Just Off the Key of Reason 1/3
Title: Just Off the Key of Reason
Chapter: 1/3
Rating: NC-17. This story deals with an open relationship, so if that isn't for you, feel free to walk on by.
Characters: Santana/Finn/Rachel
Word Count: 29,000 (total)
Prompt: "If he doesn't want to pick between us, he shouldn't have to." Left by smc_27 at the Santana Lopez Drabble Meme. To say it got away from me would be an understatement.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: A quick thank you to likebrightness for your help!
Finn has always had the same problem when it comes to girls. He has a really hard time choosing between them, because even when he's in love with a girl (the way he is with Rachel), it's like there's always someone else sitting there being incredible and fucking things up in his head.
Santana isn't doing anything wrong. She isn't doing anything, really.
They worked together on an assignment for glee club, and for the first time in...well, since he's known her, probably, he realized that Santana isn't just this scary girl with sharp words for everyone in her life. They actually managed to have a couple of decent conversations while they were working together that week, and sure, Santana still snarked at him, but it didn't have the same cruelty that it did before.
(Finn has a theory that if Santana really hates you, she just ignores your existence altogether. Making fun of you is like, a twisted expression of affection for her.)
He was completely surprised when his phone woke him up at like, one in the morning one Friday and he saw Santana's name on the display.
She was crying when he answered. "Could you come pick me up?" she asked. She sounded a little breathless, like she'd been crying even harder before he picked up. "I'm at Mason Anders' house, and I need to not be here."
"Are you drunk?" he asked, even though he was already sitting up and pushing the covers back.
"Does it fucking matter?" she snapped before taking a shuddering breath. "Yes, Finn. I'm drunk and I need to not be here any more."
"Okay. I'm on my way." He didn't think his mom would stop him if he explained that he was picking up a friend who'd had too much to drink if either she or Burt even woke up before he got out of the house. That wasn't likely though; they're both pretty heavy sleepers.
It was freezing outside, and raining, which made Finn wish he'd grabbed his coat instead of just pulling on a hoodie with his jeans. He blasted the heat in his truck all the way across town in an effort to cut through the damp chill.
Then he'd turned onto Mason's street and saw Santana sitting out on the curb in the rain, not wearing a coat and with her hair totally soaked.
"Why are you sitting outside?" he asked as soon as she opened the door, reaching behind the seat for the blanket that his mom insists that he keep back there in case of emergencies.
She slammed the door shut and glared at him. "Can you just drive and not ask questions?" she snapped.
He resisted the urge to throw the fleece blanket at her and held it out instead, watching as she took it and used one end to squeeze some of the water out of her hair before draping the part that was still dry over her bare legs. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head and held it out towards her. "Here."
She pressed her lips together before taking the shirt. "Do you mind if I..." She trailed off, gesturing at her own soaking wet shirt, and his cheeks burned when he realized that she was asking if he minded if she took it off.
"Yeah." He made himself look out the windshield at the street when she started pulling the fabric over her head.
"Thanks," she murmured after a moment, which he took as his cue to look back at her. She looked really small wearing his hoodie. "Can you please take me home?"
He didn't say anything as he pulled away from the curb, and neither did she. In fact, she stayed silent for the entire ten minutes it took to get to her place. He cut the engine when he pulled into the driveway, not wanting to wake anyone inside. He was surprised that Santana just sat there instead of jumping out of the truck immediately.
"Brittany decided to give Artie another chance," she murmured after a moment. It struck Finn as strange (strangely telling, maybe) that she used the guy's real name instead of some kind of insult. She let out a heavy breath and was shaking her head when he looked over at her. "After this summer, I just thought..." She trailed off and took another breath. "I don't know what I thought."
"Are you gonna be okay?" he asked.
"Do I have a choice?"
He watched her for a moment and saw the silent tears that were slipping down her cheeks. He wondered if she would be crying in front of him at all if she hadn't been drinking. "Well, yeah, I guess you do." She looked over at him. "You could be totally miserable. Or you could find something else that makes you happy."
She just stared at him, breathing and swallowing every few seconds like she was trying to make herself stop crying. "Thanks for the ride, Finn," she finally said. Maybe he was crazy, but he thought she looked like she wanted to say something else.
Before he could say anything, she was out of the truck and running up the path to the front porch.
He'd told Rachel about picking Santana up the next afternoon, though he didn't mention anything about the crying or Brittany and Artie being back together. (Everyone who hadn't already heard found out about that at school on Monday anyhow.) It just didn't seem like the kind of thing Santana would want anyone to know, and Finn didn't figure that not telling Rachel made him a bad boyfriend or anything.
He'd still been surprised when Rachel leaned over at the end of the story and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips.
"Santana needs a good friend, I think," she'd said, cupping her hand around his jaw. "It's sweet of you to be there for her."
"Seriously?" he'd asked before he could stop himself. "I mean, you aren't mad?"
Her lips curved upwards. "No. I trust you."
That had been the beginning.
*
Finn's friendship with Santana isn't like any other he's ever had. It's not like being friends with Puck or Mike or whoever because, whatever people might want to say about her attitude, Santana is definitely not a dude. It's not like trying to be friends with Quinn, who he's pretty sure still hates him at least a third of the time, and it's not like trying to be friends with Rachel, because he was in love with her for at least half the time they were trying to be just friends.
Santana is the first actual girl friend he's ever managed to have.
He and Santana don't usually hang out alone, though they talk on Facebook chat sometimes and they sit beside each other in their computer applications class and watch videos on YouTube. (Schools should just give up on content filters, really, because they aren't that hard to work around.) He usually ends up hanging out with Santana at parties, too, because Rachel doesn't really like to go to them and he does sometimes, and Santana has never not been at a party Finn went to.
They're all sitting together at lunch one day - and he doesn't remember when exactly the glee club started sitting together, but he really likes it - when Santana stands up abruptly from the table and stalks out of the cafeteria without saying anything to anyone. Finn's watching her go when Rachel nudges him with her elbow and nods down the table to where Brittany has literally climbed into Artie's lap and is whispering something in his ear.
"Go find her," Rachel tells him softly. "She needs a friend, Finn." She says it like a reminder, and the tone of her voice has him pushing away from the table, though he grabs his bag of Skittles to take with him. It only takes a couple of minutes to find her sitting alone in the choir room.
"Way to eat and run," he says, trying for a joke that he knows falls flat. It makes her roll her eyes, but he ignores it and crosses the room to sit next to her on the top riser. "What's up?"
"Nothing," she says, picking at the red polish on one fingernail.
"Santana."
She huffs out a breath and turns to glare at him. "You're really fucking annoying, you know that?" He just waits instead of saying anything; he knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. "Seeing her like that...I don't think Brittany loves me the way that I love her."
"That sucks," he says quietly, looking at the bag of candy in his hand. It does, too. He felt like that with Quinn sometimes, and even though he loves Rachel more than he ever loved Quinn, it doesn't erase everything that he felt before her.
"If she doesn't want to be with me, that's fine. I'm glad she just told me instead of like, fucking around." She laughs humorlessly, surprising Finn and making him look up at her. "She's always been a better person than me."
"Santana."
She snatches the Skittles from his hand roughly. "I convinced her that having sex with me when she was with Artie wasn't cheating," she says, staring at him pointedly.
Well. Finn tries to think of what Rachel would say in this situation because she's better at this stuff than he is. "So you were like, misguided," he says after a minute. "You wouldn't do that now, right?" He assumes the way that she's glaring at him, like she'd like to burn a hole through his forehead so she could watch his brain melt, means that she wouldn't. A month ago, that look would have made him want to move his chair away from hers, but he thinks he's getting used to it. "You just need time to get over it."
She just stares at him for a second. "Since when do you have all the answers, Hudson?"
The bell that signals the end of lunch rings before he can figure out how to answer her question, which is probably a good thing.
*
The thing that people don't tell you about sex is that it really does make you feel closer to someone, which has been the best surprise about sex with Rachel so far. Like, he knew that it was going to feel awesome physically (though it's even better than he'd thought it would be after his kind of disastrous first time), but he had no idea that it was going to make him feel so much more for Rachel.
It's not always easy to get alone time with Rachel though. Her dads are home by 5:30 every night, and between basketball and glee rehearsals, Finn is almost always at school later than that. They have a date night once a month, but they also have a 'no boys in the house without a parent present' rule, so that isn't really helpful. His mom and Burt are home every night, too, and when they go out, Kurt is usually still around. Finn doesn't usually hate having a step-brother the way he thought he would, but when said step-brother is distracting his girl from getting naked with him...well. Yeah, he kind of hates Kurt then, and it happens way too often.
He's way too tall for them to be trying to have sex in a vehicle - his or hers - but a dude's gotta do what he's got to do, and Rachel's been giving him those looks all night while they've been out. He parks his truck out on this gravel road where he and Puck sometimes go out and shoot paintball guns after they leave the movie on Saturday night. They have an hour till her curfew, and he really, really wants to make the most of it.
And, judging by the way that Rachel pulls him to the middle of the bench seat and straddles his lap, she does too.
Before he even realizes what's happening, Rachel's panties are lying on the seat next to him and her soft little hand is slipping into the front of his boxers. He doesn't even remember her unzipping his jeans, but fuck it.
She lets out an amazing little breath when slides his hand up the inside of her thigh until his fingers brush over her pussy. "Finn," she gasps when he circles the tip of his index finger around her clit.
He groans and shifts in his seat, and it makes her hand, which definitely stopped moving when he touched her, slip against the head of his cock. "Rachel. I can't--"
She cuts him off. "I know," she says, even as she's leaning back to reach for her purse in the floorboard, because of course Rachel carries condoms in her purse.
She moans the same way she always does when she lowers herself onto him, her fingers digging into his shoulders for the few seconds she takes to adjust before she starts moving again. It's fast and a little desperate, but so good. As much as he'd like to have a bed and more than forty-five minutes, he doesn't hate the times like these.
They stay there as long as they can without risking breaking Rachel's curfew, just sitting together and talking, and Finn thinks, not for the first time, about how great it's going to be when they finally get a chance to spend a whole night together instead of having to sleep in separate beds.
He goes straight to the kitchen when he gets home. Kurt is standing at the counter making himself a cup of tea, and he gives Finn a bland look when he pulls open to fridge to see if there's anything appealing inside.
"You know, the worst thing about you and Rachel sleeping together is that I can always tell when it happened," Kurt comments, looking at Finn with a vaguely disgusted expression on his face. It could be because he's talking about sex, or maybe it's because Finn just pulled a baked chicken breast out of the fridge and took a bite.
"Whatever, dude." He slaps Kurt on the back on his way out of the kitchen, because really, who cares what Kurt thinks?
*
The week of Christmas, Mr. Schue arranges for New Directions to go caroling at some of the local nursing homes. It's one of those things that Finn kind of loves and hates at the same time, because he knows that the residents like getting to hear them sing and that it brings some holiday spirit into the places, but nursing homes are more than a little bit depressing. He tries to just focus on the good parts though.
Finn is driving out of McKinley's parking lot at the end of the day with Rachel when she starts shouting at him to stop and go back because she left a folder of sheet music sitting on top of the piano.
"Do you really need it?" Finn asks her, idling there in the middle of the parking lot.
She looks at him like he's crazy. "It's my Christmas sheet music, Finn. Of course I need it."
He can tell she's totally not impressed when he mumbles, "But you're Jewish," so he circles the truck back around towards the side entrance and doesn't argue when she asks him to go get it for her.
He's got the choir room door halfway open when he hears a not-entirely-unfamiliar moan followed by Puck's gruffly mumbled, "Fuck, Santana."
The door slams when it falls shut, but Finn is already halfway down the hall, so he doesn't worry about it or what it means for Puck and Santana.
"Where's my folder?" Rachel asks when he gets back to the truck.
"I didn't see it," he insists, hoping that he can remember to hide it somewhere when they get back to school after New Year's. If she thinks she left it on the piano, she probably did.
He doesn't really know why he doesn't tell her that he's pretty sure he just almost walked in on Puck and Santana having sex. He doesn't generally lie to Rachel, and she would understand why he didn't want to go into the room with them in there like that. He just doesn't want to bring it up. He can't stop thinking about it though, even when he and Rachel are in her basement watching The Breakfast Club and snuggling together on the couch. It keeps coming into his head, a sudden unbidden memory of the way Santana's moan sounded from where he was standing in the hallway.
He finally figures it out when he gets home that night and he's half-asleep in bed.
It isn't Puck having sex with Santana that's freaking him out. It's Santana having sex wih Puck. Because for the last six months or whatever, Santana has been all about Brittany. She dated lots of guys before - hell, she almost dated Finn - but he was pretty sure that the Brittany thing meant that she was into girls and only girls.
Puck is definitely not a girl.
He sees her on Facebook chat a couple of days later, but instead of talking to her there, he grabs his phone and finds her name in his contact list.
"I heard you and Puck in the choir room after we went caroling," he sort of blurts out after they've greeted each other.
She makes a strangled sort of noise before she dissolves into giggles. "What exactly did you hear?" she manages.
"Uh..." Maybe what he thought he heard wasn't what he heard after all. "A moan, and he said your name. It sounded like you were..."
"Fucking," she supplies, sounding unimpressed. "Because we were. We thought everyone was gone though."
"I came back for Rachel's sheet music," he says, feeling stupid, and he can practically picture her rolling her eyes even though he knows that she and Rachel have reached some sort of peace agreement or middle ground or something. "I don't get it though."
"Um. If you and the hobbit are doing the dirty, you should get it," she says.
He ignores her little dig at Rachel because there isn't really any venom behind it, not like there used to be. "No, I mean...I thought that, after everything with Brittany, you were into girls." He says the last part quietly, because he's not really sure he's supposed to be saying it at all.
"Being into girls doesn't mean I can't be into guys, too," she points out. She lets the words hang there for a moment. "Look, it's been a while, and Puck and I have always been good together."
Finn leans back in his desk chair and rubs his hand over his face. He understands the words that she's saying, but he still feels confused. He's been used to the idea of Santana as a lesbian, but now she's telling him...what? "So, are you bi?"
She laughs quietly. "I guess. I'm not really a fan of labeling shit."
"But like...you'd have sex with a guy or a girl, and you could fall in love with...anyone."
He hears her take a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I guess so. If it was the right person."
He thinks that could be really confusing, but then again, "That's kind of awesome, really. Like, no one's off limits."
"Finn." She's laughing for real then, and gasping a little, and he thinks she might sound a little teary, but then she's calling him an idiot and he isn't sure of anything about this conversation any more, really.
*
Santana and Puck are still sleeping together when school starts again, and the way that everything has shaken down since school started, it almost feels like they've all gone back to junior year again.
"Maybe I should invite Santana over for dinner with my fathers sometime," Rachel says one night. It's completely out of the blue. They're sitting in his room, and she's doing reading for her AP history class while he plays some Mario Galaxy. (Rachel hates it when he plays violent games when she's over, so he generally sticks to Mario when she's around. There are worse things, honestly, so he doesn't say anything about it.)
"Why?"
She looks at him like she's just said the most logical thing in the world and he's the crazy one for questioning her. "Being bisexual in a town like Lima has to be challenging. Maybe my dads can offer her some advice."
"You didn't want to invite her over when you thought she was a lesbian," he points out, setting down his game controller. This feels like the sort of conversation where he should actually be looking at her face instead of the TV.
Rachel looks down at her lap instead of meeting his eyes. "She and I weren't friends before," she says softly. "Our friendship now may be tentative, but since you two have become a bit closer, I feel like I could actually have that sort of conversation with her without her just becoming defensive or shutting down."
"I don't know, Rach."
"You don't think she'd be receptive?" she asks, looking at him seriously.
"I just don't think she wants to talk about it at all, and having dinner with you and your dads would be all about talking about it." It sounds kind of stupid, but he still thinks he's right.
Rachel nods. "What do you suggest I do?"
"Nothing," he answers honestly. "I really think she just wants to be left alone to figure stuff out. Santana isn't afraid to talk about something if she wants to."
Rachel leans forward so she's on her hands and knees and crawls to where he's sitting at the foot of his bed, draping her arms over his shoulders and pressing a kiss to the side of his neck. "You're right," she murmurs against his skin. "And you're a good friend."
"Thanks, babe."
Her lips move up until they're brushing against his earlobe the way he loves. "You're an even better boyfriend," she whispers against his ear. He has to bite back a groan at the way her warm breath feels. "Finn."
Screw it. He turns, slipping his arm around her waist so he can move her back up against the pillows and stretch out on top of her. "I love you."
He slips his hand up under the hem of her skirt when she's trying to answer, and the words kind of get lost in this sexy little whimper she lets out.
He doesn't mind.
*
Finn totally expects shit to hit the fan when Brittany and Artie break up again.
He sees the whole thing. Everyone does, because they have an actual fight in the middle of a glee club rehearsal.
"I don't understand why you're so mad," Brittany says, throwing her hands up. Finn doesn't either, and he's seen this whole fight. Even though they started fighting over some dance move that Brittany wants to do that Artie doesn't like for whatever reason, they aren't fighting about dancing or glee club any more. Finn doesn't know what though.
"You never understand," Artie says seriously, "and this isn't me calling you stupid. You just don't get it."
Quinn, standing just in front of Finn with Sam, sucks in an audible breath.
"So explain it to me," Brittany says like it's the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it should be.
Artie shakes his head. "I can't. We're just...we're done, Brittany." Everyone watches him wheel out of the room before looking at Brittany, standing there with her eyes shining with tears.
Except Finn. He's looking at Santana. She's standing on the other side of the room, watching everything unfold with an expression on her face that Finn can't read at all.
"Let's take five, guys," Mr. Schue says, breaking the silence but none of the tension.
They all just kind of stand there for a moment, then Brittany is half-running out of the room while everyone else sort of mills around.
Finn doesn't even know what to do when Santana just moves to the back of the room and sits down with her phone. Like, shouldn't she be chasing Brittany? Isn't this the opening that she's been waiting for?
(That's how Finn felt when he realized that Jesse and Rachel were a done deal sophomore year. Like maybe he would finally have a chance with her.)
Rachel catches his eye and glances pointedly at Santana, widening her eyes when he shakes his head. He's not going to go talk to her right now, no matter how much Rachel apparently thinks he should.
Puck walks up then and asks a question about their basketball practice schedule, and Finn's so grateful to the guy for saving him that he nearly hugs him. It's one thing to talk to Santana and be friends with her, but it's another thing to walk up and ask her what's up two minutes after the girl she is (was?) in love with breaks up with her boyfriend right in front of her. He's not afraid of her any more, but he's also not stupid.
"Why didn't you talk to Santana?" Rachel demands the second they're alone after rehearsal, standing at her locker in the otherwise deserted hallway.
He shakes his head. "That isn't how she works. If she wants to talk about it, she'll bring it up, Rach."
Rachel closes her locker door and tilts her head at him. "What?" he asks when she doesn't say anything.
"You're right," she says softly. "It's nice that you two are friends now, but it's a little strange for me." She says it like she wishes it wasn't true - the fact that it's strange, he thinks - and it makes something constrict in Finn's chest. "She's lucky to have you."
He wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her against his chest, leaning down to kiss the top of her head. "I think I'm lucky to have you."
She tips her had back to kiss him then, her lips brushing sweetly against his the way she always does when they're out in public and she doesn't want to be inappropriate.
Even though he knows what he said is true, Finn doesn't expect Santana to show up at the garage four days later on Saturday afternoon.
He's gotten used to seeing Rachel here, to the point that he doesn't even really think that she looks out of place in her pretty dresses and nice shoes in the greasy shop. Santana being here, however, is weird. First of all, she's wearing jeans and a red sweater instead of her Cheerio uniform; he should be used to seeing her in street clothes by now - she isn't quite as attached to the Cheerio thing as she used to be - but it's always a little shock. The heels of her flat riding boots click on the concrete floor as she walks towards him, and she's got a paper cup from The Lima Bean in her hand.
"Hey," she says, standing over him where he's finishing changing the tire on a Toyota.
He glances up at her and reaches for a lug nut. "What are you doing here?"
He catches her shrug out of the corner of his eye. "When do you get off?"
"We've been kind of slow. Burt said I can cut out whenever. Probably after I finish this tire." He reaches for a tire iron to get the lug nuts started. "Why?"
"Do you have plans with Rachel?" she asks instead of answering.
"No." He sets down the tire iron and stands so he can really look at her. "What's up, Santana?"
She sighs, rolling her eyes. "My parents are gone for the weekend, and I'm already sick of being in my house alone. Brittany used to come over when they were gone, but."
"Right," Finn says, saving her from having to say that things are weird with Britt. He knows. "You wanna hang out?"
"God help me, I do."
He snorts out a laugh and nods before kneeling next to the car again. "Don't hurt yourself, Santana."
"Shut up," she orders, kicking at his toe. He knows Santana well enough by now to know that the way she's lingering, sipping her drink and watching him tighten lug nuts, means that there's something else she wants to say. He also knows that it's better to let her decide to say whatever it is instead of pushing it. "Hanging out with me isn't going to be like, a thing with Rachel, is it?" she finally asks.
"No." It's a weird question, he thinks, because it's not like they haven't hung out together before, for glee club and at parties and stuff, and Rachel has really encouraged his friendship with Santana, even after they all found out that Santana's bi. (It shouldn't make a difference either way, and he should have known that it wouldn't with Rachel, but there was always a chance that she was only okay with him being friends with Santana because she thought the girl wasn't into dudes any more.)
Santana smiles when he look up at her. "Good. Come over when you're done here."
She walks away before he can answer, leaving him shaking his head as he gets up to lower the jack so he can finish off the lug nuts.
The first thing he sees when she opens her front door is her socks, bright blue with white and yellow stripes, and he can't help grinning at them. "Shut up," she warns him.
"But they have stripes." He doesn't know why, exactly, they're funny, but they kind of are.
"They're socks."
He doesn't say anything else about the socks when she steps aside to let him in the house, but he doesn't stop grinning about them either.
They end up in what Santana calls the family room, sprawled out on a huge brown leather sofa and watching a Pop Up Video marathon on a huge flat-screen television. He's kind of engrossed in the pop-ups on this 'NSync video (embarrassing, yeah, but Justin Timberlake is kind of awesome) when Santana finally tells him what had her coming by the garage and asking him to come hang out.
"Brittany stopped by here this morning."
He looks over at her, sitting in the corner of the sofa. She has her legs pulled up next to her, and there's a white fleece blanket patterned with red and green snowflakes draped over them. Her eyes are focused on the TV screen, but he doesn't know that she's actually seeing anything that's happening on it.
"My parents go away for the weekend every few months. It isn't a big deal, and I'm not afraid to be here by myself or anything, but Britt has been coming and staying with me since middle school. This is the first time she hasn't."
"Why did she come over?"
She finally looks at him. "To hang out, I guess. But it would have turned into more than hanging out. It always does with Britt," she says quietly. "I told her that I was busy instead of telling her the truth."
Finn asks the question before he can stop himself. "What's the truth?"
It's too much, he knows. This is the sort of thing that gets you into trouble with Santana: Trying to get her to do something that she isn't ready for, to open up more than she's willing to without being prompted, is a bad idea. His mom (and Rachel) would say that it makes her lash out, but Finn knows that it's her getting defensive but trying not to look like she's being defensive. She goes on the attack as a way to stop people from paying attention to the fact that she just almost gave something up.
He's bracing himself for the attack, for whatever insult she's going to fling at him. It catches him completely off guard when she says, "The truth is that I know we can't be together."
"Why not?"
"Because she doesn't love me like I love her," Santana whispers. "I've been in love with her for I don't even know how long, and she loves me as her best friend. It isn't the same."
Finn actually does know what it's like not to be able to look at your best friend the same way because of something he did, and even though what Santana and Brittany are going through isn't the same at all, he kind of gets it. No matter how things wind up with them, these girls are never going to be able to be best friends like they were before, just like he and Puck will never be exactly the way they were before the stuff with Quinn. And he thinks that maybe he gets what it's like to love someone and not have them feel the same way.
"I'm sorry," he says after a moment, because he doesn't know what else to say. He knows better than to compare her and Brittany to him and Puck. She blinks at him, and he wishes that he was better at reading her expressions. "I wish I could fix it for you."
She looks like she wants to laugh, but instead she just slides over on the couch a little, switching her legs to her opposite side so she's right next to him. He puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her into his side because it feels right. "Me too."
She stays there next to him through the rest of the boy band videos, curled up against his side and letting him run his fingers through the ends of her hair.
*
"Do you ever think that you could fall in love with a girl?"
The what the fuck look on Rachel's face definitely drives home how stupidly he asked the question, but it isn't like he really thought about the wording before he asked. The question itself though, he's been thinking about for a while. Not Rachel, specifically, but people in general. He's kind of surrounded by people who aren't doing what society tells you you're "supposed" to do in terms of love: his girlfriend has two dads, his stepbrother is gay, and now he knows that one of his best friends (and when did that happen?) is bi. Finn can't imagine Kurt falling for a girl any more than he can imagine himself falling for a guy, so Santana sort of blows his mind a little bit.
Rachel's face is far more understanding when he explains all of that to her.
"I don't know," she says after a moment. She pulls her legs up and crosses them so she can turn to face him where they're sitting on the floor next to her bed. "I can appreciate an attractive woman, and I can't say that I've never been attracted to one, but I don't know that I could picture myself in a relationship with a girl."
He forces himself to focus on what she's getting at instead of fixating on the fact that his super sexy girlfriend just admitted that she's been attracted to other girls. "What do you mean?"
She's quiet for a moment. "I don't think love has anything to do with gender," she finally says, "but I can't picture myself in a relationship that didn't involve being with a man." She smiles, taking his hand and tracing the tips of her fingers over his palm.
He doesn't know exactly what he wanted to hear when he asked, but Finn likes what Rachel says.
A little later, when they've moved up onto her bed and his fingers are skimming up her ribs beneath her shirt, he finds himself asking, with his lips against her ear. "Have you ever fantasized about being with a girl?"
Her fingernails dig into his biceps almost painfully when she gasps his name, and he pulls back to look at her face, afraid that he's made her mad.
She pushes at his chest, so he rolls off of her and onto his back, sure that this is the end of his fun night. He doesn't even know what to say when she moves on top of him, straddling his hips and leaning over him to nip at his lips. "Have you ever fantasized about me with a girl?" she counters in a low voice that goes straight to his dick.
"God, Rachel."
He totally forgets that her dads are sitting downstairs watching Mad Men in the den when Rachel wraps her lips around his cock, but she reminds him by reaching up his body and pressing her fingers against his lips, which is hot enough in and of itself that he has to bite back a groan.
*
The first time Finn ever had a drink, he was thirteen. Puck had the alcohol, of course, a bottle of some Jewish wine that they finished off together over Christmas break when they were just supposed to be hanging out playing video games while Mrs. Puckerman was at work. Finn puked and Puck still brings it up every once in a while, but really, the worst part was how terrible he felt the next day, nauseous and headachey and just like shit all around.
He still drinks, of course, but he still hates hangovers, so he doesn't like to let himself get drunk. He'd much rather drink enough to have a good time and then stop before things get out of hand.
Sometimes though, things do get out of hand.
Mrs. Puckerman takes Abby with her when she goes to visit her sister for a weekend, leaving Puck home alone with orders not to have anyone in the house while she's gone. This means, of course, that he throws a party, though he does keep it to just the glee club and a handful of other people who don't suck instead of inviting the basketball team and all the Cheerios the way he would have if he'd gotten this opportunity two years ago.
Rachel says she thinks she's getting a cold, so she stays home in an effort to avoid getting sick, which kind of sucks. He loves Rachel all the time, of course, but he really likes it when he gets her somewhere that she can really relax and let things go. The fact that she isn't around, being cute and distracting him, is probably why he lets himself get roped into a game of Fuck the Dealer during which, in fact, he gets spectacularly fucked, and not at all in the fun way. He's playing with Tina and Mike, who have a bottle of American Honey, which is much too tasty a liquor to play drinking games with, he decides, when he stands up to leave the table and nearly falls over.
He switches to water, ignoring Puck's jabs at his manhood, and chews his way through a few slices of cinnamon raisin bread that he finds in the kitchen. That gets him from 'almost sick' to just wasted, which is a huge improvement, even though he's still going to feel like shit tomorrow.
He's sitting in the living room debating whether or not he should call Rachel for a ride home since Kurt and Blaine left a couple of hours ago when Santana flops down onto the couch beside him.
"You're boring," she announces before he even gets a chance to greet her. "And I'm drunk."
"Me too."
"You should drink more," she tells him seriously. "You can drink for both of us, and then I can stop drinking. That way you'll throw up instead of me."
"You're a bitch," he says, looking at her like she's crazy. She doesn't respond, just stares at him blandly and crosses her legs. She's wearing a tight pink skirt with boots that go up past her knees. He likes it, and he wonders what it would look like if Rachel and Santana were ever to trade wardrobes.
It'd probably be pretty hot.
"I really don't want to puke tonight," he tells her.
"Me neither." She stands up and holds her hand out, looking at him expectantly. "Let's go for a walk."
"It's like, forty degrees," he says dumbly. He doesn't really want to be outside, and there's no way she's wearing enough clothes to be walking around out there.
She rolls her eyes. "Don't be a pussy, Hudson. First of all, we'll wear coats because that's what they're for, and for another, we're drunk. You don't feel cold when you're drunk."
Sound enough logic for him. "Where are we walking?"
"We'll go to my house." He looks at her dubiously; her house isn't really a comfortable walking distance away, though it's not impossibly far. She rolls her eyes again and makes a noise like he's annoying her. "Puck and I both did it all the time freshman year. It takes like, forty-five minutes."
This is a really terrible idea. "Fine."
It turns out that the route Santana takes from Puck's house to hers cuts through about seven hundred back yards. Finn is just sober enough to realize that while a small girl like her in your back yard isn't scary, a big dude like him is, so he spends a good portion of the time walking slumped over and praying that no one is looking out their windows at one o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Other than worrying about someone calling the cops on him, the walk is actually kind of fun. He doesn't know what Santana was drinking at the party, but it obviously wasn't tequila, because she's being hilarious and silly instead of crying all over him the way he's seen her do way too many times before.
Finn still remembers Santana in middle school, back before Quinn moved to Lima and swallowed up all of his attention. He'd actually had a little crush on her, even though he was too afraid to do anything about it back then. She was softer in middle school, less mean, and, he thinks, probably more open. They had a lot of the same friends - Puck, notably - but he'd never really been brave enough to take the chance and get to know her better.
Now that he has gotten to know her better, he wishes that he hadn't wasted all that time being intimidated by her. Once you get past her armor, you can see how great she really is. She's smart and talented, and when she's on your side, she'll go to the mat for you, no questions asked. After years of hoping that she wasn't going to say something horrible and mean to him on a regular basis, it's crazy that he considers her one of his best friends.
He likes being friends with Santana.
It isn't until they're walking up the front walk at her house that he realizes what a bad idea this is, coming home with her. She doesn't seem to notice the way he's hesitating, reaching into her coat pocket for her keys while the heels of her boots click on the porch steps.
"What about your parents?" he asks, whispering when she looks over her shoulder at him.
"They won't notice," she answers dismissively. "Their bedroom is at the back of the house, mine is at the front."
"Are you supposed to let guys in your room at night?"
Instead of answering his question, Santana presses her finger to her lips and pushes the door open.
(Finn thinks that means that he's not actually supposed to be here, but his other option is to call Rachel or Burt or his mom to come pick him up, which...no.)
For all the times that Finn has been to Santana's house, for parties or when they were working together for glee or whatever, he hasn't ever been in her bedroom before tonight. It's a kind of dark and moody, which suits her, and not exactly tidy either, which doesn't surprise him. It's not dirty at all, but there are clothes and shoes sort of everywhere and there's makeup and stuff scattered all over the top of the vanity. (He doesn't mean to compare her to Rachel, but he knows that Rachel's vanity table is meticulously organized to the point that Finn doesn't even really like to sit next to the thing for fear of inadvertently knocking something out of place.)
She tosses her coat over a chair that's sitting in the corner that he thinks is her dropping spot for everything when she comes through the door; he sees her Cheerios jacket and bag there along with the backpack she carries at school.
"Is somebody going to come after me with a shotgun or something if they find me here?" Finn asks once her door is closed.
She shakes her head at him, perching on the edge of her bed to unzip her boots. "They don't care," she insists, "and even if they did, they like you."
He isn't entirely convinced, but Santana tells him to take off his coat before she disappears into her ensuite with what he assumes are pajamas in her hand, and he does it.
Walking in the cold has definitely sobered him up, but Finn still feels drunk enough that he wouldn't be willing to drive or have a conversation with Burt or his mom for fear that they would figure it out and be angry. He doesn't have much of a choice but to hang out with Santana for a while unless he wants to walk back to Puck's, which he definitely does not.
He feels weird being in her room alone, so he's standing awkwardly next to her desk looking at the books she has lined up on the shelf (he's not sure he's ever seen Santana read something that wasn't for school, but apparently she does) when she comes out of the bathroom in a little tank top and a pair of silky looking dark blue pajama pants.
"We can see what's on the movie channels," she offers, standing next to the unmade bed and fussing with the linens until she's got stuff arranged so she can sit on the bed instead of just crawling into it.
That's how he finds himself stretched out on Santana Lopez's bed at nearly two on a Sunday morning, half-drunk and watching some movie, the title of which he doesn't even know.
"I can't believe you walked all the way here from Puck's with me." It comes out of nowhere, but she's looking up at him and almost laughing at him.
He makes a face. "Don't be mean."
"I'm not," she insists, pushing herself up so she's leaned back against the headboard next to him. Her knee touches his thigh when she bends her leg. "It was sweet of you to go with me. Or maybe you were just drunk."
"I'm still kind of drunk," he admits, making her grin, "but I came with you because I wanted to." He shrugs and slides down a little, putting his face level with hers. "I like hanging out with you, San."
"I don't know when the hell it happened, but I like hanging out with you, too, Finn." She says it quietly, like she's confessing something ilicit.
He doesn't know who leans in first, but Santana's lips are soft when they touch his, and gentler than they ever were when they kissed before. It's more than a brush of their lips together, but it's still technically chaste, even though it doesn't feel that way. It feels like...more.
"Finn." She whispers his name, her breath fanning over his lips.
Her eyes are wide, like she doesn't know what just happened any more than he does.
(He wonders, vaguely, if her heart is beating as fast as his is too.)
Part Two
Chapter: 1/3
Rating: NC-17. This story deals with an open relationship, so if that isn't for you, feel free to walk on by.
Characters: Santana/Finn/Rachel
Word Count: 29,000 (total)
Prompt: "If he doesn't want to pick between us, he shouldn't have to." Left by smc_27 at the Santana Lopez Drabble Meme. To say it got away from me would be an understatement.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: A quick thank you to likebrightness for your help!
Finn has always had the same problem when it comes to girls. He has a really hard time choosing between them, because even when he's in love with a girl (the way he is with Rachel), it's like there's always someone else sitting there being incredible and fucking things up in his head.
Santana isn't doing anything wrong. She isn't doing anything, really.
They worked together on an assignment for glee club, and for the first time in...well, since he's known her, probably, he realized that Santana isn't just this scary girl with sharp words for everyone in her life. They actually managed to have a couple of decent conversations while they were working together that week, and sure, Santana still snarked at him, but it didn't have the same cruelty that it did before.
(Finn has a theory that if Santana really hates you, she just ignores your existence altogether. Making fun of you is like, a twisted expression of affection for her.)
He was completely surprised when his phone woke him up at like, one in the morning one Friday and he saw Santana's name on the display.
She was crying when he answered. "Could you come pick me up?" she asked. She sounded a little breathless, like she'd been crying even harder before he picked up. "I'm at Mason Anders' house, and I need to not be here."
"Are you drunk?" he asked, even though he was already sitting up and pushing the covers back.
"Does it fucking matter?" she snapped before taking a shuddering breath. "Yes, Finn. I'm drunk and I need to not be here any more."
"Okay. I'm on my way." He didn't think his mom would stop him if he explained that he was picking up a friend who'd had too much to drink if either she or Burt even woke up before he got out of the house. That wasn't likely though; they're both pretty heavy sleepers.
It was freezing outside, and raining, which made Finn wish he'd grabbed his coat instead of just pulling on a hoodie with his jeans. He blasted the heat in his truck all the way across town in an effort to cut through the damp chill.
Then he'd turned onto Mason's street and saw Santana sitting out on the curb in the rain, not wearing a coat and with her hair totally soaked.
"Why are you sitting outside?" he asked as soon as she opened the door, reaching behind the seat for the blanket that his mom insists that he keep back there in case of emergencies.
She slammed the door shut and glared at him. "Can you just drive and not ask questions?" she snapped.
He resisted the urge to throw the fleece blanket at her and held it out instead, watching as she took it and used one end to squeeze some of the water out of her hair before draping the part that was still dry over her bare legs. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head and held it out towards her. "Here."
She pressed her lips together before taking the shirt. "Do you mind if I..." She trailed off, gesturing at her own soaking wet shirt, and his cheeks burned when he realized that she was asking if he minded if she took it off.
"Yeah." He made himself look out the windshield at the street when she started pulling the fabric over her head.
"Thanks," she murmured after a moment, which he took as his cue to look back at her. She looked really small wearing his hoodie. "Can you please take me home?"
He didn't say anything as he pulled away from the curb, and neither did she. In fact, she stayed silent for the entire ten minutes it took to get to her place. He cut the engine when he pulled into the driveway, not wanting to wake anyone inside. He was surprised that Santana just sat there instead of jumping out of the truck immediately.
"Brittany decided to give Artie another chance," she murmured after a moment. It struck Finn as strange (strangely telling, maybe) that she used the guy's real name instead of some kind of insult. She let out a heavy breath and was shaking her head when he looked over at her. "After this summer, I just thought..." She trailed off and took another breath. "I don't know what I thought."
"Are you gonna be okay?" he asked.
"Do I have a choice?"
He watched her for a moment and saw the silent tears that were slipping down her cheeks. He wondered if she would be crying in front of him at all if she hadn't been drinking. "Well, yeah, I guess you do." She looked over at him. "You could be totally miserable. Or you could find something else that makes you happy."
She just stared at him, breathing and swallowing every few seconds like she was trying to make herself stop crying. "Thanks for the ride, Finn," she finally said. Maybe he was crazy, but he thought she looked like she wanted to say something else.
Before he could say anything, she was out of the truck and running up the path to the front porch.
He'd told Rachel about picking Santana up the next afternoon, though he didn't mention anything about the crying or Brittany and Artie being back together. (Everyone who hadn't already heard found out about that at school on Monday anyhow.) It just didn't seem like the kind of thing Santana would want anyone to know, and Finn didn't figure that not telling Rachel made him a bad boyfriend or anything.
He'd still been surprised when Rachel leaned over at the end of the story and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips.
"Santana needs a good friend, I think," she'd said, cupping her hand around his jaw. "It's sweet of you to be there for her."
"Seriously?" he'd asked before he could stop himself. "I mean, you aren't mad?"
Her lips curved upwards. "No. I trust you."
That had been the beginning.
*
Finn's friendship with Santana isn't like any other he's ever had. It's not like being friends with Puck or Mike or whoever because, whatever people might want to say about her attitude, Santana is definitely not a dude. It's not like trying to be friends with Quinn, who he's pretty sure still hates him at least a third of the time, and it's not like trying to be friends with Rachel, because he was in love with her for at least half the time they were trying to be just friends.
Santana is the first actual girl friend he's ever managed to have.
He and Santana don't usually hang out alone, though they talk on Facebook chat sometimes and they sit beside each other in their computer applications class and watch videos on YouTube. (Schools should just give up on content filters, really, because they aren't that hard to work around.) He usually ends up hanging out with Santana at parties, too, because Rachel doesn't really like to go to them and he does sometimes, and Santana has never not been at a party Finn went to.
They're all sitting together at lunch one day - and he doesn't remember when exactly the glee club started sitting together, but he really likes it - when Santana stands up abruptly from the table and stalks out of the cafeteria without saying anything to anyone. Finn's watching her go when Rachel nudges him with her elbow and nods down the table to where Brittany has literally climbed into Artie's lap and is whispering something in his ear.
"Go find her," Rachel tells him softly. "She needs a friend, Finn." She says it like a reminder, and the tone of her voice has him pushing away from the table, though he grabs his bag of Skittles to take with him. It only takes a couple of minutes to find her sitting alone in the choir room.
"Way to eat and run," he says, trying for a joke that he knows falls flat. It makes her roll her eyes, but he ignores it and crosses the room to sit next to her on the top riser. "What's up?"
"Nothing," she says, picking at the red polish on one fingernail.
"Santana."
She huffs out a breath and turns to glare at him. "You're really fucking annoying, you know that?" He just waits instead of saying anything; he knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. "Seeing her like that...I don't think Brittany loves me the way that I love her."
"That sucks," he says quietly, looking at the bag of candy in his hand. It does, too. He felt like that with Quinn sometimes, and even though he loves Rachel more than he ever loved Quinn, it doesn't erase everything that he felt before her.
"If she doesn't want to be with me, that's fine. I'm glad she just told me instead of like, fucking around." She laughs humorlessly, surprising Finn and making him look up at her. "She's always been a better person than me."
"Santana."
She snatches the Skittles from his hand roughly. "I convinced her that having sex with me when she was with Artie wasn't cheating," she says, staring at him pointedly.
Well. Finn tries to think of what Rachel would say in this situation because she's better at this stuff than he is. "So you were like, misguided," he says after a minute. "You wouldn't do that now, right?" He assumes the way that she's glaring at him, like she'd like to burn a hole through his forehead so she could watch his brain melt, means that she wouldn't. A month ago, that look would have made him want to move his chair away from hers, but he thinks he's getting used to it. "You just need time to get over it."
She just stares at him for a second. "Since when do you have all the answers, Hudson?"
The bell that signals the end of lunch rings before he can figure out how to answer her question, which is probably a good thing.
*
The thing that people don't tell you about sex is that it really does make you feel closer to someone, which has been the best surprise about sex with Rachel so far. Like, he knew that it was going to feel awesome physically (though it's even better than he'd thought it would be after his kind of disastrous first time), but he had no idea that it was going to make him feel so much more for Rachel.
It's not always easy to get alone time with Rachel though. Her dads are home by 5:30 every night, and between basketball and glee rehearsals, Finn is almost always at school later than that. They have a date night once a month, but they also have a 'no boys in the house without a parent present' rule, so that isn't really helpful. His mom and Burt are home every night, too, and when they go out, Kurt is usually still around. Finn doesn't usually hate having a step-brother the way he thought he would, but when said step-brother is distracting his girl from getting naked with him...well. Yeah, he kind of hates Kurt then, and it happens way too often.
He's way too tall for them to be trying to have sex in a vehicle - his or hers - but a dude's gotta do what he's got to do, and Rachel's been giving him those looks all night while they've been out. He parks his truck out on this gravel road where he and Puck sometimes go out and shoot paintball guns after they leave the movie on Saturday night. They have an hour till her curfew, and he really, really wants to make the most of it.
And, judging by the way that Rachel pulls him to the middle of the bench seat and straddles his lap, she does too.
Before he even realizes what's happening, Rachel's panties are lying on the seat next to him and her soft little hand is slipping into the front of his boxers. He doesn't even remember her unzipping his jeans, but fuck it.
She lets out an amazing little breath when slides his hand up the inside of her thigh until his fingers brush over her pussy. "Finn," she gasps when he circles the tip of his index finger around her clit.
He groans and shifts in his seat, and it makes her hand, which definitely stopped moving when he touched her, slip against the head of his cock. "Rachel. I can't--"
She cuts him off. "I know," she says, even as she's leaning back to reach for her purse in the floorboard, because of course Rachel carries condoms in her purse.
She moans the same way she always does when she lowers herself onto him, her fingers digging into his shoulders for the few seconds she takes to adjust before she starts moving again. It's fast and a little desperate, but so good. As much as he'd like to have a bed and more than forty-five minutes, he doesn't hate the times like these.
They stay there as long as they can without risking breaking Rachel's curfew, just sitting together and talking, and Finn thinks, not for the first time, about how great it's going to be when they finally get a chance to spend a whole night together instead of having to sleep in separate beds.
He goes straight to the kitchen when he gets home. Kurt is standing at the counter making himself a cup of tea, and he gives Finn a bland look when he pulls open to fridge to see if there's anything appealing inside.
"You know, the worst thing about you and Rachel sleeping together is that I can always tell when it happened," Kurt comments, looking at Finn with a vaguely disgusted expression on his face. It could be because he's talking about sex, or maybe it's because Finn just pulled a baked chicken breast out of the fridge and took a bite.
"Whatever, dude." He slaps Kurt on the back on his way out of the kitchen, because really, who cares what Kurt thinks?
*
The week of Christmas, Mr. Schue arranges for New Directions to go caroling at some of the local nursing homes. It's one of those things that Finn kind of loves and hates at the same time, because he knows that the residents like getting to hear them sing and that it brings some holiday spirit into the places, but nursing homes are more than a little bit depressing. He tries to just focus on the good parts though.
Finn is driving out of McKinley's parking lot at the end of the day with Rachel when she starts shouting at him to stop and go back because she left a folder of sheet music sitting on top of the piano.
"Do you really need it?" Finn asks her, idling there in the middle of the parking lot.
She looks at him like he's crazy. "It's my Christmas sheet music, Finn. Of course I need it."
He can tell she's totally not impressed when he mumbles, "But you're Jewish," so he circles the truck back around towards the side entrance and doesn't argue when she asks him to go get it for her.
He's got the choir room door halfway open when he hears a not-entirely-unfamiliar moan followed by Puck's gruffly mumbled, "Fuck, Santana."
The door slams when it falls shut, but Finn is already halfway down the hall, so he doesn't worry about it or what it means for Puck and Santana.
"Where's my folder?" Rachel asks when he gets back to the truck.
"I didn't see it," he insists, hoping that he can remember to hide it somewhere when they get back to school after New Year's. If she thinks she left it on the piano, she probably did.
He doesn't really know why he doesn't tell her that he's pretty sure he just almost walked in on Puck and Santana having sex. He doesn't generally lie to Rachel, and she would understand why he didn't want to go into the room with them in there like that. He just doesn't want to bring it up. He can't stop thinking about it though, even when he and Rachel are in her basement watching The Breakfast Club and snuggling together on the couch. It keeps coming into his head, a sudden unbidden memory of the way Santana's moan sounded from where he was standing in the hallway.
He finally figures it out when he gets home that night and he's half-asleep in bed.
It isn't Puck having sex with Santana that's freaking him out. It's Santana having sex wih Puck. Because for the last six months or whatever, Santana has been all about Brittany. She dated lots of guys before - hell, she almost dated Finn - but he was pretty sure that the Brittany thing meant that she was into girls and only girls.
Puck is definitely not a girl.
He sees her on Facebook chat a couple of days later, but instead of talking to her there, he grabs his phone and finds her name in his contact list.
"I heard you and Puck in the choir room after we went caroling," he sort of blurts out after they've greeted each other.
She makes a strangled sort of noise before she dissolves into giggles. "What exactly did you hear?" she manages.
"Uh..." Maybe what he thought he heard wasn't what he heard after all. "A moan, and he said your name. It sounded like you were..."
"Fucking," she supplies, sounding unimpressed. "Because we were. We thought everyone was gone though."
"I came back for Rachel's sheet music," he says, feeling stupid, and he can practically picture her rolling her eyes even though he knows that she and Rachel have reached some sort of peace agreement or middle ground or something. "I don't get it though."
"Um. If you and the hobbit are doing the dirty, you should get it," she says.
He ignores her little dig at Rachel because there isn't really any venom behind it, not like there used to be. "No, I mean...I thought that, after everything with Brittany, you were into girls." He says the last part quietly, because he's not really sure he's supposed to be saying it at all.
"Being into girls doesn't mean I can't be into guys, too," she points out. She lets the words hang there for a moment. "Look, it's been a while, and Puck and I have always been good together."
Finn leans back in his desk chair and rubs his hand over his face. He understands the words that she's saying, but he still feels confused. He's been used to the idea of Santana as a lesbian, but now she's telling him...what? "So, are you bi?"
She laughs quietly. "I guess. I'm not really a fan of labeling shit."
"But like...you'd have sex with a guy or a girl, and you could fall in love with...anyone."
He hears her take a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I guess so. If it was the right person."
He thinks that could be really confusing, but then again, "That's kind of awesome, really. Like, no one's off limits."
"Finn." She's laughing for real then, and gasping a little, and he thinks she might sound a little teary, but then she's calling him an idiot and he isn't sure of anything about this conversation any more, really.
*
Santana and Puck are still sleeping together when school starts again, and the way that everything has shaken down since school started, it almost feels like they've all gone back to junior year again.
"Maybe I should invite Santana over for dinner with my fathers sometime," Rachel says one night. It's completely out of the blue. They're sitting in his room, and she's doing reading for her AP history class while he plays some Mario Galaxy. (Rachel hates it when he plays violent games when she's over, so he generally sticks to Mario when she's around. There are worse things, honestly, so he doesn't say anything about it.)
"Why?"
She looks at him like she's just said the most logical thing in the world and he's the crazy one for questioning her. "Being bisexual in a town like Lima has to be challenging. Maybe my dads can offer her some advice."
"You didn't want to invite her over when you thought she was a lesbian," he points out, setting down his game controller. This feels like the sort of conversation where he should actually be looking at her face instead of the TV.
Rachel looks down at her lap instead of meeting his eyes. "She and I weren't friends before," she says softly. "Our friendship now may be tentative, but since you two have become a bit closer, I feel like I could actually have that sort of conversation with her without her just becoming defensive or shutting down."
"I don't know, Rach."
"You don't think she'd be receptive?" she asks, looking at him seriously.
"I just don't think she wants to talk about it at all, and having dinner with you and your dads would be all about talking about it." It sounds kind of stupid, but he still thinks he's right.
Rachel nods. "What do you suggest I do?"
"Nothing," he answers honestly. "I really think she just wants to be left alone to figure stuff out. Santana isn't afraid to talk about something if she wants to."
Rachel leans forward so she's on her hands and knees and crawls to where he's sitting at the foot of his bed, draping her arms over his shoulders and pressing a kiss to the side of his neck. "You're right," she murmurs against his skin. "And you're a good friend."
"Thanks, babe."
Her lips move up until they're brushing against his earlobe the way he loves. "You're an even better boyfriend," she whispers against his ear. He has to bite back a groan at the way her warm breath feels. "Finn."
Screw it. He turns, slipping his arm around her waist so he can move her back up against the pillows and stretch out on top of her. "I love you."
He slips his hand up under the hem of her skirt when she's trying to answer, and the words kind of get lost in this sexy little whimper she lets out.
He doesn't mind.
*
Finn totally expects shit to hit the fan when Brittany and Artie break up again.
He sees the whole thing. Everyone does, because they have an actual fight in the middle of a glee club rehearsal.
"I don't understand why you're so mad," Brittany says, throwing her hands up. Finn doesn't either, and he's seen this whole fight. Even though they started fighting over some dance move that Brittany wants to do that Artie doesn't like for whatever reason, they aren't fighting about dancing or glee club any more. Finn doesn't know what though.
"You never understand," Artie says seriously, "and this isn't me calling you stupid. You just don't get it."
Quinn, standing just in front of Finn with Sam, sucks in an audible breath.
"So explain it to me," Brittany says like it's the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it should be.
Artie shakes his head. "I can't. We're just...we're done, Brittany." Everyone watches him wheel out of the room before looking at Brittany, standing there with her eyes shining with tears.
Except Finn. He's looking at Santana. She's standing on the other side of the room, watching everything unfold with an expression on her face that Finn can't read at all.
"Let's take five, guys," Mr. Schue says, breaking the silence but none of the tension.
They all just kind of stand there for a moment, then Brittany is half-running out of the room while everyone else sort of mills around.
Finn doesn't even know what to do when Santana just moves to the back of the room and sits down with her phone. Like, shouldn't she be chasing Brittany? Isn't this the opening that she's been waiting for?
(That's how Finn felt when he realized that Jesse and Rachel were a done deal sophomore year. Like maybe he would finally have a chance with her.)
Rachel catches his eye and glances pointedly at Santana, widening her eyes when he shakes his head. He's not going to go talk to her right now, no matter how much Rachel apparently thinks he should.
Puck walks up then and asks a question about their basketball practice schedule, and Finn's so grateful to the guy for saving him that he nearly hugs him. It's one thing to talk to Santana and be friends with her, but it's another thing to walk up and ask her what's up two minutes after the girl she is (was?) in love with breaks up with her boyfriend right in front of her. He's not afraid of her any more, but he's also not stupid.
"Why didn't you talk to Santana?" Rachel demands the second they're alone after rehearsal, standing at her locker in the otherwise deserted hallway.
He shakes his head. "That isn't how she works. If she wants to talk about it, she'll bring it up, Rach."
Rachel closes her locker door and tilts her head at him. "What?" he asks when she doesn't say anything.
"You're right," she says softly. "It's nice that you two are friends now, but it's a little strange for me." She says it like she wishes it wasn't true - the fact that it's strange, he thinks - and it makes something constrict in Finn's chest. "She's lucky to have you."
He wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her against his chest, leaning down to kiss the top of her head. "I think I'm lucky to have you."
She tips her had back to kiss him then, her lips brushing sweetly against his the way she always does when they're out in public and she doesn't want to be inappropriate.
Even though he knows what he said is true, Finn doesn't expect Santana to show up at the garage four days later on Saturday afternoon.
He's gotten used to seeing Rachel here, to the point that he doesn't even really think that she looks out of place in her pretty dresses and nice shoes in the greasy shop. Santana being here, however, is weird. First of all, she's wearing jeans and a red sweater instead of her Cheerio uniform; he should be used to seeing her in street clothes by now - she isn't quite as attached to the Cheerio thing as she used to be - but it's always a little shock. The heels of her flat riding boots click on the concrete floor as she walks towards him, and she's got a paper cup from The Lima Bean in her hand.
"Hey," she says, standing over him where he's finishing changing the tire on a Toyota.
He glances up at her and reaches for a lug nut. "What are you doing here?"
He catches her shrug out of the corner of his eye. "When do you get off?"
"We've been kind of slow. Burt said I can cut out whenever. Probably after I finish this tire." He reaches for a tire iron to get the lug nuts started. "Why?"
"Do you have plans with Rachel?" she asks instead of answering.
"No." He sets down the tire iron and stands so he can really look at her. "What's up, Santana?"
She sighs, rolling her eyes. "My parents are gone for the weekend, and I'm already sick of being in my house alone. Brittany used to come over when they were gone, but."
"Right," Finn says, saving her from having to say that things are weird with Britt. He knows. "You wanna hang out?"
"God help me, I do."
He snorts out a laugh and nods before kneeling next to the car again. "Don't hurt yourself, Santana."
"Shut up," she orders, kicking at his toe. He knows Santana well enough by now to know that the way she's lingering, sipping her drink and watching him tighten lug nuts, means that there's something else she wants to say. He also knows that it's better to let her decide to say whatever it is instead of pushing it. "Hanging out with me isn't going to be like, a thing with Rachel, is it?" she finally asks.
"No." It's a weird question, he thinks, because it's not like they haven't hung out together before, for glee club and at parties and stuff, and Rachel has really encouraged his friendship with Santana, even after they all found out that Santana's bi. (It shouldn't make a difference either way, and he should have known that it wouldn't with Rachel, but there was always a chance that she was only okay with him being friends with Santana because she thought the girl wasn't into dudes any more.)
Santana smiles when he look up at her. "Good. Come over when you're done here."
She walks away before he can answer, leaving him shaking his head as he gets up to lower the jack so he can finish off the lug nuts.
The first thing he sees when she opens her front door is her socks, bright blue with white and yellow stripes, and he can't help grinning at them. "Shut up," she warns him.
"But they have stripes." He doesn't know why, exactly, they're funny, but they kind of are.
"They're socks."
He doesn't say anything else about the socks when she steps aside to let him in the house, but he doesn't stop grinning about them either.
They end up in what Santana calls the family room, sprawled out on a huge brown leather sofa and watching a Pop Up Video marathon on a huge flat-screen television. He's kind of engrossed in the pop-ups on this 'NSync video (embarrassing, yeah, but Justin Timberlake is kind of awesome) when Santana finally tells him what had her coming by the garage and asking him to come hang out.
"Brittany stopped by here this morning."
He looks over at her, sitting in the corner of the sofa. She has her legs pulled up next to her, and there's a white fleece blanket patterned with red and green snowflakes draped over them. Her eyes are focused on the TV screen, but he doesn't know that she's actually seeing anything that's happening on it.
"My parents go away for the weekend every few months. It isn't a big deal, and I'm not afraid to be here by myself or anything, but Britt has been coming and staying with me since middle school. This is the first time she hasn't."
"Why did she come over?"
She finally looks at him. "To hang out, I guess. But it would have turned into more than hanging out. It always does with Britt," she says quietly. "I told her that I was busy instead of telling her the truth."
Finn asks the question before he can stop himself. "What's the truth?"
It's too much, he knows. This is the sort of thing that gets you into trouble with Santana: Trying to get her to do something that she isn't ready for, to open up more than she's willing to without being prompted, is a bad idea. His mom (and Rachel) would say that it makes her lash out, but Finn knows that it's her getting defensive but trying not to look like she's being defensive. She goes on the attack as a way to stop people from paying attention to the fact that she just almost gave something up.
He's bracing himself for the attack, for whatever insult she's going to fling at him. It catches him completely off guard when she says, "The truth is that I know we can't be together."
"Why not?"
"Because she doesn't love me like I love her," Santana whispers. "I've been in love with her for I don't even know how long, and she loves me as her best friend. It isn't the same."
Finn actually does know what it's like not to be able to look at your best friend the same way because of something he did, and even though what Santana and Brittany are going through isn't the same at all, he kind of gets it. No matter how things wind up with them, these girls are never going to be able to be best friends like they were before, just like he and Puck will never be exactly the way they were before the stuff with Quinn. And he thinks that maybe he gets what it's like to love someone and not have them feel the same way.
"I'm sorry," he says after a moment, because he doesn't know what else to say. He knows better than to compare her and Brittany to him and Puck. She blinks at him, and he wishes that he was better at reading her expressions. "I wish I could fix it for you."
She looks like she wants to laugh, but instead she just slides over on the couch a little, switching her legs to her opposite side so she's right next to him. He puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her into his side because it feels right. "Me too."
She stays there next to him through the rest of the boy band videos, curled up against his side and letting him run his fingers through the ends of her hair.
*
"Do you ever think that you could fall in love with a girl?"
The what the fuck look on Rachel's face definitely drives home how stupidly he asked the question, but it isn't like he really thought about the wording before he asked. The question itself though, he's been thinking about for a while. Not Rachel, specifically, but people in general. He's kind of surrounded by people who aren't doing what society tells you you're "supposed" to do in terms of love: his girlfriend has two dads, his stepbrother is gay, and now he knows that one of his best friends (and when did that happen?) is bi. Finn can't imagine Kurt falling for a girl any more than he can imagine himself falling for a guy, so Santana sort of blows his mind a little bit.
Rachel's face is far more understanding when he explains all of that to her.
"I don't know," she says after a moment. She pulls her legs up and crosses them so she can turn to face him where they're sitting on the floor next to her bed. "I can appreciate an attractive woman, and I can't say that I've never been attracted to one, but I don't know that I could picture myself in a relationship with a girl."
He forces himself to focus on what she's getting at instead of fixating on the fact that his super sexy girlfriend just admitted that she's been attracted to other girls. "What do you mean?"
She's quiet for a moment. "I don't think love has anything to do with gender," she finally says, "but I can't picture myself in a relationship that didn't involve being with a man." She smiles, taking his hand and tracing the tips of her fingers over his palm.
He doesn't know exactly what he wanted to hear when he asked, but Finn likes what Rachel says.
A little later, when they've moved up onto her bed and his fingers are skimming up her ribs beneath her shirt, he finds himself asking, with his lips against her ear. "Have you ever fantasized about being with a girl?"
Her fingernails dig into his biceps almost painfully when she gasps his name, and he pulls back to look at her face, afraid that he's made her mad.
She pushes at his chest, so he rolls off of her and onto his back, sure that this is the end of his fun night. He doesn't even know what to say when she moves on top of him, straddling his hips and leaning over him to nip at his lips. "Have you ever fantasized about me with a girl?" she counters in a low voice that goes straight to his dick.
"God, Rachel."
He totally forgets that her dads are sitting downstairs watching Mad Men in the den when Rachel wraps her lips around his cock, but she reminds him by reaching up his body and pressing her fingers against his lips, which is hot enough in and of itself that he has to bite back a groan.
*
The first time Finn ever had a drink, he was thirteen. Puck had the alcohol, of course, a bottle of some Jewish wine that they finished off together over Christmas break when they were just supposed to be hanging out playing video games while Mrs. Puckerman was at work. Finn puked and Puck still brings it up every once in a while, but really, the worst part was how terrible he felt the next day, nauseous and headachey and just like shit all around.
He still drinks, of course, but he still hates hangovers, so he doesn't like to let himself get drunk. He'd much rather drink enough to have a good time and then stop before things get out of hand.
Sometimes though, things do get out of hand.
Mrs. Puckerman takes Abby with her when she goes to visit her sister for a weekend, leaving Puck home alone with orders not to have anyone in the house while she's gone. This means, of course, that he throws a party, though he does keep it to just the glee club and a handful of other people who don't suck instead of inviting the basketball team and all the Cheerios the way he would have if he'd gotten this opportunity two years ago.
Rachel says she thinks she's getting a cold, so she stays home in an effort to avoid getting sick, which kind of sucks. He loves Rachel all the time, of course, but he really likes it when he gets her somewhere that she can really relax and let things go. The fact that she isn't around, being cute and distracting him, is probably why he lets himself get roped into a game of Fuck the Dealer during which, in fact, he gets spectacularly fucked, and not at all in the fun way. He's playing with Tina and Mike, who have a bottle of American Honey, which is much too tasty a liquor to play drinking games with, he decides, when he stands up to leave the table and nearly falls over.
He switches to water, ignoring Puck's jabs at his manhood, and chews his way through a few slices of cinnamon raisin bread that he finds in the kitchen. That gets him from 'almost sick' to just wasted, which is a huge improvement, even though he's still going to feel like shit tomorrow.
He's sitting in the living room debating whether or not he should call Rachel for a ride home since Kurt and Blaine left a couple of hours ago when Santana flops down onto the couch beside him.
"You're boring," she announces before he even gets a chance to greet her. "And I'm drunk."
"Me too."
"You should drink more," she tells him seriously. "You can drink for both of us, and then I can stop drinking. That way you'll throw up instead of me."
"You're a bitch," he says, looking at her like she's crazy. She doesn't respond, just stares at him blandly and crosses her legs. She's wearing a tight pink skirt with boots that go up past her knees. He likes it, and he wonders what it would look like if Rachel and Santana were ever to trade wardrobes.
It'd probably be pretty hot.
"I really don't want to puke tonight," he tells her.
"Me neither." She stands up and holds her hand out, looking at him expectantly. "Let's go for a walk."
"It's like, forty degrees," he says dumbly. He doesn't really want to be outside, and there's no way she's wearing enough clothes to be walking around out there.
She rolls her eyes. "Don't be a pussy, Hudson. First of all, we'll wear coats because that's what they're for, and for another, we're drunk. You don't feel cold when you're drunk."
Sound enough logic for him. "Where are we walking?"
"We'll go to my house." He looks at her dubiously; her house isn't really a comfortable walking distance away, though it's not impossibly far. She rolls her eyes again and makes a noise like he's annoying her. "Puck and I both did it all the time freshman year. It takes like, forty-five minutes."
This is a really terrible idea. "Fine."
It turns out that the route Santana takes from Puck's house to hers cuts through about seven hundred back yards. Finn is just sober enough to realize that while a small girl like her in your back yard isn't scary, a big dude like him is, so he spends a good portion of the time walking slumped over and praying that no one is looking out their windows at one o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Other than worrying about someone calling the cops on him, the walk is actually kind of fun. He doesn't know what Santana was drinking at the party, but it obviously wasn't tequila, because she's being hilarious and silly instead of crying all over him the way he's seen her do way too many times before.
Finn still remembers Santana in middle school, back before Quinn moved to Lima and swallowed up all of his attention. He'd actually had a little crush on her, even though he was too afraid to do anything about it back then. She was softer in middle school, less mean, and, he thinks, probably more open. They had a lot of the same friends - Puck, notably - but he'd never really been brave enough to take the chance and get to know her better.
Now that he has gotten to know her better, he wishes that he hadn't wasted all that time being intimidated by her. Once you get past her armor, you can see how great she really is. She's smart and talented, and when she's on your side, she'll go to the mat for you, no questions asked. After years of hoping that she wasn't going to say something horrible and mean to him on a regular basis, it's crazy that he considers her one of his best friends.
He likes being friends with Santana.
It isn't until they're walking up the front walk at her house that he realizes what a bad idea this is, coming home with her. She doesn't seem to notice the way he's hesitating, reaching into her coat pocket for her keys while the heels of her boots click on the porch steps.
"What about your parents?" he asks, whispering when she looks over her shoulder at him.
"They won't notice," she answers dismissively. "Their bedroom is at the back of the house, mine is at the front."
"Are you supposed to let guys in your room at night?"
Instead of answering his question, Santana presses her finger to her lips and pushes the door open.
(Finn thinks that means that he's not actually supposed to be here, but his other option is to call Rachel or Burt or his mom to come pick him up, which...no.)
For all the times that Finn has been to Santana's house, for parties or when they were working together for glee or whatever, he hasn't ever been in her bedroom before tonight. It's a kind of dark and moody, which suits her, and not exactly tidy either, which doesn't surprise him. It's not dirty at all, but there are clothes and shoes sort of everywhere and there's makeup and stuff scattered all over the top of the vanity. (He doesn't mean to compare her to Rachel, but he knows that Rachel's vanity table is meticulously organized to the point that Finn doesn't even really like to sit next to the thing for fear of inadvertently knocking something out of place.)
She tosses her coat over a chair that's sitting in the corner that he thinks is her dropping spot for everything when she comes through the door; he sees her Cheerios jacket and bag there along with the backpack she carries at school.
"Is somebody going to come after me with a shotgun or something if they find me here?" Finn asks once her door is closed.
She shakes her head at him, perching on the edge of her bed to unzip her boots. "They don't care," she insists, "and even if they did, they like you."
He isn't entirely convinced, but Santana tells him to take off his coat before she disappears into her ensuite with what he assumes are pajamas in her hand, and he does it.
Walking in the cold has definitely sobered him up, but Finn still feels drunk enough that he wouldn't be willing to drive or have a conversation with Burt or his mom for fear that they would figure it out and be angry. He doesn't have much of a choice but to hang out with Santana for a while unless he wants to walk back to Puck's, which he definitely does not.
He feels weird being in her room alone, so he's standing awkwardly next to her desk looking at the books she has lined up on the shelf (he's not sure he's ever seen Santana read something that wasn't for school, but apparently she does) when she comes out of the bathroom in a little tank top and a pair of silky looking dark blue pajama pants.
"We can see what's on the movie channels," she offers, standing next to the unmade bed and fussing with the linens until she's got stuff arranged so she can sit on the bed instead of just crawling into it.
That's how he finds himself stretched out on Santana Lopez's bed at nearly two on a Sunday morning, half-drunk and watching some movie, the title of which he doesn't even know.
"I can't believe you walked all the way here from Puck's with me." It comes out of nowhere, but she's looking up at him and almost laughing at him.
He makes a face. "Don't be mean."
"I'm not," she insists, pushing herself up so she's leaned back against the headboard next to him. Her knee touches his thigh when she bends her leg. "It was sweet of you to go with me. Or maybe you were just drunk."
"I'm still kind of drunk," he admits, making her grin, "but I came with you because I wanted to." He shrugs and slides down a little, putting his face level with hers. "I like hanging out with you, San."
"I don't know when the hell it happened, but I like hanging out with you, too, Finn." She says it quietly, like she's confessing something ilicit.
He doesn't know who leans in first, but Santana's lips are soft when they touch his, and gentler than they ever were when they kissed before. It's more than a brush of their lips together, but it's still technically chaste, even though it doesn't feel that way. It feels like...more.
"Finn." She whispers his name, her breath fanning over his lips.
Her eyes are wide, like she doesn't know what just happened any more than he does.
(He wonders, vaguely, if her heart is beating as fast as his is too.)
Part Two