And So It Seemed To Confess 1/5
Title: And So It Seemed To Confess
Chapter: 1/5
Pairing: Puck/Rachel
Word Count: 5,650
Summary: AU He isn't worried about Rachel talking about him being in therapy at school. Nope, Puck's worried that Rachel might tell her dad what Puck used to do and Dr. Berry will get him sent back to juvie.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
"I'm not going to a fucking shrink."
Puck's mom rolls her eyes and shoots him a pointed look from the driver's seat of her new car. The new car that she's driving because he wrecked the last one. And no, he doesn't really have a leg to stand on considering that the car that they're in is sitting in the driveway of his new therapist's office. Which is also, apparently, his house. It's in a nicer part of town, with a two-car garage and perfectly trimmed shrubs, and there are pots of autumn flowers sitting on either side of the steps that lead up to the porch. There's a little cobblestone path that leads off the driveway and around the side of the house, the path he's supposed to follow to get to where his new shrink is waiting for him.
"What kind of doctor doesn't have a real office?" Puck asks, trying for a different tactic.
"Stop it, Noah," his mother says, her tone totally neutral. The fact that she isn't pissed off right now really doesn't work in his favor. It's easier to get his way with shit if he can get her worked up to the point that she gives in just because she wants him to shut up. He used it all the time growing up. Of course, that hasn't worked in almost a year, since she found out that he'd gotten a girl pregnant. "Seeing a counselor is part of your probation, and my son isn't going to talk to some overworked family services drone."
Puck lets his head fall back against the seat, because this is the exact same thing he's been hearing since the day his mother picked him up from juvie. (One of the many, many things he's been hearing.)
Ten minutes later, he's sitting in big, brown leather armchair and avoiding eye contact with his therapist. He has dark, curly hair and is wearing a burnt orange sweater over a light blue collared shirt, which...whatever. He introduced himself as Dr. Berry, shaking Puck's hand and inviting him to sit.
"Noah, we don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about," Dr. Berry says, leaning forward to set the three-ring binder he had in his lap on the coffee table in front of them beside a carved wooden bowl full of green apples. Puck looks up and sees him shrug one shoulder. "We don't have to talk at all. You can come here once a week for the foreseeable future, and we can spend the whole hour sitting in silence if you want."
Puck rolls his eyes. "My mom would freak out."
"She won't find out," Dr. Berry counters with a little smile. "Everything that does or does not happen in this room is between us. Doctor-patient confidentiality. As far as the terms of your probation go, I'll simply verify that you attended therapy."
Okay, that's actually kind of awesome, knowing that none of this goes outside of this room. It's totally not badass to be talking to a shrink, and he doesn't want anyone to know. "Okay," Puck says after a second, nodding his head.
Puck sees his name printed on the label on the spine of the binder Dr. Berry picks up again. He wonders what's in there, what the guy already knows about Puck's life without even knowing him. "Do you mind if I ask a couple of questions?" Dr. Berry asks after a minute.
Here we go, Puck thinks, but he nods his head anyhow.
"The thing that landed you in trouble was hooking an ATM to your mother's car in an effort to steal it, right?" Puck nods and watches Dr. Berry write something. "And in June, you surrendered your parental rights to the child that you fathered." Puck nods again, slowly, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dr. Berry looks up, his pen still poised to write. "You play football at McKinley, right? Who are you playing on Friday?"
"West Lima," Puck answers without thinking.
Dr. Berry makes a face. "You think this new coach can finally get us a win?"
"You know football?"
"I played for McKinley in high school. Hating West Lima is deeply ingrained."
Puck looks at the guy appraisingly, though he tries not to make it obvious. Thirty years ago or whatever, he was probably pretty perfect for football. Offense, Puck would guess if you made him.
They spend the rest of the hour talking about football, first about McKinley's team and Coach Beiste and then about whether the Bengals are going to amount to anything this year, and Puck almost forgets that he's talking to a therapist. The only time Dr. Berry says something that seems even a little shrink-like is when he makes a comment about being surprised that Puck plays offense instead of defense given that he seems to have "aggressive tendencies."
He expects his mom to ask all sorts of questions when she picks him up, but Abby's in the back seat babbling away about her gymnastics class, and the only thing his mom asks is whether he'd rather have tacos or sloppy joes for dinner. That's fine with him; he doesn't want to talk about being in therapy at all.
*
School is weird now that he can't do all the shit he used to do. Figgins made it pretty clear when he came back that he wasn't going to fuck around with any bullshit, and even though the dude lets a lot of stuff slide, Puck's pretty sure he's actually serious this time. One misstep and Puck's fucked. That means no more dumpster tosses, no more slushie facials, no more cutting classes to hang out in the back of the auditorium or under the bleachers. It's boring. Like, he comes to school, and he goes to class, and then he goes to football practice, and that's it.
His mom's got him on lockdown - she even took the keys to his truck - so he can't even go for a cruise to like, blow off some steam. She drops him off in the morning and picks him up after practice, then takes him home and expects him to do his homework and help with chores and stuff, which is whatever, but he's so fucking bored.
He's been playing a lot of video games to try to make up for it, but even shooting virtual Nazis in the head is starting to get old.
He's been seeing Dr. Berry for a month now, and they still haven't talked about any of the stuff that Puck doesn't want to talk about, but that he's pretty sure a shrink would be interested in hearing, like his dad and Quinn and Finn and that little girl out there who has his nose.
(He thinks about it every time he walks past the baby photo of him that's hanging on the wall right outside his mom's bedroom. Instead of seeing himself in a seventeen-year-old picture, he sees that little girl all wrapped up in a pink blanket in the nurses' arms at the hospital the day they signed the papers. Yet another reason not to go to the end of the hall.)
Talking about all of that shit doesn't make sense to him, not really. If you're trying to move past the bad stuff in your life, isn't it better to just forget about it than to like, drag it all out again and talk about it and look at it and pick it apart looking for some hidden meaning that he's already pretty sure isn't there?
Whatever. He'll be on probation until he's eighteen, which is next summer, and then he won't have to do the therapy thing any more. He can bullshit his way through an hour a week for the seven months or so.
"When did you start playing football?" Dr. Berry asks casually during one appointment. Puck was telling him about last Friday's game and how it puts them that much closer to the district championship. Football is one of the things he feels comfortable talking about because it has fuck all to do with his feelings.
"Third grade was the first year that they did peewee football. All the teams were colors."
Dr. Berry grins like he knows something Puck doesn't. "What team were you on?"
"Red."
"Why did you start playing?"
Puck thinks back to third grade, and how Carole was the one who dropped him off with Finn for their first practice because his mom had to work. "Finn wanted to play, so I went along with it. I guess it stuck." Really, back then, Puck wanted to play baseball and did little league every summer. He hadn't ever really considered football as something he might want to do. After he started though, he had enough fun with Finn and everyone else that he didn't want to quit.
"Who's Finn?"
"My--" Puck cuts himself off, because fuck. He doesn't want to answer the question, but he thinks that not answering it is going to make Dr. Berry think it's like, a thing. "He was my best friend," he finally answers, saying it like it doesn't matter. He could lie, but he doesn't really see the point in that, even if he doesn't want to talk about this.
"He isn't any more?" Dr. Berry prompts.
Fuck. "No."
One-word answers. That's definitely the way to go.
"Why not?"
It's a simple question. Everyone else in town knows why Puck and Finn aren't friends any more. Why shouldn't his therapist? Fuck, for all he knows, Dr. Berry does know and just wants Puck to tell him himself for whatever crazy shrink reason.
"Because I got his girlfriend pregnant," Puck answers after a moment, getting right to the point. There's more to it, sure, but that really gets to the heart of it.
Dr. Berry doesn't say anything, just nods his head and make a note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. Puck doesn't say anything either. He doesn't want to talk about this.
It seems like they've been sitting in silence for a long time when Dr. Berry finally speaks. "Do you miss your friendship with Finn?"
Puck just shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about this.
But the answer is yes. He and Finn got each other. The guy was the brother Puck never had, even though that sounds like bullshit; he was closer to Finn than he was to like, the cousins on his dad's side or whatever, which makes him more important than family. He'd always kind of thought that he and Finn were the guys who would be friends forever, like the old dudes who sit in coffee shops shooting the shit for hours on end, talking about the good ol' days.
"How long were you and Finn friends?" Dr. Berry asks after a while.
Since second grade, when they were both in Mrs. Zimmer's class and she made the mistake of sitting them next to each other on the first day of school. "I don't want to talk about this," Puck says instead. Talking about Finn and the end of their friendship is a direct road to talking about Quinn and the baby and...no.
Dr. Berry nods. "How did you do on the history test you took last week?" he asks neutrally. It feels like an out to Puck, and he jumps on the opportunity gratefully.
Just when he'd started to get comfortable with this therapy bullshit, it starts getting all weird and feeling way too personal again. He really doesn't understand the people who do this shit voluntarily, because it's really weird, feeling like someone can see what's going on inside your head.
The wind hits Puck square in the face when he walks out of the little sun porch that's between outside and Dr. Berry's office, prompting him to walk around the side of the house towards the driveway with his head down. That's how he doesn't see the girl walking at him, barreling around the corner. He walks straight into her and nearly knocks her on her ass.
"Shit." He grabs her forearms and manages to keep her upright, even though they both stumble off the side of the path onto the mulch under the shrubs that line this side of the house. "Sorry."
"It's fine," the girl says, blinking up at him with huge brown eyes. She pulls away from him and steps back onto the path, brushing her hair out of her face. "I'm fine."
She's walking past him before he can even think about figuring out why she looks so familiar, all that dark, shiny hair and those eyes that he knows he's seen up close before, the skirt of her plaid dress hitting the backs of her thighs as she walks.
It bugs him all through dinner and when he's sitting in his room trying to make himself read this crap about a pond and the simple life for English, which he just gives up on after a while. It's that thing where he knows that he knows who she is, and he just can't place it, and it's really annoying. He takes a pass through his friends on Facebook, to see if maybe it's someone that he knows in passing from class or whatever, but she definitely isn't there, and he doesn't know where else to look.
He's lying in bed, right on the edge of sleep, when he realizes why she looks so familiar and ruins any chance he had of falling asleep any time soon.
She's that Rachel chick he used to throw slushies at, the girl who tried to make the show choir thing happen at the beginning of sophomore year, mooning around Finn until he found out that Quinn was pregnant. (Puck heard later that the choir thing fell apart when the teacher who was sponsoring it left to be an accountant.) Puck backed off on the slushie thing for most of last year with all the stuff with Quinn going on, and this year it was the football team versus the hockey players in a slushie war before he got his ass sent to juvie, so he didn't bother seeking out any of the freaks. It's probably been a year since he did that to her, but like...seeing her at Dr. Berry's office today is weird.
He figures she must be another of Dr. Berry's patients, one of those people who sees a therapist because she wants to or thinks she needs to or whatever. Is getting slushies thrown in your face something that you talk about with a shrink? Did Dr. Berry already know who Puck was before he started seeing him because this girl has talked about him?
That's sort of a mindfuck.
He forces himself to close his eyes instead of thinking about it any more. It's not going to do any good.
*
"Can I ask you a question?"
Dr. Berry's mouth quirks. "Of course, Noah."
"Do you have another appointment after mine? Like, do you see someone else?"
"You're my last appointment on Wednesdays, actually. Why do you ask?"
"I ran into a girl outside last week, when I was leaving," he answers. "I thought maybe she was one of those people who do the therapy thing because they want to."
Dr. Berry grins. Puck's general distaste for therapy is something that he was actually willing to talk about back when he first started coming here, so the guy knows all about it. "It was probably my daughter. I don't think anyone came back here last Wednesday."
"Oh." He's still confused. Dr. Berry is black, and Rachel doesn't look like she is at all. But Dr. Berry doesn't even remember anyone coming back to his office after Puck's appointment, and someone obviously did, so maybe he's just confused.
"You're in the same class at McKinley, actually," Dr. Berry says, oblivious to Puck's skepticism. "Rachel Berry?"
Rachel Berry.
Fuck.
"I don't think I know her," Puck says. It isn't a lie, exactly, because he doesn't know her. Shit, he didn't even know her last name. She was just this girl that he threw frozen drinks on. And besides, it can't be the same girl, right? Because this guy is black, and that girl most definitely isn't.
He watches Dr. Berry stand up, setting his binder on the coffee table and walking to his desk to pick something up. He comes back and holds out a framed picture to Puck, who kind of has to take the thing. It's a school photo of a girl - the same girl from last week, the same girl he used to throw slushies on - wearing a yellow sweater and a bright smile. "That's her," he confirms when he sees the question on Dr. Berry's face.
He leans forward to lay the frame on the coffee table, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Maybe his black doctor adopted a white baby. Hell, maybe Puck's baby was adopted by a family who looks different from her, black or Asian or whatever.
He finds himself wishing, not for the first time, that there was a clock in this room so he knew how much longer he had to sit here. Instead of a clock though, Dr. Berry sets this little timer every week that goes off when their hour is up.
"You don't have to worry, Noah," Dr. Berry says softly, jerking Puck out of his thoughts. "Rachel understands that she isn't to talk about any of my patients at school, even if she does know them. And I don't discuss patients with my family," he adds.
Puck just nods instead of correcting him. He isn't worried about Rachel talking about this at school; with his reputation, he can get away with whatever the fuck he wants to do, no matter what anyone says. Nope, Puck's worried that Rachel might mention what Puck used to do and Dr. Berry will say something to his P.O. that'll get him sent back to juvie.
He brings up an episode of Criminal Minds he saw to keep from talking about himself - it's a tactic that he knows Dr. Berry sees through, but it keeps the dude off his back, so whatever - though in the back of his mind he's wondering if there's anything he can do to keep the girl from saying anything.
*
Sweet-talking Figgins' secretary out of Rachel Berry's class schedule and locker number is so easy it's almost insulting. It's been a while since he's run game on a cougar, but all it takes is a flash of a smile and a compliment on her earrings and she's handing him a piece of paper from her printer. She's kind of flustered, so she blacks out the girl's social security number and locker combination, but she doesn't bother with Rachel's home address - though that confirms that she's exactly who he thinks she is - or phone number.
"Are you that hard up Puck?" Santana asks meanly when he steps out of the office folding up the paper. "Going after that."
He rolls his eyes and shoves Rachel's schedule into his back pocket. "Suck it, Santana."
"Yeah, yeah, and choke and die, whatever." She falls into step beside him as he walks towards the cafeteria. "Are you coming over tonight?"
He glances over at her, taking in the way that her Cheerio skirt hits the fronts of her thighs as she walks and wishes that he could say yes. "I'm still grounded."
She rolls her eyes. "You should've thought about how it was going to affect me before you tried to steal a fucking ATM," she snaps, and yeah, they haven't fucked since before that happened. It's not like he can do anything about it though. "So fucking lame, Puck."
He glares at her back when she quickens her steps to walk away from him. Santana's always had a mean streak, but it's been worse lately, and he doesn't know why. It doesn't matter. She isn't going to talk about it unless she wants to. He misses hanging out with her more than he misses having sex with her anyhow, which is kind of weird. When she doesn't have her Satan hat on, Santana's actually kind of awesome, which is why they've kept up this thing they have going on for so long. Otherwise, Puck's a one-and-done kind of guy.
Anyways.
Now that he has all of this information about Rachel though, he needs to decide how best to use it. At first, he thought he wanted to just play it straight: Apologize for slushying her and ask her to please not tell her dad and get his ass tossed back to juvie. Except he doesn't know anything about this girl. Maybe she's already forgotten about all of the stuff that happened freshman and sophomore year, and bringing it up to her will just remind her of what an ass he was. Or maybe she didn't recognize him at her house, so he doesn't need to be worrying about it at all.
He can't just let it go though. Juvie fucking sucked. He makes up stories about how badass he was when he was there when people ask, but the guys there were hardcore, and the whole experience was not a positive one. He really doesn't want to go back to that fucking place again. If that means that he has to pick up trash at the park on Saturday afternoons and see a shrink every week, fine. That's why he cut that deal in the first place.
And if it means that he has to figure out what's up with this Rachel chick, he will.
The way he sees it, getting this shit taken care of sooner rather than later is the way to go, so he starts hanging around the hallway where her locker is that afternoon. He takes the chance to watch her, trying really hard not to just get distracted by the way her little gray skirt falls against her thighs. (And fuck, how did he never notice her legs before?) Instead, he watches the careful way that she puts her books in her backpack, how she closes the door gently before walking away instead of slamming it closed like everyone else on the planet.
The thing is, while everyone else in the hallway is busy talking to their friends or checking their phones, Rachel isn't doing either of those things. Puck's straight-up ignoring anyone who tries to talk to him - he's busy - and his phone has buzzed in his pocket a few times since the last bell rang. Rachel though, doesn't look like someone who's ignoring her phone.
She looks like someone whose phone just doesn't ring all that often.
He leaves school without any ideas. He doesn't know what the hell he's going to do with this girl.
*
He kind of starts stalking her. It's definitely not the worst thing he's ever done. Hell, it isn't the worst thing he's ever done to her. It has its advantages though; he doesn't know how she hasn't gotten nailed for breaking the dress code with those skirts, but he's fucking grateful for the oversight. The legs on that girl.
He still has to go to his own classes, and he has football after school, but he makes a point of passing through hallways outside of her classes or the one where her locker is a couple of times a day. He doesn't know how much he's learning about her, but seeing her in those tiny little skirts makes it worth it.
She's almost always alone, though he sees her once talking to this goth Asian girl. She actually uses her locker the way she's supposed to, going between most of her classes and leaving her backpack in it during the day instead of carrying everything around all the time the way most people do. She carries her books against her chest, things like AP English and Chemistry and World History (which all the juniors take), and she's carrying a different colored three-ring binder every time he sees her.
He's making his now-normal pass through the hallway where Rachel's locker is when he sees Quinn standing with her there. He can't see Quinn's face, but he can see Rachel's, and the girl looks like she's about to cry, her eyes all wide and her cheeks pink. He pauses there at the end of the hall to see what happens. He's been trying to remember why he ever started slushying Rachel, but seeing this brings it all back; Quinn suggested it back when they first met, before she started dating Finn and shit got all fucked up. He wanted her, so he didn't have any problem being a dick to the short chick in the animal sweaters.
Quinn turns away from Rachel so quickly that the pleats on her skirt flare away from her thighs. She stalks down the hallway like a woman on a mission, and if she sees Puck standing there when she passes him, she doesn't bother to acknowledge him. That's standard from Quinn. He's pretty sure that she hasn't looked him in the eye even once since the day that they signed the paperwork that made them legally no longer parents. She's all about pretending that nothing has ever happened between them.
His feet are taking him towards where Rachel is still standing at her locker before he realizes that it's happening. "Don't let Quinn get to you," he tells her when he's close enough to talk without everyone in the hallway hearing what he says. "She's all fucked up."
Rachel blinks her big eyes at him quickly, swallowing hard. "Why are you talking to me?" she asks, speaking quickly. "Are you going to steal something from me?"
He fights the urge to roll his eyes. "Relax. I just know what a bitch she can be."
"I'm sure you do," she murmurs, her mouth twisted when she turns back to her open locker.
"You're Rachel, right?" She looks up at him again, blinking. Her eyes aren't shiny with unshed tears any more, but confused. "I'm Puck."
"I know who you are. What I don't know," she goes on, standing on her toes to retrieve her backpack from the hook in the top of her locker, "is why you're talking to me."
"Can't a guy just be nice?"
"Yes." She slips a French book into her bag and zips it shut, then closes her locker door smartly. She looks him straight in the eye when she says, "But I didn't think that you were capable of that."
She turns on her heel and is out of the hallway before he even realizes that she's going, leaving him standing there next to her locker trying to figure out what the hell just happened. He didn't have any expectations going into this conversation because he didn't plan on having it, but this is not at all how he would have expected any conversation with any girl to go. Puck is a stud, and girls don't talk to him like that.
Apparently Rachel Berry isn't like most girls.
*
The fact that this girl has apparently already made up her mind about him almost bothers Puck more than it does that she's his therapist's daughter and shit.
Puck is good with women, okay? All of them. He can convince teachers not to count him tardy when he walks into class five minutes late, he can talk cougars and cheerleaders into bed with equal ease, and all the little old ladies at temple (when he actually agrees to go with his nana) think he's like, super-charming. Even little girls like Puck, like the friends that Abby brings home with her sometimes. Women are Puck's thing, and Rachel being totally unaffected by him is really not okay.
He finds her at her locker before school a few days later. She lets out a sigh when he walks up beside her. "I don't know why you've been following me around or what you have planned, but if you could just please get it over with and let me get on with my life, I would appreciate it very much."
She has her head lowered a little so that her hair falls over her face, preventing Puck from reading her expression, but her voice sounds sad.
"I'm not planning anything," he tells her seriously, keeping his voice low. "Really," he adds when she doesn't react.
"Then why are you stalking me?" she asks, raising her head so she can meet his eyes.
His mind races, grasping for something to say besides because I don't want you to tell your dad that I used to bully you. "Because I need help in history," he finally says, rolling his eyes at his own stupidity. "I can't ask just anyone for help, because it's totally not badass, but I snagged Mr. Simms' gradebook and saw that you have one of the highest grades." That isn't true, but he figures that it could be. It doesn't look like she has many friends, so what else is she doing but being a good, upstanding student?
"Students' grades are personal," Rachel says. There's a primness to her voice, but the words come out like she didn't even really think about it before she said them.
Puck shrugs one shoulder lazily. "Can you help me?"
He watches her tongue dart out to wet her lips. "Of course I can. The real question is, why would I? After the way that you used to treat me, why would I help you with anything?"
She closes her locker gently and walks away, leaving him standing there in the same hallway again, his eyebrows furrowed as he tries to figure out what the hell to do with this girl.
*
"You seem distracted."
Puck narrows his eyes a little at Dr. Berry. He doesn't know what the dude's getting at. They're talking about the unimportant shit that they usually do: football, schoolwork, food, Thanksgiving next week.
Dr. Berry shrugs at the expression on Puck's face, setting his pen down on the legal pad in his lap. "You're not an open guy, Noah, but you're usually at least engaged in the conversation. You seem a million miles away today."
Yeah, that probably has something to do with the fact that every time he comes here, he's afraid that he's going to find out that Rachel told her dad all about him and the guy hates him. "I guess I'm just tired," he lies.
"Are you not sleeping well?"
Puck rolls his eyes. "It isn't like, a thing." Dr. Berry's mouth quirks, and something about the moment makes Puck want to tell the truth. "There's this girl," he begins. "She's already decided that she knows what kind of guy I am, but she doesn't know me at all."
Okay, so it's a version of the truth. (The version that doesn't include, the girl is your daughter.)
"Well, our reputations precede us."
He knows. Up until now, that's generally worked in his favor. Now, of course, when it might really matter, it's biting him in the ass. "So I have to convince her that I'm not who she thinks I am?"
"You probably shouldn't lie to a girl in an effort to start some sort of...relationship," Dr. Berry says carefully. He talks like this a lot, mostly because he can't ever be totally sure what Puck's talking about. That's completely deliberate. "But if her opinion of you is wrong, I think it's certainly okay to show her who you really are. Maybe you can become friends."
It's actually not bad advice. Dr. Berry laughs when Puck tells him that and mentions that he's finally earning his mom's money.
What he needs to do is show Rachel that he isn't just the dude who used to throw drinks in her face.
Chapter: 1/5
Pairing: Puck/Rachel
Word Count: 5,650
Summary: AU He isn't worried about Rachel talking about him being in therapy at school. Nope, Puck's worried that Rachel might tell her dad what Puck used to do and Dr. Berry will get him sent back to juvie.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
"I'm not going to a fucking shrink."
Puck's mom rolls her eyes and shoots him a pointed look from the driver's seat of her new car. The new car that she's driving because he wrecked the last one. And no, he doesn't really have a leg to stand on considering that the car that they're in is sitting in the driveway of his new therapist's office. Which is also, apparently, his house. It's in a nicer part of town, with a two-car garage and perfectly trimmed shrubs, and there are pots of autumn flowers sitting on either side of the steps that lead up to the porch. There's a little cobblestone path that leads off the driveway and around the side of the house, the path he's supposed to follow to get to where his new shrink is waiting for him.
"What kind of doctor doesn't have a real office?" Puck asks, trying for a different tactic.
"Stop it, Noah," his mother says, her tone totally neutral. The fact that she isn't pissed off right now really doesn't work in his favor. It's easier to get his way with shit if he can get her worked up to the point that she gives in just because she wants him to shut up. He used it all the time growing up. Of course, that hasn't worked in almost a year, since she found out that he'd gotten a girl pregnant. "Seeing a counselor is part of your probation, and my son isn't going to talk to some overworked family services drone."
Puck lets his head fall back against the seat, because this is the exact same thing he's been hearing since the day his mother picked him up from juvie. (One of the many, many things he's been hearing.)
Ten minutes later, he's sitting in big, brown leather armchair and avoiding eye contact with his therapist. He has dark, curly hair and is wearing a burnt orange sweater over a light blue collared shirt, which...whatever. He introduced himself as Dr. Berry, shaking Puck's hand and inviting him to sit.
"Noah, we don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about," Dr. Berry says, leaning forward to set the three-ring binder he had in his lap on the coffee table in front of them beside a carved wooden bowl full of green apples. Puck looks up and sees him shrug one shoulder. "We don't have to talk at all. You can come here once a week for the foreseeable future, and we can spend the whole hour sitting in silence if you want."
Puck rolls his eyes. "My mom would freak out."
"She won't find out," Dr. Berry counters with a little smile. "Everything that does or does not happen in this room is between us. Doctor-patient confidentiality. As far as the terms of your probation go, I'll simply verify that you attended therapy."
Okay, that's actually kind of awesome, knowing that none of this goes outside of this room. It's totally not badass to be talking to a shrink, and he doesn't want anyone to know. "Okay," Puck says after a second, nodding his head.
Puck sees his name printed on the label on the spine of the binder Dr. Berry picks up again. He wonders what's in there, what the guy already knows about Puck's life without even knowing him. "Do you mind if I ask a couple of questions?" Dr. Berry asks after a minute.
Here we go, Puck thinks, but he nods his head anyhow.
"The thing that landed you in trouble was hooking an ATM to your mother's car in an effort to steal it, right?" Puck nods and watches Dr. Berry write something. "And in June, you surrendered your parental rights to the child that you fathered." Puck nods again, slowly, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dr. Berry looks up, his pen still poised to write. "You play football at McKinley, right? Who are you playing on Friday?"
"West Lima," Puck answers without thinking.
Dr. Berry makes a face. "You think this new coach can finally get us a win?"
"You know football?"
"I played for McKinley in high school. Hating West Lima is deeply ingrained."
Puck looks at the guy appraisingly, though he tries not to make it obvious. Thirty years ago or whatever, he was probably pretty perfect for football. Offense, Puck would guess if you made him.
They spend the rest of the hour talking about football, first about McKinley's team and Coach Beiste and then about whether the Bengals are going to amount to anything this year, and Puck almost forgets that he's talking to a therapist. The only time Dr. Berry says something that seems even a little shrink-like is when he makes a comment about being surprised that Puck plays offense instead of defense given that he seems to have "aggressive tendencies."
He expects his mom to ask all sorts of questions when she picks him up, but Abby's in the back seat babbling away about her gymnastics class, and the only thing his mom asks is whether he'd rather have tacos or sloppy joes for dinner. That's fine with him; he doesn't want to talk about being in therapy at all.
*
School is weird now that he can't do all the shit he used to do. Figgins made it pretty clear when he came back that he wasn't going to fuck around with any bullshit, and even though the dude lets a lot of stuff slide, Puck's pretty sure he's actually serious this time. One misstep and Puck's fucked. That means no more dumpster tosses, no more slushie facials, no more cutting classes to hang out in the back of the auditorium or under the bleachers. It's boring. Like, he comes to school, and he goes to class, and then he goes to football practice, and that's it.
His mom's got him on lockdown - she even took the keys to his truck - so he can't even go for a cruise to like, blow off some steam. She drops him off in the morning and picks him up after practice, then takes him home and expects him to do his homework and help with chores and stuff, which is whatever, but he's so fucking bored.
He's been playing a lot of video games to try to make up for it, but even shooting virtual Nazis in the head is starting to get old.
He's been seeing Dr. Berry for a month now, and they still haven't talked about any of the stuff that Puck doesn't want to talk about, but that he's pretty sure a shrink would be interested in hearing, like his dad and Quinn and Finn and that little girl out there who has his nose.
(He thinks about it every time he walks past the baby photo of him that's hanging on the wall right outside his mom's bedroom. Instead of seeing himself in a seventeen-year-old picture, he sees that little girl all wrapped up in a pink blanket in the nurses' arms at the hospital the day they signed the papers. Yet another reason not to go to the end of the hall.)
Talking about all of that shit doesn't make sense to him, not really. If you're trying to move past the bad stuff in your life, isn't it better to just forget about it than to like, drag it all out again and talk about it and look at it and pick it apart looking for some hidden meaning that he's already pretty sure isn't there?
Whatever. He'll be on probation until he's eighteen, which is next summer, and then he won't have to do the therapy thing any more. He can bullshit his way through an hour a week for the seven months or so.
"When did you start playing football?" Dr. Berry asks casually during one appointment. Puck was telling him about last Friday's game and how it puts them that much closer to the district championship. Football is one of the things he feels comfortable talking about because it has fuck all to do with his feelings.
"Third grade was the first year that they did peewee football. All the teams were colors."
Dr. Berry grins like he knows something Puck doesn't. "What team were you on?"
"Red."
"Why did you start playing?"
Puck thinks back to third grade, and how Carole was the one who dropped him off with Finn for their first practice because his mom had to work. "Finn wanted to play, so I went along with it. I guess it stuck." Really, back then, Puck wanted to play baseball and did little league every summer. He hadn't ever really considered football as something he might want to do. After he started though, he had enough fun with Finn and everyone else that he didn't want to quit.
"Who's Finn?"
"My--" Puck cuts himself off, because fuck. He doesn't want to answer the question, but he thinks that not answering it is going to make Dr. Berry think it's like, a thing. "He was my best friend," he finally answers, saying it like it doesn't matter. He could lie, but he doesn't really see the point in that, even if he doesn't want to talk about this.
"He isn't any more?" Dr. Berry prompts.
Fuck. "No."
One-word answers. That's definitely the way to go.
"Why not?"
It's a simple question. Everyone else in town knows why Puck and Finn aren't friends any more. Why shouldn't his therapist? Fuck, for all he knows, Dr. Berry does know and just wants Puck to tell him himself for whatever crazy shrink reason.
"Because I got his girlfriend pregnant," Puck answers after a moment, getting right to the point. There's more to it, sure, but that really gets to the heart of it.
Dr. Berry doesn't say anything, just nods his head and make a note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. Puck doesn't say anything either. He doesn't want to talk about this.
It seems like they've been sitting in silence for a long time when Dr. Berry finally speaks. "Do you miss your friendship with Finn?"
Puck just shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about this.
But the answer is yes. He and Finn got each other. The guy was the brother Puck never had, even though that sounds like bullshit; he was closer to Finn than he was to like, the cousins on his dad's side or whatever, which makes him more important than family. He'd always kind of thought that he and Finn were the guys who would be friends forever, like the old dudes who sit in coffee shops shooting the shit for hours on end, talking about the good ol' days.
"How long were you and Finn friends?" Dr. Berry asks after a while.
Since second grade, when they were both in Mrs. Zimmer's class and she made the mistake of sitting them next to each other on the first day of school. "I don't want to talk about this," Puck says instead. Talking about Finn and the end of their friendship is a direct road to talking about Quinn and the baby and...no.
Dr. Berry nods. "How did you do on the history test you took last week?" he asks neutrally. It feels like an out to Puck, and he jumps on the opportunity gratefully.
Just when he'd started to get comfortable with this therapy bullshit, it starts getting all weird and feeling way too personal again. He really doesn't understand the people who do this shit voluntarily, because it's really weird, feeling like someone can see what's going on inside your head.
The wind hits Puck square in the face when he walks out of the little sun porch that's between outside and Dr. Berry's office, prompting him to walk around the side of the house towards the driveway with his head down. That's how he doesn't see the girl walking at him, barreling around the corner. He walks straight into her and nearly knocks her on her ass.
"Shit." He grabs her forearms and manages to keep her upright, even though they both stumble off the side of the path onto the mulch under the shrubs that line this side of the house. "Sorry."
"It's fine," the girl says, blinking up at him with huge brown eyes. She pulls away from him and steps back onto the path, brushing her hair out of her face. "I'm fine."
She's walking past him before he can even think about figuring out why she looks so familiar, all that dark, shiny hair and those eyes that he knows he's seen up close before, the skirt of her plaid dress hitting the backs of her thighs as she walks.
It bugs him all through dinner and when he's sitting in his room trying to make himself read this crap about a pond and the simple life for English, which he just gives up on after a while. It's that thing where he knows that he knows who she is, and he just can't place it, and it's really annoying. He takes a pass through his friends on Facebook, to see if maybe it's someone that he knows in passing from class or whatever, but she definitely isn't there, and he doesn't know where else to look.
He's lying in bed, right on the edge of sleep, when he realizes why she looks so familiar and ruins any chance he had of falling asleep any time soon.
She's that Rachel chick he used to throw slushies at, the girl who tried to make the show choir thing happen at the beginning of sophomore year, mooning around Finn until he found out that Quinn was pregnant. (Puck heard later that the choir thing fell apart when the teacher who was sponsoring it left to be an accountant.) Puck backed off on the slushie thing for most of last year with all the stuff with Quinn going on, and this year it was the football team versus the hockey players in a slushie war before he got his ass sent to juvie, so he didn't bother seeking out any of the freaks. It's probably been a year since he did that to her, but like...seeing her at Dr. Berry's office today is weird.
He figures she must be another of Dr. Berry's patients, one of those people who sees a therapist because she wants to or thinks she needs to or whatever. Is getting slushies thrown in your face something that you talk about with a shrink? Did Dr. Berry already know who Puck was before he started seeing him because this girl has talked about him?
That's sort of a mindfuck.
He forces himself to close his eyes instead of thinking about it any more. It's not going to do any good.
*
"Can I ask you a question?"
Dr. Berry's mouth quirks. "Of course, Noah."
"Do you have another appointment after mine? Like, do you see someone else?"
"You're my last appointment on Wednesdays, actually. Why do you ask?"
"I ran into a girl outside last week, when I was leaving," he answers. "I thought maybe she was one of those people who do the therapy thing because they want to."
Dr. Berry grins. Puck's general distaste for therapy is something that he was actually willing to talk about back when he first started coming here, so the guy knows all about it. "It was probably my daughter. I don't think anyone came back here last Wednesday."
"Oh." He's still confused. Dr. Berry is black, and Rachel doesn't look like she is at all. But Dr. Berry doesn't even remember anyone coming back to his office after Puck's appointment, and someone obviously did, so maybe he's just confused.
"You're in the same class at McKinley, actually," Dr. Berry says, oblivious to Puck's skepticism. "Rachel Berry?"
Rachel Berry.
Fuck.
"I don't think I know her," Puck says. It isn't a lie, exactly, because he doesn't know her. Shit, he didn't even know her last name. She was just this girl that he threw frozen drinks on. And besides, it can't be the same girl, right? Because this guy is black, and that girl most definitely isn't.
He watches Dr. Berry stand up, setting his binder on the coffee table and walking to his desk to pick something up. He comes back and holds out a framed picture to Puck, who kind of has to take the thing. It's a school photo of a girl - the same girl from last week, the same girl he used to throw slushies on - wearing a yellow sweater and a bright smile. "That's her," he confirms when he sees the question on Dr. Berry's face.
He leans forward to lay the frame on the coffee table, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Maybe his black doctor adopted a white baby. Hell, maybe Puck's baby was adopted by a family who looks different from her, black or Asian or whatever.
He finds himself wishing, not for the first time, that there was a clock in this room so he knew how much longer he had to sit here. Instead of a clock though, Dr. Berry sets this little timer every week that goes off when their hour is up.
"You don't have to worry, Noah," Dr. Berry says softly, jerking Puck out of his thoughts. "Rachel understands that she isn't to talk about any of my patients at school, even if she does know them. And I don't discuss patients with my family," he adds.
Puck just nods instead of correcting him. He isn't worried about Rachel talking about this at school; with his reputation, he can get away with whatever the fuck he wants to do, no matter what anyone says. Nope, Puck's worried that Rachel might mention what Puck used to do and Dr. Berry will say something to his P.O. that'll get him sent back to juvie.
He brings up an episode of Criminal Minds he saw to keep from talking about himself - it's a tactic that he knows Dr. Berry sees through, but it keeps the dude off his back, so whatever - though in the back of his mind he's wondering if there's anything he can do to keep the girl from saying anything.
*
Sweet-talking Figgins' secretary out of Rachel Berry's class schedule and locker number is so easy it's almost insulting. It's been a while since he's run game on a cougar, but all it takes is a flash of a smile and a compliment on her earrings and she's handing him a piece of paper from her printer. She's kind of flustered, so she blacks out the girl's social security number and locker combination, but she doesn't bother with Rachel's home address - though that confirms that she's exactly who he thinks she is - or phone number.
"Are you that hard up Puck?" Santana asks meanly when he steps out of the office folding up the paper. "Going after that."
He rolls his eyes and shoves Rachel's schedule into his back pocket. "Suck it, Santana."
"Yeah, yeah, and choke and die, whatever." She falls into step beside him as he walks towards the cafeteria. "Are you coming over tonight?"
He glances over at her, taking in the way that her Cheerio skirt hits the fronts of her thighs as she walks and wishes that he could say yes. "I'm still grounded."
She rolls her eyes. "You should've thought about how it was going to affect me before you tried to steal a fucking ATM," she snaps, and yeah, they haven't fucked since before that happened. It's not like he can do anything about it though. "So fucking lame, Puck."
He glares at her back when she quickens her steps to walk away from him. Santana's always had a mean streak, but it's been worse lately, and he doesn't know why. It doesn't matter. She isn't going to talk about it unless she wants to. He misses hanging out with her more than he misses having sex with her anyhow, which is kind of weird. When she doesn't have her Satan hat on, Santana's actually kind of awesome, which is why they've kept up this thing they have going on for so long. Otherwise, Puck's a one-and-done kind of guy.
Anyways.
Now that he has all of this information about Rachel though, he needs to decide how best to use it. At first, he thought he wanted to just play it straight: Apologize for slushying her and ask her to please not tell her dad and get his ass tossed back to juvie. Except he doesn't know anything about this girl. Maybe she's already forgotten about all of the stuff that happened freshman and sophomore year, and bringing it up to her will just remind her of what an ass he was. Or maybe she didn't recognize him at her house, so he doesn't need to be worrying about it at all.
He can't just let it go though. Juvie fucking sucked. He makes up stories about how badass he was when he was there when people ask, but the guys there were hardcore, and the whole experience was not a positive one. He really doesn't want to go back to that fucking place again. If that means that he has to pick up trash at the park on Saturday afternoons and see a shrink every week, fine. That's why he cut that deal in the first place.
And if it means that he has to figure out what's up with this Rachel chick, he will.
The way he sees it, getting this shit taken care of sooner rather than later is the way to go, so he starts hanging around the hallway where her locker is that afternoon. He takes the chance to watch her, trying really hard not to just get distracted by the way her little gray skirt falls against her thighs. (And fuck, how did he never notice her legs before?) Instead, he watches the careful way that she puts her books in her backpack, how she closes the door gently before walking away instead of slamming it closed like everyone else on the planet.
The thing is, while everyone else in the hallway is busy talking to their friends or checking their phones, Rachel isn't doing either of those things. Puck's straight-up ignoring anyone who tries to talk to him - he's busy - and his phone has buzzed in his pocket a few times since the last bell rang. Rachel though, doesn't look like someone who's ignoring her phone.
She looks like someone whose phone just doesn't ring all that often.
He leaves school without any ideas. He doesn't know what the hell he's going to do with this girl.
*
He kind of starts stalking her. It's definitely not the worst thing he's ever done. Hell, it isn't the worst thing he's ever done to her. It has its advantages though; he doesn't know how she hasn't gotten nailed for breaking the dress code with those skirts, but he's fucking grateful for the oversight. The legs on that girl.
He still has to go to his own classes, and he has football after school, but he makes a point of passing through hallways outside of her classes or the one where her locker is a couple of times a day. He doesn't know how much he's learning about her, but seeing her in those tiny little skirts makes it worth it.
She's almost always alone, though he sees her once talking to this goth Asian girl. She actually uses her locker the way she's supposed to, going between most of her classes and leaving her backpack in it during the day instead of carrying everything around all the time the way most people do. She carries her books against her chest, things like AP English and Chemistry and World History (which all the juniors take), and she's carrying a different colored three-ring binder every time he sees her.
He's making his now-normal pass through the hallway where Rachel's locker is when he sees Quinn standing with her there. He can't see Quinn's face, but he can see Rachel's, and the girl looks like she's about to cry, her eyes all wide and her cheeks pink. He pauses there at the end of the hall to see what happens. He's been trying to remember why he ever started slushying Rachel, but seeing this brings it all back; Quinn suggested it back when they first met, before she started dating Finn and shit got all fucked up. He wanted her, so he didn't have any problem being a dick to the short chick in the animal sweaters.
Quinn turns away from Rachel so quickly that the pleats on her skirt flare away from her thighs. She stalks down the hallway like a woman on a mission, and if she sees Puck standing there when she passes him, she doesn't bother to acknowledge him. That's standard from Quinn. He's pretty sure that she hasn't looked him in the eye even once since the day that they signed the paperwork that made them legally no longer parents. She's all about pretending that nothing has ever happened between them.
His feet are taking him towards where Rachel is still standing at her locker before he realizes that it's happening. "Don't let Quinn get to you," he tells her when he's close enough to talk without everyone in the hallway hearing what he says. "She's all fucked up."
Rachel blinks her big eyes at him quickly, swallowing hard. "Why are you talking to me?" she asks, speaking quickly. "Are you going to steal something from me?"
He fights the urge to roll his eyes. "Relax. I just know what a bitch she can be."
"I'm sure you do," she murmurs, her mouth twisted when she turns back to her open locker.
"You're Rachel, right?" She looks up at him again, blinking. Her eyes aren't shiny with unshed tears any more, but confused. "I'm Puck."
"I know who you are. What I don't know," she goes on, standing on her toes to retrieve her backpack from the hook in the top of her locker, "is why you're talking to me."
"Can't a guy just be nice?"
"Yes." She slips a French book into her bag and zips it shut, then closes her locker door smartly. She looks him straight in the eye when she says, "But I didn't think that you were capable of that."
She turns on her heel and is out of the hallway before he even realizes that she's going, leaving him standing there next to her locker trying to figure out what the hell just happened. He didn't have any expectations going into this conversation because he didn't plan on having it, but this is not at all how he would have expected any conversation with any girl to go. Puck is a stud, and girls don't talk to him like that.
Apparently Rachel Berry isn't like most girls.
*
The fact that this girl has apparently already made up her mind about him almost bothers Puck more than it does that she's his therapist's daughter and shit.
Puck is good with women, okay? All of them. He can convince teachers not to count him tardy when he walks into class five minutes late, he can talk cougars and cheerleaders into bed with equal ease, and all the little old ladies at temple (when he actually agrees to go with his nana) think he's like, super-charming. Even little girls like Puck, like the friends that Abby brings home with her sometimes. Women are Puck's thing, and Rachel being totally unaffected by him is really not okay.
He finds her at her locker before school a few days later. She lets out a sigh when he walks up beside her. "I don't know why you've been following me around or what you have planned, but if you could just please get it over with and let me get on with my life, I would appreciate it very much."
She has her head lowered a little so that her hair falls over her face, preventing Puck from reading her expression, but her voice sounds sad.
"I'm not planning anything," he tells her seriously, keeping his voice low. "Really," he adds when she doesn't react.
"Then why are you stalking me?" she asks, raising her head so she can meet his eyes.
His mind races, grasping for something to say besides because I don't want you to tell your dad that I used to bully you. "Because I need help in history," he finally says, rolling his eyes at his own stupidity. "I can't ask just anyone for help, because it's totally not badass, but I snagged Mr. Simms' gradebook and saw that you have one of the highest grades." That isn't true, but he figures that it could be. It doesn't look like she has many friends, so what else is she doing but being a good, upstanding student?
"Students' grades are personal," Rachel says. There's a primness to her voice, but the words come out like she didn't even really think about it before she said them.
Puck shrugs one shoulder lazily. "Can you help me?"
He watches her tongue dart out to wet her lips. "Of course I can. The real question is, why would I? After the way that you used to treat me, why would I help you with anything?"
She closes her locker gently and walks away, leaving him standing there in the same hallway again, his eyebrows furrowed as he tries to figure out what the hell to do with this girl.
*
"You seem distracted."
Puck narrows his eyes a little at Dr. Berry. He doesn't know what the dude's getting at. They're talking about the unimportant shit that they usually do: football, schoolwork, food, Thanksgiving next week.
Dr. Berry shrugs at the expression on Puck's face, setting his pen down on the legal pad in his lap. "You're not an open guy, Noah, but you're usually at least engaged in the conversation. You seem a million miles away today."
Yeah, that probably has something to do with the fact that every time he comes here, he's afraid that he's going to find out that Rachel told her dad all about him and the guy hates him. "I guess I'm just tired," he lies.
"Are you not sleeping well?"
Puck rolls his eyes. "It isn't like, a thing." Dr. Berry's mouth quirks, and something about the moment makes Puck want to tell the truth. "There's this girl," he begins. "She's already decided that she knows what kind of guy I am, but she doesn't know me at all."
Okay, so it's a version of the truth. (The version that doesn't include, the girl is your daughter.)
"Well, our reputations precede us."
He knows. Up until now, that's generally worked in his favor. Now, of course, when it might really matter, it's biting him in the ass. "So I have to convince her that I'm not who she thinks I am?"
"You probably shouldn't lie to a girl in an effort to start some sort of...relationship," Dr. Berry says carefully. He talks like this a lot, mostly because he can't ever be totally sure what Puck's talking about. That's completely deliberate. "But if her opinion of you is wrong, I think it's certainly okay to show her who you really are. Maybe you can become friends."
It's actually not bad advice. Dr. Berry laughs when Puck tells him that and mentions that he's finally earning his mom's money.
What he needs to do is show Rachel that he isn't just the dude who used to throw drinks in her face.