he finally asks when she doesn't greet him like usual.
She fixes him with another glare, this one more deliberate. "You'll be happy to know that I ended things with Finn last night thanks to your unsolicited advice."
"Whoa, what advice?" Puck asks, looking at her like she's crazy. Yeah, he pointed out that their relationship was bullshit, but he didn't tell her to do anything about it, mostly because he knows how fucking hard-headed she is. Nothing he could have said would have made her do anything.
She doesn't get a chance to answer because the professor starts class, and she spends the entire hour pretending that she can't see him glancing at her out of the corner of her eye.
"So, what? You're all pissed off at me now because you decided to break up with Finn?" he asks after class. He watches her button her gray wool coat as they walk down the steps of the building their class is in.
"Not really," she admits. She doesn't feel much of anything about ending her relationship with Finn. Not feeling anything is sort of turning into a theme in her life, one that she's not really ready to look into any deeper.
"You wanna admit that I was right?"
She rolls her eyes at the smug little grin on his lips. "Shut up."
*
Puck's sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoon, plowing through a bowl of Cap'n Crunch, when Santana comes bursting into the house. She didn't come home last night, so she's still wearing the jeans and the white backless shirt she wore out to whatever bar or party she went to, and her hair's up in a ponytail.
"'Sup, walk of shame?"
"Fuck off, Puck," she says, pulling open the tiny little purse in her hand and upending it on the table as she sits across from him. "I stayed with Amber last night."
Puck just rolls his eyes and takes another bite of cereal. Amber is her tall, blonde, hot friend, and this is Santana 'I bat for both teams' Lopez; the girl has a history with her hot blonde friends.
"Fuck off," she repeats seriously. "You're the one with the cheating whore of a girlfriend."
He stops with his spoon halfway to his mouth and stares at her. "What?"
She quirks an eyebrow at him, then turns her attention back to sorting through whatever the hell accumulated in her purse in one night. "I went out with Amber last night, and we ran into Amy and her friend Sarah, who is in the same program as Mia," she explains quickly, making Puck roll his eyes again. Santana knows fucking everybody somehow. "So we started talking about Mia, and I was informed that Mia and Chris, some guy in their program, have been the scandal of their poetry class since the day that they were caught fucking in the bathroom down the hall fifteen minutes before class started."
She says it all very casually, looking at a receipt from whatever bar she was at before crumpling it up with a napkin he can see has a number scrawled on it, but he knows her well enough to know that she's not just fucking him around right now. Still...
"Seriously?"
She pushes away from the table and stands. "I think she's been cheating on you for a while." She grabs her phone and walks out of the room, leaving the rest of the mess on the table for Puck to stare out while he tries to figure out what the hell he's going to do.
In the end, he does what's easiest: He takes a shower, gets dressed, and drives over to Mia's apartment to ask her if she's fucking around on him.
When the first words out of her cheating mouth are, "Who told you that?" he's pretty fucking sure that it's all true.
And it could probably be some big, dramatic, drawn out thing, but Mia really isn't like that, and neither is Puck. (Unless, of course, you add Quinn, Rachel, Finn, or Santana into the mix. Then shit gets explosive.) He just tells her to fuck off and not call him again and deletes her number when he's walking back to his car.
He calls Rachel when he's about halfway back to his house. "So, I just found out Mia's a cheating slut," he tells her when she answers. "Wanna get drunk tonight?"
She makes this strangled noise that's almost a laugh. "What exactly did you have in mind?"
She meets Noah at an Irish-style pub called Finnegan's Wake. They each take a shot of Jameson, then Rachel decides to try pear cider when just the sight of Noah's Guinness turns her stomach.
It turns out that pear cider is delicious and doesn't taste at all like alcohol (though not quite like pink), which makes it easy to drink a lot of it quite quickly. Noah is drinking with a purpose, so just two hours into the night, they're both very drunk.
"Being cheated on sucks," he tells her seriously. He's already told her the whole story, though Noah was far less concerned with the details than Rachel would have been. She would need to know why, and with whom; he just needed confirmation and the opportunity to call her a slut. (Though Rachel doesn't think that 'cheater' and 'slut' are exactly synonymous.)
She takes a tiny sip of cider, watching him over the rim of her glass. "Do you think this is karma?" she asks gently. "No, really," she says when he rolls his eyes. "How many times have you been with a girl who had a boyfriend?"
"Including you?" he asks pointedly, earning himself a glare. But really, fuck that, and for that matter: "How many times now have you and Finn broken up? Seventeen?"
She huffs out a breath. "Officially, only three. Or four, depending on your definition of break up."
"That's fucked up." He drains the last of his beer and tilts his head at her. "Have you ever fucked anyone else?" She nearly chokes on her drink.
"Oh, my god," she manages after a minute of gasping for air. "That is none of your business."
Puck just stares at her incredulously, because her refusal to answer the question is all the answer he needs. "You didn't have sex for a year?"
She hisses his name, glancing around to see if anyone else is listening, then lets out a sigh when she realizes that they're being completely ignored.. "Fourteen months, actually."
"Jesus fucking Christ."
"After a while, you kind of forget about it all together," she admits, shrugging one shoulder. She gestures for the waitress to bring her another drink. She's already drunk, but she wants more. It's just so tasty, and if Noah is going to start talking about sex, she's going to need it.
"You don't forget about sex," he insists. "Fuck, at least tell me you gave yourself a hand."
He watches her cheeks turn pink. "Stop it." She changes the subject, and he lets it go. It's not like this is his only opportunity to get her all worked up.
They take a cab back to her apartment after last call, and she puts Puck in charge of microwaving the popcorn when she goes into her room to change into pajamas. He's sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for her when she comes in in a pair of purple pajamas patterned with little yellow flowers. He watches her reach up into a cabinet for a bowl, then into the fridge for two bottles of water. "What?" she asks with a laugh, handing him one of the bottles.
And since he's fucking drunk, he tells her the truth. "I'm trying to figure out if you'd go classic and just use your hand, or if you'd actually buy a vibrator." Her eyes go wide, which is kind of awesome.
"Just for that, you're sleeping on the couch," she finally manages.
They find some Family Guy reruns to watch while they eat their popcorn, and Rachel ends up falling asleep on the couch with her feet in Noah's lap and her head pillowed on the armrest.