FIC: Oh, I'm Counting the Days Pt. 2 [Glee; Quinn/Puck, R]
One | Three | AO3
Part Two
The second night out from Lima, he finds himself in the middle of Utah. It's not quite Colorado, but it probably works much the same as what his mother was fearing. Before this trip, he barely knew that there even was a Utah, and now he's staying overnight in some town called Green River - there's not much in the way of green around here, but there's a river snaking near the town, so he counts there being one out of two as a success in advertising.
A tattered pamphlet shoved between the nightstand and the wall advertises Friendship Cruise 2009, and he frowns. This place was cheap and more importantly, was the closest place to California he could have gotten to without passing out behind the wheel of his car. And then his mother would have reasons to be mad at him. But he can't help but feel like this place hasn't had too many guests in the intervening years. Maybe he'd wake up in the middle of a gravel pit somewhere and this is all a crazy, whacked-out hallucination with some weirdly awesome drugs. Although, if that is the case, he wishes his hallucinations involved more of the rocking celebrity lifestyle and less of boring, mundane Utah - or Nebraska, like last night's motel had been. He mashes the pamphlet into a ball and throws it up at the ceiling as he lays on the bed.
He's bored.
If Finn was here, they could get drunk on cheap, illegally-gotten beer and find some local girls to party with until dawn - if there were any that were out of elementary school but not yet married. But, knowing Finn, they would more likely end up drunk-dialing Rachel in her new apartment in New York City and Finn would whine about how much he missed her, and he would make inappropriate comments that would lead to Rachel never wanting to speak to either of them again. Maybe she'd talk to Finn again. When he was sober. In theory, he could do the partying thing with any of his guys, or even by himself, but there's always something the most fun about doing it with Finn. And there's nothing more pathetic than partying by yourself.
He's not even going to think about what he could be doing if Quinn was here. At the very least, he'd have a warm body pressed up against him and keeping him company, her arms folded over his shoulders and her thigh pressed against his. Even if it was completely non-sexual and platonic and everything that he's not used to not being with girls.
It would mean that they were something more than all that, if she was with him.
He rolls over in bed and stares at the cracks in the ceiling plaster, wondering what it is about Quinn, specifically Quinn, that can drive him so crazy like this. It's not just any girl. There is something special about her that goes above and beyond anything else. And he's unsure of what it is, exactly. It's more than just Beth, that much he knows.
He turns on the television - there's not much here, not even cable - and ends up on an old, static-filled Frasier rerun. It looks boring as fuck; everyone's in suits and ties and fancy dresses, but it's better than public-access news with tinny background music. Fuck if he cares what the elementary school's lunch menu is for the first day of school, or how many fish you're allowed to catch.
Before he realizes it, he falls asleep, grasping the pillow tightly; the long days of driving have taken their toll on him.
And his dreams that night are of dancing with Quinn like they did in the episode. He would spin her and dip her, hold her close to him. And then the dreams shifted, and they would run off, hand in hand, and he would press her against the wall of the ballroom, in some dank corner no one could find them in. He would hike up the skirt of her dress - probably some red, short, flippy thing - and bury himself to the hilt inside her.
And he wakes up in his motel room, freezing, oh-so-fucking hard, and so very much alone.
"Welcome to California," the sign on the side of the interstate read, in yellow script against a blue background. "Now entering Pacific time."
Finally, he has reached his destination. It doesn't matter that he still has a couple more hours to go before he reaches Los Angeles; it doesn't matter that he's out in the middle of a desert somewhere.
What matters is that he made it. And now he doesn't have to look back. He never has to look back. There's thousands and thousands of pools here; there's thousands and thousands of people who have left their homes like him and followed their dreams to the glitz and the glamour of the big city. He's not seeking that life. He's not going to pay his dues by waiting on celebrities in Hollywood, living on the hopes that an agent takes pity on him one day and decides to have him audition for the role of a dead naval officer on NCIS or the brainless one-episode love interest to distract from the main relationship at hand on some laugh-track sitcom. After all, pretty much every actor in Hollywood has to have some experience on a crime show before they can move onto bigger and better things.
Although if some record label happens to be looking for a more badass version of John Mayer, then he's not going to say no. Not that he thinks that he's like John Mayer, not at all, but they both play the guitar, and Sarah's made the comparison before - not before he threw a pillow across the room at her, but she's made it nevertheless.
California, Puckzilla is here. And he's not going away anytime soon.
Not if he can help it.
"Hey, Quinn?"
He calls her for the first and only time since the morning in the park about a month and a half after he gets there, late on a Tuesday afternoon his time. He's unsure on if he's interrupting some sort of ice-breaking exercise that involves solving the rain in Spain or hunger in Hungary or whatever. But instead, she just laughs. "Puck. You're -" she pauses, and he bets that she's pinching her forehead between her fingers and wondering why this douche from high school decided to call her today, "not the person I was expecting to hear from today."
"Were you expecting to hear from Finn?"
"No, I have friends here too, God. Mathilde is supposed to be arranging a marathon study session for our psych midterm, and I was waiting to hear from her."
And with that, it becomes crystal clear that he's not a part of her life at Yale. That much is obvious, because it's not like he's studying for midterms - thank God, or whoever - and the only friends he can say that he's met since he moved out here are his clients, however few and far between they are. And it's not like he's actually friends with any of them. Whatever he is to them ends the second he pulls away from their driveway. He doesn't have any new friends or a fancy new life, and here she is, doing all of those and more. And with people named Mathilde of all things. What happened to cool, normal names? Like Puck. Or Jackie. Not some snooty, prep school refugee bitch with an impossible-to-pronounce name, and she probably had an attitude to match.
"So, what are you doing, then?"
"I'm not lounging around in a bra and silk panties, if that's what you're asking."
"Damn. Didn't say you were." And now he's trying to picture it, those long legs and demure smile and that golden hair flipped coyly over one shoulder. It's not a sight he has seen too many times, especially not in any way, shape or form what could be considered a seduction. But it's not an unwelcome thought. Maybe he would have to convince her to try phone sex one of these days, and he mentally runs through his list of dirty talk phrases that could send Quinn into a quivering mass of feisty blonde seductress within two seconds flat. And then she speaks, again, and shifts his line of thinking considerably. Besides, she would never agree to it.
"Down, Puck. It's too cold for that here; it is Connecticut in October, after all. I'm trying to figure out what I can make for dinner. Broke until Friday, so it's whatever's here."
He's no Iron Chef, but he does know a thing or two about cooking. Those were the perils of being a latchkey kid with a younger sister who relied on him and a mother who didn't always get home from work until closer to bedtime. Plus, they didn't always have a lot of food in their kitchen, and there were only so many times he could order out for moo goo gai pan before they both got sick of it. "What do you have?"
"A small thing of brandy that Shelley accidentally left here last weekend, a bottle of soy sauce, half a bag of kidney beans and some vanilla extract." She goes silent for a few seconds, almost as though she's rifling through a fridge or a pantry or something. "Oh, and I guess a few eggs."
"Shit, Quinn, whatever happened to your bacon addiction? And you could scramble up those eggs and throw in the beans and top it off with the brandy and have a Puck-lette."
She laughs, again, and Puck cannot help but smile. He's making her laugh. "I ran out of bacon over the weekend. Is a Puck-lette anything like an alcoholic omelette? Or alcoholic scrambled eggs?"
"It's an omelette for people with high class and low ability in actually keeping eggs together in the pan. Sarah always liked it."
"You gave Sarah alcohol for dinner? Such an enabler."
"Of course not! I made hers with Kool-Aid or, sometimes, orange juice instead. And no, before you ask, I did not spike my little sister's Puck-lettes."
"Good. That would be weird and creepy if you had." Their conversation goes silent for about a moment, and he can hear her breathing on the other end of the line. It's awkward for him, not knowing what's going through her head right now and not having any of her numerous facial expressions to pick up on to help with that. He's not used to the lack of knowing. "Hey, Puck?" Her question pierces through the silence.
"Yeah?"
"I kinda need to get going." He can hear muffled voices in the background, and a flash of jealousy surges through his body. It's probably snooty Mathilde and Shelley and her other Yale brainiac friends ready to whisk her away for a mid-week trip to save the world's sea otter population, but they get to see her, talk to her, relate to her in ways that he never could. And he suddenly feels inadequate, which is not a feeling he is used to feeling. "I'll text you later about how the Puck-lette turns out?"
He grins. "I hope it's the best one ever made. See ya."
"Bye."
The phone goes silent on the other end, and he thinks of the things he could have said but didn't. Anything that would have revealed the depth of how he felt, for instance, or that he missed her, or that California actually kinda sucks for most people who aren't Brad Pitt or fucking Brad Pitt - damn Angelina. It's not the same here as he thought it was going to be - so many people had had the same idea before him, and knew how to market themselves better, and he wasn't going to be some pool cleaning magnate before he was twenty - and it's not the same without her. Things he has learned.
They are more things than he learned during his entire senior year, at least.
It's times like this when he realizes that she's actually the closest thing to love he's ever found. And fuck if he's going to say anything like that out loud, because he's got a reputation to uphold and all that shit, but it's true.
He thinks he probably loves Quinn. It's not even a thinking thing necessarily, but excluding that one time in a hospital a few years ago, he's never really said it to anyone who wasn't related to him. And he can be excused for that one time, because emotions running high and tense that day, but it doesn't mean that it wasn't true then, or now. So maybe he does love Quinn. What good is that going to do him in the here and now? None. She's not here, she's on the other side of the country, and she probably doesn't feel that way about him, not at all. If she could meet and marry a future Senator at Yale, and have little future Senator babies, why would she ever want to be with a guy who barely passed high school and would never rise above shitty jobs like pool cleaner for the rest of his life? Shit. Given the choice between the two, he'd fuck the future Senator too. Even if it was a guy.
He's never felt so alone before in his life, and yet, there are a few million people in this city. More people than he's ever been around, and he's more alone than ever.
He wants to crack open a bottle of beer right now, kick back and relax; he wants to forget about his wallowing and move on. Except, as he checks his fridge, he has even less food than Quinn does, and a quick inspection of his wallet shows he has precisely enough to pay for gas to get to Jill's house tomorrow - his weekly Wednesday job - but not anything more. And he's all out of alcohol.
He fries up the last egg in his fridge, dices up a small bell pepper his neighbor Emily gave him over the weekend from her window garden, and eats it in solidarity with a girl three thousand miles away. It's not quite a Puck-lette - it would need the beer, or some of Shelley's brandy, and definitely more than one egg - but the sentiment is still there.
It's the best one he's ever had.
Quinn: omg it was so gross but so good
Puck: told ya babe
Puck: next time try it with peppers
Quinn: ...am i seriously taking cooking advice from you?
Puck: are u ;)
Quinn: if you hear about a yale student dying of food poisoning you're at fault here
Quinn: ok? ok.
Puck: enjoy
He taps off away from the text message screen and smiles. The Puck-lette has invaded the Ivy walls of Connecticut and didn't send Quinn recoiling all the way to New Hampshire in horror. It can officially be labeled as a success.
What he doesn't realize at the time is that their short text message exchange is the last time he'll talk to her until December. They never were much for the small talk to pass the time, but he doesn't care to think that it'll take that long - until they can see each other again - until he knows that she's okay. Even though he's pretty sure that if something was to happen to Quinn, not only would he have heard about it like a million times over, but he would have already sufficiently kicked whoever's ass was responsible for doing it to her. Still.
The winter holidays are a long, long way away when it's only October at the start.
One | Three | AO3
Part Two
The second night out from Lima, he finds himself in the middle of Utah. It's not quite Colorado, but it probably works much the same as what his mother was fearing. Before this trip, he barely knew that there even was a Utah, and now he's staying overnight in some town called Green River - there's not much in the way of green around here, but there's a river snaking near the town, so he counts there being one out of two as a success in advertising.
A tattered pamphlet shoved between the nightstand and the wall advertises Friendship Cruise 2009, and he frowns. This place was cheap and more importantly, was the closest place to California he could have gotten to without passing out behind the wheel of his car. And then his mother would have reasons to be mad at him. But he can't help but feel like this place hasn't had too many guests in the intervening years. Maybe he'd wake up in the middle of a gravel pit somewhere and this is all a crazy, whacked-out hallucination with some weirdly awesome drugs. Although, if that is the case, he wishes his hallucinations involved more of the rocking celebrity lifestyle and less of boring, mundane Utah - or Nebraska, like last night's motel had been. He mashes the pamphlet into a ball and throws it up at the ceiling as he lays on the bed.
He's bored.
If Finn was here, they could get drunk on cheap, illegally-gotten beer and find some local girls to party with until dawn - if there were any that were out of elementary school but not yet married. But, knowing Finn, they would more likely end up drunk-dialing Rachel in her new apartment in New York City and Finn would whine about how much he missed her, and he would make inappropriate comments that would lead to Rachel never wanting to speak to either of them again. Maybe she'd talk to Finn again. When he was sober. In theory, he could do the partying thing with any of his guys, or even by himself, but there's always something the most fun about doing it with Finn. And there's nothing more pathetic than partying by yourself.
He's not even going to think about what he could be doing if Quinn was here. At the very least, he'd have a warm body pressed up against him and keeping him company, her arms folded over his shoulders and her thigh pressed against his. Even if it was completely non-sexual and platonic and everything that he's not used to not being with girls.
It would mean that they were something more than all that, if she was with him.
He rolls over in bed and stares at the cracks in the ceiling plaster, wondering what it is about Quinn, specifically Quinn, that can drive him so crazy like this. It's not just any girl. There is something special about her that goes above and beyond anything else. And he's unsure of what it is, exactly. It's more than just Beth, that much he knows.
He turns on the television - there's not much here, not even cable - and ends up on an old, static-filled Frasier rerun. It looks boring as fuck; everyone's in suits and ties and fancy dresses, but it's better than public-access news with tinny background music. Fuck if he cares what the elementary school's lunch menu is for the first day of school, or how many fish you're allowed to catch.
Before he realizes it, he falls asleep, grasping the pillow tightly; the long days of driving have taken their toll on him.
And his dreams that night are of dancing with Quinn like they did in the episode. He would spin her and dip her, hold her close to him. And then the dreams shifted, and they would run off, hand in hand, and he would press her against the wall of the ballroom, in some dank corner no one could find them in. He would hike up the skirt of her dress - probably some red, short, flippy thing - and bury himself to the hilt inside her.
And he wakes up in his motel room, freezing, oh-so-fucking hard, and so very much alone.
"Welcome to California," the sign on the side of the interstate read, in yellow script against a blue background. "Now entering Pacific time."
Finally, he has reached his destination. It doesn't matter that he still has a couple more hours to go before he reaches Los Angeles; it doesn't matter that he's out in the middle of a desert somewhere.
What matters is that he made it. And now he doesn't have to look back. He never has to look back. There's thousands and thousands of pools here; there's thousands and thousands of people who have left their homes like him and followed their dreams to the glitz and the glamour of the big city. He's not seeking that life. He's not going to pay his dues by waiting on celebrities in Hollywood, living on the hopes that an agent takes pity on him one day and decides to have him audition for the role of a dead naval officer on NCIS or the brainless one-episode love interest to distract from the main relationship at hand on some laugh-track sitcom. After all, pretty much every actor in Hollywood has to have some experience on a crime show before they can move onto bigger and better things.
Although if some record label happens to be looking for a more badass version of John Mayer, then he's not going to say no. Not that he thinks that he's like John Mayer, not at all, but they both play the guitar, and Sarah's made the comparison before - not before he threw a pillow across the room at her, but she's made it nevertheless.
California, Puckzilla is here. And he's not going away anytime soon.
Not if he can help it.
"Hey, Quinn?"
He calls her for the first and only time since the morning in the park about a month and a half after he gets there, late on a Tuesday afternoon his time. He's unsure on if he's interrupting some sort of ice-breaking exercise that involves solving the rain in Spain or hunger in Hungary or whatever. But instead, she just laughs. "Puck. You're -" she pauses, and he bets that she's pinching her forehead between her fingers and wondering why this douche from high school decided to call her today, "not the person I was expecting to hear from today."
"Were you expecting to hear from Finn?"
"No, I have friends here too, God. Mathilde is supposed to be arranging a marathon study session for our psych midterm, and I was waiting to hear from her."
And with that, it becomes crystal clear that he's not a part of her life at Yale. That much is obvious, because it's not like he's studying for midterms - thank God, or whoever - and the only friends he can say that he's met since he moved out here are his clients, however few and far between they are. And it's not like he's actually friends with any of them. Whatever he is to them ends the second he pulls away from their driveway. He doesn't have any new friends or a fancy new life, and here she is, doing all of those and more. And with people named Mathilde of all things. What happened to cool, normal names? Like Puck. Or Jackie. Not some snooty, prep school refugee bitch with an impossible-to-pronounce name, and she probably had an attitude to match.
"So, what are you doing, then?"
"I'm not lounging around in a bra and silk panties, if that's what you're asking."
"Damn. Didn't say you were." And now he's trying to picture it, those long legs and demure smile and that golden hair flipped coyly over one shoulder. It's not a sight he has seen too many times, especially not in any way, shape or form what could be considered a seduction. But it's not an unwelcome thought. Maybe he would have to convince her to try phone sex one of these days, and he mentally runs through his list of dirty talk phrases that could send Quinn into a quivering mass of feisty blonde seductress within two seconds flat. And then she speaks, again, and shifts his line of thinking considerably. Besides, she would never agree to it.
"Down, Puck. It's too cold for that here; it is Connecticut in October, after all. I'm trying to figure out what I can make for dinner. Broke until Friday, so it's whatever's here."
He's no Iron Chef, but he does know a thing or two about cooking. Those were the perils of being a latchkey kid with a younger sister who relied on him and a mother who didn't always get home from work until closer to bedtime. Plus, they didn't always have a lot of food in their kitchen, and there were only so many times he could order out for moo goo gai pan before they both got sick of it. "What do you have?"
"A small thing of brandy that Shelley accidentally left here last weekend, a bottle of soy sauce, half a bag of kidney beans and some vanilla extract." She goes silent for a few seconds, almost as though she's rifling through a fridge or a pantry or something. "Oh, and I guess a few eggs."
"Shit, Quinn, whatever happened to your bacon addiction? And you could scramble up those eggs and throw in the beans and top it off with the brandy and have a Puck-lette."
She laughs, again, and Puck cannot help but smile. He's making her laugh. "I ran out of bacon over the weekend. Is a Puck-lette anything like an alcoholic omelette? Or alcoholic scrambled eggs?"
"It's an omelette for people with high class and low ability in actually keeping eggs together in the pan. Sarah always liked it."
"You gave Sarah alcohol for dinner? Such an enabler."
"Of course not! I made hers with Kool-Aid or, sometimes, orange juice instead. And no, before you ask, I did not spike my little sister's Puck-lettes."
"Good. That would be weird and creepy if you had." Their conversation goes silent for about a moment, and he can hear her breathing on the other end of the line. It's awkward for him, not knowing what's going through her head right now and not having any of her numerous facial expressions to pick up on to help with that. He's not used to the lack of knowing. "Hey, Puck?" Her question pierces through the silence.
"Yeah?"
"I kinda need to get going." He can hear muffled voices in the background, and a flash of jealousy surges through his body. It's probably snooty Mathilde and Shelley and her other Yale brainiac friends ready to whisk her away for a mid-week trip to save the world's sea otter population, but they get to see her, talk to her, relate to her in ways that he never could. And he suddenly feels inadequate, which is not a feeling he is used to feeling. "I'll text you later about how the Puck-lette turns out?"
He grins. "I hope it's the best one ever made. See ya."
"Bye."
The phone goes silent on the other end, and he thinks of the things he could have said but didn't. Anything that would have revealed the depth of how he felt, for instance, or that he missed her, or that California actually kinda sucks for most people who aren't Brad Pitt or fucking Brad Pitt - damn Angelina. It's not the same here as he thought it was going to be - so many people had had the same idea before him, and knew how to market themselves better, and he wasn't going to be some pool cleaning magnate before he was twenty - and it's not the same without her. Things he has learned.
They are more things than he learned during his entire senior year, at least.
It's times like this when he realizes that she's actually the closest thing to love he's ever found. And fuck if he's going to say anything like that out loud, because he's got a reputation to uphold and all that shit, but it's true.
He thinks he probably loves Quinn. It's not even a thinking thing necessarily, but excluding that one time in a hospital a few years ago, he's never really said it to anyone who wasn't related to him. And he can be excused for that one time, because emotions running high and tense that day, but it doesn't mean that it wasn't true then, or now. So maybe he does love Quinn. What good is that going to do him in the here and now? None. She's not here, she's on the other side of the country, and she probably doesn't feel that way about him, not at all. If she could meet and marry a future Senator at Yale, and have little future Senator babies, why would she ever want to be with a guy who barely passed high school and would never rise above shitty jobs like pool cleaner for the rest of his life? Shit. Given the choice between the two, he'd fuck the future Senator too. Even if it was a guy.
He's never felt so alone before in his life, and yet, there are a few million people in this city. More people than he's ever been around, and he's more alone than ever.
He wants to crack open a bottle of beer right now, kick back and relax; he wants to forget about his wallowing and move on. Except, as he checks his fridge, he has even less food than Quinn does, and a quick inspection of his wallet shows he has precisely enough to pay for gas to get to Jill's house tomorrow - his weekly Wednesday job - but not anything more. And he's all out of alcohol.
He fries up the last egg in his fridge, dices up a small bell pepper his neighbor Emily gave him over the weekend from her window garden, and eats it in solidarity with a girl three thousand miles away. It's not quite a Puck-lette - it would need the beer, or some of Shelley's brandy, and definitely more than one egg - but the sentiment is still there.
It's the best one he's ever had.
Quinn: omg it was so gross but so good
Puck: told ya babe
Puck: next time try it with peppers
Quinn: ...am i seriously taking cooking advice from you?
Puck: are u ;)
Quinn: if you hear about a yale student dying of food poisoning you're at fault here
Quinn: ok? ok.
Puck: enjoy
He taps off away from the text message screen and smiles. The Puck-lette has invaded the Ivy walls of Connecticut and didn't send Quinn recoiling all the way to New Hampshire in horror. It can officially be labeled as a success.
What he doesn't realize at the time is that their short text message exchange is the last time he'll talk to her until December. They never were much for the small talk to pass the time, but he doesn't care to think that it'll take that long - until they can see each other again - until he knows that she's okay. Even though he's pretty sure that if something was to happen to Quinn, not only would he have heard about it like a million times over, but he would have already sufficiently kicked whoever's ass was responsible for doing it to her. Still.
The winter holidays are a long, long way away when it's only October at the start.
One | Three | AO3