if I could tell you 4/?
Title: If I could tell you
Chapter: 4/?
Rating: PG-13 this chapter, M eventually
Characters: Puck, Rachel, OC
Word Count: 2600
Summary: Puck and Rachel get another chance when unexpected events bring her to his doorstep years after graduation.
*****
Connor is feeding Bunny pretend carrots in the kitchen while she washes and dries the cutting board and knife and checks the oven one last time, turning the temperature up for the last few minutes so that the cheese on top of the casserole will brown. (While she still largely follows a vegan diet herself, she's found that her son will eat an incredibly wide variety of vegetables if they come with cheese sauce.) With a glance at the bottle on the counter-top, she stretches up on her toes, reaching in the cupboard above the sink for a pair of appropriate glasses.
The bottle of wine was an impulse buy.
She was at the grocery store picking up on a few supplies, like shampoo (for some reason she really doesn't feel comfortable borrowing Jen's), Connor's favorite crackers and of course the necessary ingredients for the dinner she insisted on making to thank Noah for his hospitality, when a Napa Valley red on the shelf caught her eye.
Maybe it wasn't wise; she's still counting every penny, but she'd deposited the checks from Daddy and Burt and Carole, so a ten-dollar bottle of wine isn't going to break her. It will go perfectly with the meal, and besides, last minute wrinkles aside, she and Connor are here and it's been too long since she's felt she had something to celebrate.
Noah walks into the kitchen in a pair of jeans and a faded McKinley Titans tee-shirt, with his short hair still damp from the shower. He looks terrific, but obviously the color in her cheeks is simply due to the heat of the oven as she takes the dish out. Anything else would be ridiculous given that she's probably seen him in that exact outfit hundreds of times. (Really, that exact one, she recognizes the blue paint stain on the sleeve from when they painted scenery for West Side Story.)
"Smells good in here," he says appreciatively and then gesturing to the bottle, "Hey, do you want me to open that?"
"Yes, please," she replies, ignoring any stray and definitely out-of-place butterflies and bringing the salad and bread to the table.
He makes quick work of the cork and pours them each a glass and there and then she decides that it's also been way too long since she had a friend to celebrate with.
Dinner is a success and Noah has seconds even after she identifies the green bits as kale. (Who knew that the cheese trick would work with grown up boys too?) They talk about her apartment for a while and then she draws him out about his work, listening intently while he describes two or three of the projects he's working on. It's exciting, of course, to know that he's done so well, especially at something he clearly loves, but she can't help worrying that he must be much busier than he's made out.
He's talking to Connor now, trying to making him laugh by imitating the sounds of various instruments, blowing a trumpet sound from between his lips, then strumming a make-believe guitar, and finally tapping a steady drum beat with his fingertips on the table.
"Daddy plays drums," Connor says softly. "Lots and lots."
Noah flashes a quick look at her and then replies, "Yeah buddy, I remember. Your daddy plays the drums really well."
Connor turns to her, and his eyelids are starting to go heavy and he's rubbing the hem of his shirt between his fingers in the way he does when he's tired.
"Can we call Daddy on the phone?" he asks and she reaches over to him and pulls him onto her lap, smoothing his hair and rocking him slightly.
"It's really late where Daddy is right now and he's probably asleep," she says, ignoring Noah's surprised glance and placing a kiss on the top of her son's head. "We'll try to call him tomorrow, okay sweetie?"
The little boy nods and settles against her and she knows he'll be asleep in a few minutes, so she makes their excuses, grateful for the familiar bedtime rituals of washing faces and hands, brushing teeth and getting into pajamas. When she tucks Connor into bed with Bunny curled into the crook of his small arm, she hugs him extra tight.
The two of them are going to make this work. She just knows it.
When she comes back out, Noah is stacking the rinsed dishes in the drain-board and when she goes to grab the dish towel to dry, he grins and tells her to leave it. "The cook doesn't clean. House rules. Go relax."
"Well, I can't argue with house rules, I guess," she smiles.
"Nope. Here, take this with you." He pours an inch or so of wine in her glass before topping off his own. "I'll be there in a little bit and we can do that catching up thing."
She sits on the sofa, tucking her feet underneath her as she sips from her glass and wonders, not for the first time, what exactly Noah knows about, well, everything: school and Finn and New York.
His post-high-school correspondence with her was largely limited to a few scrawled postcards the first year or two, and as far as she's aware, he didn't keep in touch with Finn at all, although obviously, he has his own lines of communication with Lima. But the way he's looked over her shoulder last night, as if he was expecting Finn to be behind her and the glance he'd given her when Connor brought up his daddy makes her think that he's less in the loop than she assumed.
The simplest explanation is that most people don't keep close tabs on the lives of old high-school friends. It's not a very comforting thought, so she decides to concentrate on the fact that he seems happy enough to see her, happy enough to invite them back to his home, even if he's already gone above and beyond the requirements of a decade old friendship.
She's lost in thought and it startles her when he sinks down onto the other end of the sofa, propping his feet up on the coffee table. They share a moment of companionable silence, but only a moment because patience has never been her strong point.
"So are you going to ask?"
"About what?" he replies, looking at her curiously.
She smiles crookedly. "You know. Don't you think I owe you some kind of explanation?" Certainly every one else seemed to expect that from her at one point or another over the last year. Her family, her friends, the town at large, all looking to her for the answers to what went wrong. (Is it over-dramatic to think that most of her life seems to have been subject to that kind of scrutiny?)
"You don't owe me shit," he says firmly. "Anything you want to tell me though, I can be a good listener."
She bites her lip. "I know." You always were. "I guess I'm not sure where to begin."
"I get that," he nods. "Let me ask you this since I really don't want to say the wrong thing to the little guy. I saw you in that grocery store in Lima and shit Rach, I'm not going to lie, it seemed like maybe you weren't totally happy..."
Walking out of the Lima Shop 'n Save and sobbing in her car with radio turned up high so that she doesn't scare Connor. Going home without the groceries to Finn, who either doesn't notice her red-rimmed eyes, or doesn't have the patience to unravel it. Staring in the bathroom mirror at the frumpy clothes and the practical haircut and the dark circles under her eyes and wondering how Noah could possibly look at her as if she was exactly the same girl who sang that duet with him all those years ago.
"...but with Connor and a house and that ring on your finger you seemed settled. And now two years later you're in San Francisco and when you say Finn isn't in the picture, what exactly are you talking about? Because a three-hour time difference doesn't exactly equal late at night."
Of course he picked up on that. She swallows hard. "First week of August? Um, that's Prague, I think. Or possibly Budapest. I have it down in my calendar." She shifts to pull her phone out of her pocket and he sits up, his feet hitting the floor with a thud and puts a hand out to stop her.
"Like Eastern Europe? How long has he been gone? For that matter, what the hell is he doing there when he should be...." He breaks off, his warm fingers still gripping her, thumb brushing the inside of her wrist absently before he seems to realize it and pulls away. She sort of (completely) wishes he'd put it back.
"He's been in gone since the beginning of summer. As to what he's doing there? I suppose you could say that Finn is following his dreams," she says. ,
*****
The band starts off simply: just Finn and a few guys from around town getting together and playing the kind of classic rock covers that he used to love in Glee. She's back at night school by that time, trying to finish up the last few credits for her degree (hard to believe that once upon a time that education degree had been her fall-back plan) so the gigs at local bars and nightclubs make it even trickier to find time together. Sometimes they fight about that, but by that time they're fighting about a lot of things, and anyway, he's right about one thing, with tuition and Connor to provide for, they can use the extra money he brings in.
He starts writing his own songs again, pulling out the old rhyming dictionary Mr. Schuester gave him and she finds stanza and scraps of choruses on odd pieces of paper scattered throughout the house. She offers to help, but he turns her down and she doesn't ask again.
She goes to a few of his shows right at the start and they're actually quite good, but after a few times she tells herself she needs to concentrate on her degree and that she feels guilty about always asking their parents to babysit. Yes, that's certainly part of it, but there's also a horrible, selfish part of her that's jealous, no matter how hard she tries to squash it. It should be about the late nights, the missed anniversary, the traveling as the band starts getting booked for venues around the Midwest. But the scary truth is that when she sees him lighting up on stage in a way that he doesn't anywhere else, it's not that she wants to be the one who puts that look on his face. No, she's jealous because he's got a chance to get out of Lima, because that's supposed to be her up there on stage, because it was her dream first.
(The worst part is that he knows this about her, knows practically every selfish thing she's ever done, just like it's impossible for her to misinterpret the careless shrug he gives her when she makes her excuses.)
Finn gets a new manager. Very young, very ambitious and very pretty in that classic all-American Quinn Fabray sort of way. Carole looks worried and Kurt drops a few hints to her when he's home for Easter, but she can't bring herself to say anything, not even in August when he goes to New York with her for a couple of days to meet a some promoters.
He's the one who brings it up a few weeks later. It's late at night and they're fighting again, biting out the angry words in an undertone so they don't wake Connor up and he insists that nothing happened with Chelsea in New York, as if she was accusing him of something. By then she's not sure if whether they had sex or not even matters, and they spend the night in the same bed together with a divide like the Grand Canyon between them. She's never felt so alone in a double bed.
A weekend spent apart becomes a week, and then two and by Thanksgiving they've formally separated.
She finds out he's signed with a minor label when she bumps into Will and Emma at the China Palace on Christmas Day. When she brings the bag of take-out back to Daddy, she asks him for the name of a decent family lawyer.
In May, they meet at that lawyer's office to sign the final divorce papers and he tells her about the tour. It's a big opportunity for him, playing the summer festival circuit all over Europe, opening for some big-name acts, making important contacts. And after that a U.S. tour is already starting to come together, Chelsea is already starting to book dates. Of course it will be hard with Connor, but there's the telephone and Skype and vacations and even if he doesn't end up coming back to Lima, (Chelsea knows a lot of people on the east coast music scene) with a little effort they can make it work.
She's pissed, she really is, because Connor deserves more than this.
It also feels like being let out of a cage.
She tell him about the job opportunity in San Francisco after a July show in Amsterdam. He's quiet for a long time and finally he says that she should go for it, she should take her chance to get out and that everything he said about spending time with Connor can still apply.
It's the closest she's felt to him in years.
*****
She stretches her left hand in front of her and even the pale mark where the ring used to rest is gone now. "I suppose we were never entirely solid," she admits to Noah as she finishes her last sip of wine. "We both cared for each other, but there was always something. I would say something or do something that would end up hurting him and a few months later, he'd do the same in return. I'm sure you remember what high school was like."
"Still shitty. You know, for all of you," Noah says, and his tone isn't shocked or critical or surprised, it just is and she loves him a little bit for that.
Chapter 5