fic: the last beautiful girl in the world
Title: the last beautiful girl in the world
Author: andbless_mybaby
Pairing: Jesse/Quinn (Puck/Quinn, Jesse/Rachel, mild Finn/Quinn)
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: through “The Power of Madonna”
Summary: “I’m Quinn Fabray,” she deadpans. “Former star cheerleader, current background-swayer for New Directions and expectant babymama of a degenerate.”
Word Count: 8,000
Author’s Notes: Love to B2 for the beta, Candy for the inevitable WTF, all my f-listies who encouraged me through the sex scene dry spell, and the anons for not dying this time. This assumes that Jesse transferred to William McKinley 2 - 2.5 months before Regionals, potentially messing with the timeline of the B9.
---
The first time happens like this:
“I don’t think that we’ve been introduced,” he says. “I’m Jesse St. James. Yes, the Jesse St. James, as in ‘the former lead singer for Vocal Adrenaline.’”
“I know who you are.” Quinn can’t help it if she sounds sharp. Her back hurts. They’re the last ones left in the room after practice, and it’s been quiet enough to hear the janitor throttling his mop out in the hall. She doesn’t know how she missed Jesse’s presence, even with the trig homework on her lap and 6.5 months of baby compressing her sciatic nerve. It’s kind of annoying. “You’re the guy that Rachel can’t shut up about. What are you still doing here?”
“I was feeling the aura of the room.” He holds his hands out, and she thinks that there’s no way in hell that he can possibly be for real, but he doesn’t crack a smile. “It’s much smaller than Carmel’s rehearsal space. I wasn’t quite sure about the chi, but it’s actually not as bad as I’d feared.”
“Uh,” she answers, barely containing an eye roll. “Yeah. Most people wouldn’t have snuck up on the pregnant chick.”
“Most people would have shaken my hand and told me their name by now,” he counters.
“I’m Quinn Fabray,” she deadpans. “Former star cheerleader, current background-swayer for New Directions and expectant babymama of a degenerate. Now, what do you want?”
“Faded glory. Yes.” He seems way too enthusiastic, she thinks uncomfortably. “That’s fabulously pathetic, as in literally full of pathos. I personally have never experienced anything but success, but I am creative enough to imagine what that’s like. I knew I was getting a special vibe from you.”
She tucks her worksheet into the textbook and closes it slowly, since she gets the sense that he likes being looked at. It’s not that he’s unpleasant on her eyes. His hair is raffish in that way that shows he did it that way on purpose, and there’s an arrogant gleam to him that’s appealing in a peculiar way. It really makes no sense. She never would have given him the time of day a little under a year ago. Actually, she gets the sense that she probably shouldn’t be giving it to him now.
“You’d better go find your girlfriend,” she says coolly. “She tends to wander around humming showtunes when she’s left to herself, and there are feral jocks roaming the halls this time of day.”
“Her ferret had a dentist appointment.” Sitting down a little closer than she would have preferred, he tabs his thumb over the pages of her textbook. “I offered to take her, of course, but she’s going to dinner with Hiram afterwards. That’s her-“
“…one of her gay dads,” Quinn finishes. “I assumed.”
“Do you need any help with your math? I have a 3.9 unweighted GPA.”
“I can manage.” She fixes him with her iciest smile, the one that was terrifying back when she didn’t have a double chin and feet so swollen they overflowed her shoes. “I’m in the top five percent of my class.”
“Why are you still here?” Anyone else would have taken a hint, but Jesse simply props his chin on his hand and stares at her. Maybe every gesture he makes is actually that affected, she thinks with mild dismay. Wow.
“My ride home is busy until six,” she says shortly. (Puck has double detention for stealing fundraiser candy from the marching band.) “I thought I’d have some peace and quiet here.”
“A music room should never be quiet.” His face is beatific. “It should be filled with sound at all times. Anything else is sacrilege. Do you want to sing with me?”
“No. Actually.”
Strangely, he doesn’t push it. Maybe it’s the bitchy tone of her voice, but he hushes up. Quinn takes her pencil back to the last problem she worked on, but soon discovers that it’s hard to focus on the law of cosines when he’s still looking at her. She’s been staring at the same spot on the page for two straight minutes when he clears his throat.
“Have you heard of SOH-CAH-TOA? There’s an expansive list of mnemonics…”
“I can’t focus with you staring at me!”
That’s the point where he should have said that he was sorry and preferably left. Jesse is obviously tenacious and immune to hostility, though - which, when Quinn thinks about it, is probably why he’s perfect for Rachel “Freak Flag” Berry - and so he just smiles indolently at her.
“May I ask you a question?”
“You just did.”
“Touché. I meant more like a proposal, actually. I propose-” He takes the book off her lap. “A trust-building exercise.”
He’s right in front of her face. And then, he kisses her.
It happens quickly enough that Quinn can’t possibly stop it. It’s taking place, and then, in an instant, it’s that thing that she should have seen coming a mile away but didn’t. It was in his sly smile, and the tilt of his head. He was planning it.
Quinn hasn’t been kissed in so very long. Puck holds her hand and rubs her back most days, and does her the courtesy of not letting her know what other girls he’s hooking up with - even if Santana’s sly, sidelong looks of pity seem more blatant than ever before. For Puck, that’s the “dutiful boyfriend and expectant daddy” routine, and Quinn’s grateful to him for keeping it up, she really is. But she hasn’t been kissed since the morning before Finn found out the truth about the baby.
It’s surprise. That’s why she gasps a little, why her mouth opens under his. But he doesn’t take it further. She feels him laugh a little deep in his throat, his face kind of rumbling against hers. His mouth is soft, like he uses Chap Stick.
She pushes away, long seconds after she should have, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand like a playground kid and wondering dimly if this is the sort of thing that merits slapping a boy these days.
“How is that a trust-building exercise?” she asks. She’s a little breathless, but that’s because her damn fetus is sucking up all Quinn’s lung capacity.
“It’s not.” He chucks her under her chin. “I occasionally enjoy catching people off guard, and I wanted to see how you’d react.”
“Risky.” It’s all she can get out.
“Maybe.”
And just like that, he’s gone.
---
“I want you,” she says to Puck that evening.
He’s in his closet rooting around for the clothes that he’ll wear to school the next day so that he doesn’t disturb her in the morning. The couch downstairs has his pillows stacked on it, the same way it does every night.
“Huh?” he asks, sniffing a t-shirt that was balled up on the floor. “Shit. My natural musk is amazing. Say what?”
“I want you. To, uh.” Quinn’s courage almost fails her. “To sleep with me. Again.”
If the moment weren’t so tense for her, she’d undoubtedly appreciate the sight of Noah Puckerman, high school badass, totally speechless. His WMHS Athletics cut-off shirt hugs his chest and stomach, stuck with basketball practice sweat that he hasn’t washed off. This must be what they mean when they talk about pregnancy hormones, she realizes suddenly.
Quinn pushes herself up, and walks over to him.
“Have you been possessed?” He’s cocking an eyebrow at her dubiously. “Because I want to know what planet you came from and what you did with my babymama. Tell her I got Spanish homework that needs doing so I don’t flunk sophomore year again.”
“Puck.” She plucks the Koopa-print boxer shorts he’s holding from his hand.
“Yeah?” (The tone of his voice makes her wonder if he locked the door when he came in.)
“Shut up.”
The simmering, confined feeling of lust that sparked in Quinn earlier has been fomenting and expanding all day. It’s like a dam bursting when Puck flattens his hands on her ass and pulls her in close for a ridiculously hot kiss.
Quinn kissed Finn a whole lot, and she kissed Dave Karofsky in fifth grade before he became an asshole, and she’s kissed three other guys in high school, and now (this one is a tinier, quieter thought) she’s kissed Jesse. She knows, then, that nobody kisses like Puck when he wants you. His lips cover hers hungrily, but gently, like he’s scared that she’ll pull away or something. Quinn teeters on her tiptoes, gripping his shoulders for balance, and licks at his mouth until he opens it and breathes jaggedly against her tongue.
It feels safer than what transpired that afternoon, familiar and right. He works his knee in between her thighs, and she can feel him against her hip. She’s made him hard, and that feels flattering in a way she didn’t predict. She touches him tentatively, gripping his arms and his shoulders and then his chest. The hard planes of muscle under her fingers ignite a heady, swirling delight in her brain, enough that she wants to claw at him to see if he’ll flinch. She wants him so much that she’s dizzy with it. Quinn lets him manhandle her onto the bed, because she distantly reasons that it’s probably not safe for the baby to try this in a vertical position.
Puck’s plucking at the hem of her shirt, and Quinn feels good enough to pull away a little so that he can take it off. But he doesn’t, and she realizes with sudden bewilderment that he’s trying to pull it further down.
“Don’t take it off.”
“What?” She detaches from his mouth, feeling her lips swollen and sticky with the flavor of the wintergreen gum he chews to hide the smell of dip from him mom.
“Your stretch marks are freaking me out. It looks like you got mauled by, like, a tiger.”
“Excuse me?” Quinn can almost hear the sound of tires screeching to a halt in her head, like this is a cartoon. Except, of course, for the fact that nothing is funny.
“Chill, baby.” He smirks down at her, and traces the underwire of her bra through the cloth. His thumb skims her breast. “Just leave it on. It’s not a big deal.”
“That’s your child inside me ruining my body,” she says icily. “Just in case you forgot.”
“Who said it wasn’t?” He runs a hand up her arm, but the warm feeling from before is gone. “C’mon. Relax.”
He tries to kiss her again, but she shoves him off.
(Finn, she thinks. It comes to her mind unwilled, sad and angry. Finn would have come in his shorts already, but he’d never say those things to her. He wasn’t cool, wasn’t slick, didn’t have game - but he’d be kissing the ugly red marks up her sides and telling her that she was beautiful, and her body was beautiful, and that he loved every change it made to grow their baby.)
“You’re a pig.” She adjusts her clothing furiously, like she’s ripping herself forcefully from her stupid, sentimental daydream. She swipes her arm across her mouth like she could actually wipe Puck away. “God. Get the hell away from me.”
“What?” With his pants undone, his confusion would be pathetic if she weren’t ready to kill him. “Seriously? What’s your problem?”
“You are my problem!” She’s shouting, which means that both Sarah and Mrs. Puckerman can probably hear her. Quinn is beyond caring. “Everything wrong with my life is because of you! Why can’t you stop screwing things up for five minutes so that maybe my life won’t suck for a little while?”
“I don’t fucking understand you,” he says heatedly. “Hot and cold. I know that you’re knocked up and all, but you need to work your shit out.”
“I wouldn’t have to work anything out if it wasn’t for you!” Quinn hides her face in a pillow, mortified. “Go away.”
He does, and she can’t decide whether she’s relieved or angrier at that.
---
Four days later, she’s made up her mind: she’s definitely mad. Puck avoids her completely, except for driving her to and from school in silence. Quinn’s given the silent treatment to plenty of people (boys) when she needed to prove a point, but she’s never been so livid. With her books clutched to her chest, it feels like more people are staring at her than ever.
Quinn catches Jesse looking at her in the hall, and something inside her snaps. She stalks him to a fairly private alcove and all but tackles him with the full momentum of her girth moving at top speed.
“Quinn! I thought you might be one of the freshman girls.” Jesse tosses his hair with a brief heavenward glance. “They’ve already dedicated a fan club in my honor. Makes passing between classes a challenge.”
“Look,” she says irritably, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” His voice is bland, but the way his eyes flicker over hers is anything but.
The bell rings, making them both officially late for class. Jesse doesn’t move. Quinn hasn’t seen him shift, but suddenly he’s looming in her personal space. He’s closer than she’d prefer, but she’s backed up against the wall and moving seems something like a defeat.
There’s the rubbery squeak of someone’s tennis shoes down the hall, and the chop of distant laughter. The hallway is as quiet as it ever gets. Quinn’s fingers slip against the stain-resistant gloss that Figgins had painted on after graffiti started showing up on walls last year.
“I’m trouble.” She lowers her voice, even though there’s nobody around. “I cheated on my boyfriend. I lied to a lot of people. Ask anyone around here.”
“That’s why I like you,” he tells her. “You’re complicated. You interest me.”
“I’m not interested in being interesting to you.”
“Even more interesting,” he says mildly. “I look forward to seeing you at practice.” He runs his hands over her bare arms, and a wholly unexpected current of excitement shimmers down Quinn’s back.
“You say that like we interact at all,” she points out.
“Not during,” he admits frankly. “But hey, afterwards. We could change that.”
“Do… what?” It’s a challenge she can’t fully voice, but one that she’s hoping he’ll rise to. It’s not like she knows him well (or at all, really), but she gets the feeling that he’s into that sort of thing.
He manages to survey the entire hallway without turning his head. He’s smirking when he drops his mouth to hers.
This one is a long, tangled kiss. It’s a token of further inquiry, an unspoken question between them. Under his t-shirt, she can feel the spokes of his ribs and the cool, untroubled brush of his skin. Her rotund belly is between them, creating a distance. Jesse closes the space with his hands.
---
After that, it’s on a matter of time before she’s up on Mr. Schu’s desk in his little office with her legs wide and Jesse’s hand inside her bra.
“If this were a show,” he says, “I’d call this plot development contrived.”
Her boobs are huge, like the rest of her changing body, milk-pale and aching. He’s careful enough, but her nipples throb like the wailing high opener of a jazz song when he strums them though the beige D-cup she currently fills out. She pushes into his hands, her teeth catching the skin that meets his collar.
“I’m… fat.” She pushes his hands away when he goes to unzip her. “Leave it on.”
Jesse palms her beachball of a belly, and his fingertips brush her sides.
“This is actually quite sensual.” He traces her navel where it pokes up through the fabric, and bites his lower lip naughtily. One strap of her dress is still off her shoulder; he pulls it up. “We can do it with clothes on, too.”
He runs his hands up her thighs, like he’s making an illustration. Little arrows of liquid heat prick her between her legs, higher up than he’s touching her.
He produces a condom from his wallet, which feels (irrationally) like an insult. She doesn’t tell him that she’s had sex exactly one time before, because that makes it sound like this time, number two, means something.
“Is this what you want?” He palms the heft of his dick, stiff and thick in its latex sheath.
“Isn’t that obvious?” she asks. Snapping a little.
“It’s not really a boast,” he says. His eyes find hers. His hand is on her lower back, rubbing patient circles as the head of his sex bumps hers. “I just want to ascertain that we’re on the same page. That you’re cool with doing this.”
“If you’re trying to ask if I consent, then the answer is yes.”
“Oh, good.”
She tightens when he moves inside her, because she’s expecting it to hurt. Jesse laughs a little in his throat, and murmurs something about relaxing. His voice is a little screwed up and she likes that, likes it enough that it catches her off guard and her body shifts.
“You are insanely tight,” he compliments her. “Wow.”
He pulls her legs wide around him. Quinn hasn’t done the splits since the demise of her cheerleading career, and it stretches more than a little. But Jesse looks down with dark eyes at the place where their bodies are joined, and she can feel every part of him against her skin, her thighs, the parts of herself that she hasn’t touched since the night she got pregnant.
“You like that?” he pants. “That feel good?”
“Oh God.” The sound of his voice does something to her, like the talking makes it dirtier. “Uh-huh.”
He cradles her hips, and the burn between her legs is becoming a slick, delicious ache. She begins to meet his thrusts with her hands bracing herself on the desk, lifting her hips.
Puck made Quinn come the night she slept with him, and her knowledge of sexual etiquette is virtually nonexistent. So it surprises her when Jesse finishes fairly quickly, groaning in her ear as he pulses inside her.
Afterwards, he uses the hem of his ridiculous hipster t-shirt to clean them both up, and zips his jacket up over the pale skin of his chest.
“Thanks for a good time, Quinn.” He smoothes her hair, and drops a quick kiss on her forehead. “You’re a cool girl.”
“Do you do this often?” she dryly asks him.
“I’m a man driven by my passions,” he explains. “An artist can’t be confined by societal norms when led to an experience that enlivens the soul.”
“Oh,” she says.
“You aren’t taking anything away from her.” His eyes meet hers frankly. “My beautiful, talented girlfriend is as yet unprepared to consummate our passion for one another. She knows that I’ve done this before. So it’s not like this is a betrayal of something between her and I.”
He makes it sound natural and so unworried that Quinn’s almost convinced.
“I’m not worried about her,” she insists. “I don’t even like her.”
“I know,” he replies. “She told me.”
That one takes her aback, just a little bit.
“You won’t tell Rachel, of course.” It’s not really a question. “And I, in return, will use my utmost discretion and won’t breathe a word to… well. I didn’t even ask who the lucky daddy was.”
“Puck,” she says, hating how sophomoric his name sounds on her lips. It’s the first time that she’s ever admitted it out loud. “It’s Puck’s.”
“The jock with the mohawk?” he asks. “Oh. That’s an interesting twist.”
“You call it a twist, I call it a ridiculously poor life decision,” she says. “It was my second time being drunk and my first time having sex.”
She realizes too late that she definitely just over-shared, despite her intent to avoid doing so. But Jesse has snapped closed the compact in which he’s checking out his hair, and he’s staring at her.
“Your boyfriend’s best friend got you drunk and pregnant on your first time out?” he says incredulously. “Oh, my God. You’re one back alley abortion and a peasant dress away from being a hit Broadway musical, you know.”
“You haven’t heard the part about me being the president of the Celibacy Club.”
He laughs, and it’s the least-stagey thing she’s heard from him yet.
---
“Why do you smell like fucking?”
Six words. That’s more than Puck’s spoken to her in ten days.
Quinn looks up quickly from her bowl of Spaghetti-Os, grateful that his mother is already at work for the evening. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Fucking. Sex. On the ride home today.” She realizes that he hasn’t touched his food. “I thought I smelled it.”
“It’s probably you,” she counters. “I heard Coach Sylvester slamming lockers in the hallway because Santana showed up half an hour late to practice. And you both have last period free… like, what a total coincidence. Second of all-”
“If I was fucking Lopez, which I’m not, maybe it’s just because-”
“-keep your idiot voice down. You’ll wake up your sister.”
“-she actually knows how to have fun, unlike some chicks.”
“I know all about Santana’s kind of fun.” Quinn lets acid seep into her words. “Last I heard, half the ice hockey team had to visit the STD clinic because of having fun with Santana.”
“You’re jealous.” His eyes narrow, and she thinks she sees triumph behind his sneer. “You can’t handle the thought that maybe Santana’s getting some of this. Baby, I told you that I can’t be tied down.”
Quinn sits back against the kitchen chair with a thump. Her stomach pops up, and the greenish fluorescent light wilts the flowers on her maternity top. Her food is tasteless in her mouth, so she pushes the bowl away.
“I’ve gotten ‘some of that,’” she reminds him quietly, “and everyone knows where it got me. Anyone else who wants some is perfectly welcome to it.”
“What’s the deal, Q? ‘Once you pop, the fun don’t stop?’” He’s still playing with his food, watching globs of miniature pasta coast from his spoon down the curved inside of the bowl. His words shoot straight across the table at her.
There’s a moment where she considers picking up her bowl of processed, canned crap and throwing it in his face. Anger flares red and hot across her vision, and her fingers curl into fists under the table. She feels his eyes on her, but she focuses on the dishes when she puts them in the sink. With the water almost hotter than she can stand, she washes everything up and rubs a soapy washcloth over the countertop, even though it really doesn’t need extra cleaning. When her elbow grease has smoothed away the blinding rage she feels, she folds the dishcloth and turns around slowly.
“You’re a jerk,” she says, quiet and deliberate. “You are disgusting, and a moron, and I hate you. It’s a good thing that I’m giving this baby up, because it would be ruined with you as its father.”
As she expected, that’s enough to shut him up. She doesn’t wait around to see his expression, just applies herself to the task of boosting her overgrown body up the stairs.
In the bathroom, she runs a shower. With the door locked safely behind her, she gives herself a careful sniff. All she can smell is a little bit of sweat and her vanilla-lime body spray.
That night, laying in bed and trying to read Things Fall Apart for English class - she’s never heard so much about yams in her life - she’s disturbed from her half-doze by the cramps. Her lower belly tightens like a fist, and the accompanying, dull pain is a cresting wave. She groans, and doubles up, and then opens her eyes wide when she realizes that these are probably contractions.
She’s only seven months along, so she figures that the baby can’t be escaping already. Biting her lip, she shuffles over to Puck’s computer. It takes nine or ten clicks to clear away all the porno pop-ups (apparently her boyfriend likes lesbians. A lot.) so that she can navigate to Web M.D.
It doesn’t take long for her to learn about Braxton-Hicks contractions, and how vigorous sex can cause them. She wills herself to slow the frantic beating of her heart and relax, thinking crankily that someone up there clearly never wants her to have sex ever again. The site says that drinking a bunch of water should help, but Quinn can hear Puck using the bathroom and shuffling around in the basket of folded laundry outside the door. So she settles for changing her position in the chair and nibbling at the granola bar she’d put in her purse after lunch.
While she’s logged on, she checks her e-mail and Facebook. The chat box in the bottom right-hand corner shows her that Finn is online, a realization that hits her like a shove. She wonders why he hasn’t blocked her, and realizes at almost the same moment that it’s probably because he doesn’t know how.
Her heart twists. Quickly, she clicks the option to show herself as invisible.
---
“Can it not be as rough this time?” she asks.
“That wasn’t rough,” he says with a sly wink. “But as it so happens, I realized something when I was reflecting back on our last rendezvous.”
He moves his hand under her skirt, and her oh! is almost swallowed.
This time, in an unused lab in the science wing, with an outdated mobile of the solar system overhead (Pluto is still in orbit around the papier-mâché sun), she lets him take her shirt off. There’s an ugly cotton panel on her jean skirt, but it doesn’t matter. She’s already made the decision to not care, to hold her head high like she’s still 110 pounds and the hottest thing in the class of 2012. Little sunlight filters through the dusty vertical blinds. He says that Figgins won’t budget for a janitor to clean vacant classrooms. It makes sense, but she wonders how he knows that.
“Lay back,” he commands.
She balances her back on a long black table while he moves a box of Erlenmeyer flasks and a rack of test tubes away. The clink of Pyrex and the smell of old experiments seem especially vivid, she thinks distantly, when he folds his tall body over the edge and uses his mouth on her.
Puck hadn’t done that, and Quinn’s not altogether sure that Finn would have even known that act existed. At first, she can’t get over the odd feeling of it - it’s warm and slippery, and the flickers of pleasure it gives her are as mild as a candle’s flame. Her fingers scramble under the table, looking for something to hold onto. But then Jesse uses his fingers, too, and the thing inside Quinn begins to brim, sloshing around in her head and her hips.
“Please… please put it in.” She barely recognizes the sound of her own voice. “Now.”
Jesse pulls her ankles and calves, helping her scoot to the end of the table. It’s the perfect height for his pelvis, and he grinds against her. She guides him inside her, and leaves her hand down there. Three thrusts later, she’s coming with a guttural moan. She shoves her free hand underneath herself to keep it from grabbing at him.
“Want to have another one?” he asks.
She shakes her head, afraid of starting contractions again. She’s a bit speechless still, residual moans being pushed from her lips when he moves. Quinn puts her hand to her mouth and bites it a little in an attempt to keep quiet. Jesse pulls it away. It’s like, now that he’s taken care of her needs, he can slow down. He thrusts carefully, like he’s being mindful of her request to be more gentle, eyes drifting closed.
One of his big hands cups the underside of her knee, pressing it up against the hard underside of her stomach. Her leg comes up, and she hooks her ankle over his shoulder. It makes him go deeper, and he groans, and sucks an appreciative kiss onto the bump of her ankle, on the side of her foot. If she could, Quinn would be embarrassed for him at doing that. But she feels herself starting to come again, the first grasping tendril of heat in her hips. Greedily she pulls at him, dragging him into a quicker pace as she sucks her breath around the skin of his shoulder. It’s like staring into the sun when her second orgasm hits, bright white light flooding her eyes and erupting through her veins. It’s easier, harder, wetter. Jesse’s lips stop on her heel and he watches her, the jagged mash of his hips slow and rhythmic again as it’s riding through her.
It isn’t until she’s arched her neck back, head dizzy and heavy and hot, that he speeds up again and finishes. There’s a long moment afterwards when he’s collapsed against her, catching his breath with his hands propped on either side of her elbows. Quinn hitches an errant gasp and he grins a little bit, tugging a lock of her hair in a way that would be fond if that were at all possible.
The thing about Jesse is that he doesn’t acknowledge her baby bump. There was that comment he made the first time, but then nothing. If his fingers brush against her distended belly, it’s no different from how he touches her any other place. It’s not like he has some kind of a fetish (which Quinn only heard of because of Puck and his gross mental catalogue of disgusting sex knowledge), but he’s not repulsed by it, either. If he notices her stretch marks - which he has to have, he’s got eyes - he doesn’t say anything about them. At first, Quinn really appreciates that. She’s so used to people staring at her body these days, people she doesn’t even know checking her out from the corners of their eyes and smirking like they know anything at all about her and her life. The absence of that constant attention is a relief, and makes her feel more normal than she can remember since the day she saw the plus sign on that pregnancy test. Even if “normal” has been replaced by crying herself to sleep in a strange bed, growing another human, and having furtive sex with a loser’s loser boyfriend in the music room after hours. She feels wanted.
But then, all of the sudden, she realizes that Jesse doesn’t see her, either. There are times when they’ll be in the middle of one of these things they keep doing, and he’s smiling, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. They don’t interact in any way at school or socially, because he’s a senior and also Rachel’s lapdog. She knows nothing about him, really. It’s not that she wants to. But at the same time, the vastness of all the unspoken things between them makes her uncomfortable, and then more so for even thinking about it. Like right now.
He’s perched on the counter watching as she washes her hands in one of the long line of sinks. Under his breath, he hums a song she doesn’t recognize and he hands her a paper towel.
Why are you really doing this? she wants to ask, or maybe I’m sorry, am I boring you? But the first one is pointless, and the second sounds pathetic, even in her own head. What comes out is:
“I can sing, too.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I sing. Well.” All of the sudden, it seems critically important that it be said. “I didn’t get into the glee club on my good looks, you know. I never get solos because your girlfriend is the little princess and Mercedes is a whiner. But I could. Sing.”
She feels stupid, stupider than maybe she’s ever felt before in her life. But the words are out, and there’s nothing she can do about them now.
“Sing, then.” He folds his arms behind his head. “I’m a thoroughly captive audience. You should sing me something.”
But Quinn’s face is hot and her throat is dry - she’s thirsty all the damn time these days, and he’s been kissing her for about an hour - and in an instant, it’s like she’s forgotten the words to every song she’s ever sung.
He stares at her, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does.
---
Only the most profound self-loathing, she thinks, could justify stealing a guy from Rachel Berry of all people. Now that Jesse’s enrolled at their school, Rachel parades him around like her gallant knight and dangles from his arm. She touches him incessantly, body language so blatant that nobody in the school (even Brittany) needs a psych degree to get the message: mine! It’s so apparent that she’s never had someone belong to her that way before, and that she’s overjoyed with the whole experience of having her first boyfriend. It’s pathetic - the way everyone actually uses it, as in lame - how happy he makes her.
Quinn can’t help thinking that there are parts of Jesse she’s touched that Rachel certainly has not, things that a virgin girlfriend can’t possibly know. The peppery, not at all unpleasant smell of his underarms mixed with his weirdo patchouli cologne. The knobby area at the back of his neck that bumps under her palm when they're kissing. The bristle of sandy hair between his legs, and the way it feels when he’s inside her. The way he looks when he comes, smug as normal but a little surprised, too.
A mean thrill ladders up her mind when she sees them together. A very tiny part of herself says to stop being a bitch, but a bigger, uglier part loves having something better, untouched, first. At having gotten Rachel back for stealing something that belonged to Quinn once upon a time, even if that something hadn’t been rightfully hers at the end.
She’s doing the best she can. She takes her prenatal vitamin, complete with an iron supplement that turns her stomach every morning. She goes to the doctor. She doesn’t flunk off the Honor Roll, even if pregnancy seems as good an excuse to become an academic slacker. She wears Spandex blends and a dress with polka dots because it was only ten dollars on clearance in the maternity section at Sears. She deserves something, she thinks. There isn’t anything else, so it will have to be this.
Brushing away the dustbunnies on the floor of Puck’s room, she bends over and carefully paints her toenails bright pink. Afterwards she lies across the bed with her feet dangling and waits a full hour for the polish to dry. Over the edge of the mattress, her hair hangs down as glossy and smooth as it did when she was a well-loved freshman (thanks to a packet of deep conditioner bought for, one dollar and nineteen cents at Sally’s). Her lower back protests the position, so she scooches her hands under her butt and stares at the ceiling. Inside Quinn's belly, her daughter flutters like an anxious butterfly.
---
“This is going to have to be the last time we meet like this.” His fingertips drum a tattoo on the inside of her thigh, sending a lazy flicker of heat to her core. “Rachel noticed marks on my back the other day.”
There are two obvious responses to that - I left marks? and Rachel saw you shirtless? Wow. But what Quinn actually does is lift her head and kind of gape at him. And then immediately wish that she hadn’t, because she’s still naked and has chin fat in this position.
“Um, what did you say to that?” she asks.
“We were going through our yoga routine. I made the fatal mistake of wearing my tank leotard, and…” He shrugs by way of completing the statement. “I told her that I had to rescue my neighbor’s cat from a tree. She seemed to believe it.”
The control booth of the auditorium is cramped, especially with the two of them spread side-by-side on the floor below the vastness of the picture window overlooking the house. Quinn pushes herself up in earnest, self-consciously covering her chest.
“You know how it is.” He hands over her dress, solicitously turning it right-side in for her. “This was fun, but we both have other things going on. It’s a natural end.”
“You should, uh, be careful,” she says. Her throat hurts like someone is twisting it on the inside. She realizes what that means, that she’s fighting back tears, and is immediately horrified.
“I beg your pardon?” Unfazed, he’s tying his shoes.
“She’s going to realize it eventually. She’s not stupid.”
“Realize what?” he asks.
“That you’re playing her.”
“I love Rachel.” He affirms it simply, like he would if saying that the sky was, in fact, blue. “You know nothing. And anyway, Quinn, I believe that you said it yourself. You’ve been recently outed as a cheater and a liar. Your credibility is damaged. The odds that anyone would believe your crazy stories are low.”
She sputters. He leans in, and presses a careless kiss to the side of her mouth. Anger fibrillates her heart, but she can’t manage the words to convey it.
“Don’t take any of that personally,” he says. “I still think you’re interesting. See you around, Quinn.”
He leaves twirling the key to the booth - just another one of his little secrets - around his finger. When the door shuts behind him, Quinn fumbles quickly for her purse between the soundboard and lighting panel, and digs out a tissue as fast as she can. Walking around the school with a face covered in goopy, tear-streaked makeup is low, even by her currently humble standards.
---
The smile Quinn holds during practice the next day feels heavy, like she’s been carrying it around for years. She’s lightheadedly impatient when Mr. Schu insists on stopping the number to change a step. The club is singing around her, but the chorus is fading into the background like a radio with the volume turned down. One moment she’s shoving at Mike’s arm around her waist, his arm suddenly too hot to bear. The room is washing over in colors, splotchy areas in her line of vision. And then the world goes black.
When her eyelashes flutter, it’s actually Tina’s face looming over Quinn’s, her head cushioned by the other girl’s knees in their lacy tights. Mr. Schu is holding her hand. And Quinn, overwhelmed with the abject humiliation of having fainted in front of the Glee club, wishes that she could sink through the floor and maybe just die.
“Quinn, honey. Are you okay? Should we call 911?”
Hearing that endearment from a teacher, even one as corny as Mr. Schu, makes her stomach roil furiously. She swallows rapidly, trying to hold down the bile rising in her throat. Her first attempt to shove off the cold floor fails, and Tina steadies Quinn before she can fall.
“Don’t call the ambulance,” Quinn mumbles. “’M fine.”
“You should stay still for a few minutes.” Artie rolls up. “Are you seeing spots? You should put your legs up and have some water.”
Brittany’s hands are cool on Quinn’s ankles, pulling them onto her lap. There’s a flower doodled on her thumb in purple ink. Moving seems pointless, so Quinn gives herself a moment. She feels uncomfortably hot, and the floor is at least cool under her back. Gold stars dangle from the ceiling, catching the overhead light.
Puck is still serving detention during the first hour of practice. Quinn has never been so grateful for the wrath of the band geeks.
Rachel’s gripping Jesse’s arm in maidenly terror, like a pregnant fainting spell could grip her at any moment. Jesse is playing the doting suitor with the fingers of his free hand twined with hers, but he’s looking studiously at the toes of his Converse.
Finn is next to Santana. He looks pale, but that’s not surprising - he’s the guy who almost lost his dinner when they went to see Paranormal Activity. Part of Quinn wishes that she could rub her face against his striped sweater and maybe take a long nap. But that’s not an option, of course. So she balls a fist under her aching back, and uses what feels like every bit of energy in her body to sit up. She summons her bitchiest expression, the homecoming queen imperiousness that hasn’t come out since the day she became unable to zip up her cheerleader’s skirt.
“That’s it for the free show, guys. Could someone possibly give me a hand?”
It takes Mr. Schu an effort to hoist Quinn to her feet, she can tell. Her maternity dress billows around her like a tent, and she slinks shamefaced to a chair to sit out the rest of rehearsal. Sipping the lukewarm grape Gatorade that someone ran and grabbed from a backpack somewhere, she tries to breathe.
---
It took three whole weeks for Puck to let go of the sulk he’s been nursing against her, a character arc she doesn’t even really notice until the following night when she catches him leaning against the door frame. Quinn hasn’t seen him since their silent drive to school that morning, since she left early for her eight-month appointment with her obstetrician. The bus ride and long wait in the clinic exhausted her, which isn’t hard to do these days. Propped up on some pillows so that her cumbersome belly doesn’t suffocate her, she’s twisting a too-tight silver ring around her finger.
“Hey,” he says.
“Don’t you have some kind of juvenile delinquency to be committing?” It’s a weak barb, which must be why he ignores it.
“How is the little chick?” he asks, and Quinn thinks of English class, and having learned that synecdoche means referring to a part of something like it’s the whole.
“Getting big,” she says. “Healthy, I guess.”
“What happened at Glee practice yesterday?” His line of questioning is like a firing squad, and she realizes that he probably wanted to ask that one first.
“Singing.” She hears herself being petulant, and can’t help it.
“What else?” he pushes.
“You obviously know, or you wouldn’t have asked.”
“Fuck, Quinn.” She can’t seem to care about the profanity, though he knows she hates it. “Don’t pull that shit. Why’d I have to hear about it from Matt?”
She looks at the ceiling.
“We haven’t been talking, Puck. In case you missed the memo.”
“In case you missed the memo,” he apes, “you totally went crazy-psycho-preggo on me and gave me blue balls, Q. I had to jerk it like three times before I got over that shit.”
“The kid you knocked me up with made me faint in school,” she snarls. “And made me too fat to deal with, apparently. Cry me a river.”
“Awww, shit.” He throws his hands up. “Can’t you just get over that already? You interpreted that wrong. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it, exactly?”
“I think you’re way hot,” he says. “I’m just not used to, you know. All that.”
Sitting cross-legged with “all that” weighing on her like a lead weight, no makeup, and her hair in a messy braid, his words still land like an insult.
“I don’t need your… sympathy.” Quinn doesn’t curse, even at this stage in the erosion of her character, so she doesn’t add the word fuck like she’s thinking.
“’S not sympathy. I was a douche. You made me feel like shit,” he mutters, sitting down heavily on the bed. He pulls at the edge of her dress. “Guess we’re even.”
“I don’t want to be even with you,” she says.
“And I don’t wanna fight. What’s with you and that fucker, Jesse?”
“Nothing,” she says. “That’s just stupid.”
“There’s nothing going on with me and Santana.” He looks her in the eye, and she thinks that he’s probably lying, but she still respects him in a twisted way for saying it. “I still want to work this out with you.”
The TV is on in the background. It’s game show hour, that gap before prime time when the old people shows are on. It’s either Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy! , which is funny because Quinn’s realizing that she’s neither lucky or smart enough to handle this hole she’s dug for herself. With the volume turned down, she isn’t paying attention to the white-toothed grins of the hosts or the winning screams of the contestants. Like it is, it’s just a bright light in the background. Puck’d tossed his shirt in the laundry pile a while ago, and she realizes that he looks good to her.
“Why don’t you stay?” she mutters, finally. It feels somehow like it’s costing her something to say those words, even though it’s really what she wants. “Just for tonight.”
There are some papers loose on the floor, homework that he never does. He shoves them around with his bare foot.
“Yeah. I can do that.”
That night, she lets him kiss her until her hair’s undone and tangling in his impatient hands, his body hot and huge and eager and feeling amazing all over hers. But she pushes him away when he goes for more. Puck doesn’t act mad, and Quinn sleepily wonders if this is what is going to pass for understanding between them. They both fall asleep side by side on his mattress with his hand under her shirt, on her stomach. Quinn wakes up at three A.M. or so (her phone is on the nightstand on Puck’s side, and she doesn’t want to disturb him). She has to pee, as usual, and she’s cold. She aches to curl herself up against the huge, warm body under the covers, but she forces herself to stay away. His queen size bed is really not that large for a football player and his pregnant girlfriend, however, and she feels like she’s doing a balancing act on the hard line of the mattress’s edge.
The shadows start to make more sense the longer she’s awake, until she can make out forms and shapes in the darkness. She sees her suitcase open on the floor, and his backpack dropped near a tangle of clothes and shoes in the corner. It’s probably stuffed with forged hall passes, detention slips, and notes from girls, she thinks. Quinn buries her face in the side of the pillow, but it’s no use. She’s heaving up noises, she’s crying. Worse, she doesn’t even know why. Her shoulders quake with the effort of staying quiet. The pillowcase gets wet with tears and snot as she snuffles it pathetically.
When she gets herself under control, she rolls over carefully. It could be the fact that it’s not so easy anymore, and that she has to prop herself up on her hands and shove off the mattress to reposition her alien body. It shakes the whole bed. That must be why there’s a flash of Puck’s eyes in the dark.
---
March passes, and the kids start counting down to spring break. Less than two weeks before her due date, Quinn is passing between third and fourth period when she sees Jesse heading for the parking lot. Seniors have open campus privileges and he has first lunch, so that’s not unusual in and of itself. Something still makes her follow him.
There’s a car with darkened windows idling outside the door. Hidden behind a pillar, Quinn watches Jesse lean in and give a lazy kiss to an unfamiliar girl. A Carmel parking permit hangs on the rearview mirror. Jesse rummages in his backpack and digs out a sheaf of papers that is easily recognizable as the music, judges’ packets, and backstage worksheets for New Directions’ performance set. Regionals are in ten days.
There’s a camera phone in her pocket and an accusatory shout in her chest, but Quinn just hugs her books and goes back inside.
She doesn’t tell a soul, and it’s not even hard to do. Quinn is beginning to realize that she’s an expert at keeping dirty little secrets.
end.
Author: andbless_mybaby
Pairing: Jesse/Quinn (Puck/Quinn, Jesse/Rachel, mild Finn/Quinn)
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: through “The Power of Madonna”
Summary: “I’m Quinn Fabray,” she deadpans. “Former star cheerleader, current background-swayer for New Directions and expectant babymama of a degenerate.”
Word Count: 8,000
Author’s Notes: Love to B2 for the beta, Candy for the inevitable WTF, all my f-listies who encouraged me through the sex scene dry spell, and the anons for not dying this time. This assumes that Jesse transferred to William McKinley 2 - 2.5 months before Regionals, potentially messing with the timeline of the B9.
---
The first time happens like this:
“I don’t think that we’ve been introduced,” he says. “I’m Jesse St. James. Yes, the Jesse St. James, as in ‘the former lead singer for Vocal Adrenaline.’”
“I know who you are.” Quinn can’t help it if she sounds sharp. Her back hurts. They’re the last ones left in the room after practice, and it’s been quiet enough to hear the janitor throttling his mop out in the hall. She doesn’t know how she missed Jesse’s presence, even with the trig homework on her lap and 6.5 months of baby compressing her sciatic nerve. It’s kind of annoying. “You’re the guy that Rachel can’t shut up about. What are you still doing here?”
“I was feeling the aura of the room.” He holds his hands out, and she thinks that there’s no way in hell that he can possibly be for real, but he doesn’t crack a smile. “It’s much smaller than Carmel’s rehearsal space. I wasn’t quite sure about the chi, but it’s actually not as bad as I’d feared.”
“Uh,” she answers, barely containing an eye roll. “Yeah. Most people wouldn’t have snuck up on the pregnant chick.”
“Most people would have shaken my hand and told me their name by now,” he counters.
“I’m Quinn Fabray,” she deadpans. “Former star cheerleader, current background-swayer for New Directions and expectant babymama of a degenerate. Now, what do you want?”
“Faded glory. Yes.” He seems way too enthusiastic, she thinks uncomfortably. “That’s fabulously pathetic, as in literally full of pathos. I personally have never experienced anything but success, but I am creative enough to imagine what that’s like. I knew I was getting a special vibe from you.”
She tucks her worksheet into the textbook and closes it slowly, since she gets the sense that he likes being looked at. It’s not that he’s unpleasant on her eyes. His hair is raffish in that way that shows he did it that way on purpose, and there’s an arrogant gleam to him that’s appealing in a peculiar way. It really makes no sense. She never would have given him the time of day a little under a year ago. Actually, she gets the sense that she probably shouldn’t be giving it to him now.
“You’d better go find your girlfriend,” she says coolly. “She tends to wander around humming showtunes when she’s left to herself, and there are feral jocks roaming the halls this time of day.”
“Her ferret had a dentist appointment.” Sitting down a little closer than she would have preferred, he tabs his thumb over the pages of her textbook. “I offered to take her, of course, but she’s going to dinner with Hiram afterwards. That’s her-“
“…one of her gay dads,” Quinn finishes. “I assumed.”
“Do you need any help with your math? I have a 3.9 unweighted GPA.”
“I can manage.” She fixes him with her iciest smile, the one that was terrifying back when she didn’t have a double chin and feet so swollen they overflowed her shoes. “I’m in the top five percent of my class.”
“Why are you still here?” Anyone else would have taken a hint, but Jesse simply props his chin on his hand and stares at her. Maybe every gesture he makes is actually that affected, she thinks with mild dismay. Wow.
“My ride home is busy until six,” she says shortly. (Puck has double detention for stealing fundraiser candy from the marching band.) “I thought I’d have some peace and quiet here.”
“A music room should never be quiet.” His face is beatific. “It should be filled with sound at all times. Anything else is sacrilege. Do you want to sing with me?”
“No. Actually.”
Strangely, he doesn’t push it. Maybe it’s the bitchy tone of her voice, but he hushes up. Quinn takes her pencil back to the last problem she worked on, but soon discovers that it’s hard to focus on the law of cosines when he’s still looking at her. She’s been staring at the same spot on the page for two straight minutes when he clears his throat.
“Have you heard of SOH-CAH-TOA? There’s an expansive list of mnemonics…”
“I can’t focus with you staring at me!”
That’s the point where he should have said that he was sorry and preferably left. Jesse is obviously tenacious and immune to hostility, though - which, when Quinn thinks about it, is probably why he’s perfect for Rachel “Freak Flag” Berry - and so he just smiles indolently at her.
“May I ask you a question?”
“You just did.”
“Touché. I meant more like a proposal, actually. I propose-” He takes the book off her lap. “A trust-building exercise.”
He’s right in front of her face. And then, he kisses her.
It happens quickly enough that Quinn can’t possibly stop it. It’s taking place, and then, in an instant, it’s that thing that she should have seen coming a mile away but didn’t. It was in his sly smile, and the tilt of his head. He was planning it.
Quinn hasn’t been kissed in so very long. Puck holds her hand and rubs her back most days, and does her the courtesy of not letting her know what other girls he’s hooking up with - even if Santana’s sly, sidelong looks of pity seem more blatant than ever before. For Puck, that’s the “dutiful boyfriend and expectant daddy” routine, and Quinn’s grateful to him for keeping it up, she really is. But she hasn’t been kissed since the morning before Finn found out the truth about the baby.
It’s surprise. That’s why she gasps a little, why her mouth opens under his. But he doesn’t take it further. She feels him laugh a little deep in his throat, his face kind of rumbling against hers. His mouth is soft, like he uses Chap Stick.
She pushes away, long seconds after she should have, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand like a playground kid and wondering dimly if this is the sort of thing that merits slapping a boy these days.
“How is that a trust-building exercise?” she asks. She’s a little breathless, but that’s because her damn fetus is sucking up all Quinn’s lung capacity.
“It’s not.” He chucks her under her chin. “I occasionally enjoy catching people off guard, and I wanted to see how you’d react.”
“Risky.” It’s all she can get out.
“Maybe.”
And just like that, he’s gone.
---
“I want you,” she says to Puck that evening.
He’s in his closet rooting around for the clothes that he’ll wear to school the next day so that he doesn’t disturb her in the morning. The couch downstairs has his pillows stacked on it, the same way it does every night.
“Huh?” he asks, sniffing a t-shirt that was balled up on the floor. “Shit. My natural musk is amazing. Say what?”
“I want you. To, uh.” Quinn’s courage almost fails her. “To sleep with me. Again.”
If the moment weren’t so tense for her, she’d undoubtedly appreciate the sight of Noah Puckerman, high school badass, totally speechless. His WMHS Athletics cut-off shirt hugs his chest and stomach, stuck with basketball practice sweat that he hasn’t washed off. This must be what they mean when they talk about pregnancy hormones, she realizes suddenly.
Quinn pushes herself up, and walks over to him.
“Have you been possessed?” He’s cocking an eyebrow at her dubiously. “Because I want to know what planet you came from and what you did with my babymama. Tell her I got Spanish homework that needs doing so I don’t flunk sophomore year again.”
“Puck.” She plucks the Koopa-print boxer shorts he’s holding from his hand.
“Yeah?” (The tone of his voice makes her wonder if he locked the door when he came in.)
“Shut up.”
The simmering, confined feeling of lust that sparked in Quinn earlier has been fomenting and expanding all day. It’s like a dam bursting when Puck flattens his hands on her ass and pulls her in close for a ridiculously hot kiss.
Quinn kissed Finn a whole lot, and she kissed Dave Karofsky in fifth grade before he became an asshole, and she’s kissed three other guys in high school, and now (this one is a tinier, quieter thought) she’s kissed Jesse. She knows, then, that nobody kisses like Puck when he wants you. His lips cover hers hungrily, but gently, like he’s scared that she’ll pull away or something. Quinn teeters on her tiptoes, gripping his shoulders for balance, and licks at his mouth until he opens it and breathes jaggedly against her tongue.
It feels safer than what transpired that afternoon, familiar and right. He works his knee in between her thighs, and she can feel him against her hip. She’s made him hard, and that feels flattering in a way she didn’t predict. She touches him tentatively, gripping his arms and his shoulders and then his chest. The hard planes of muscle under her fingers ignite a heady, swirling delight in her brain, enough that she wants to claw at him to see if he’ll flinch. She wants him so much that she’s dizzy with it. Quinn lets him manhandle her onto the bed, because she distantly reasons that it’s probably not safe for the baby to try this in a vertical position.
Puck’s plucking at the hem of her shirt, and Quinn feels good enough to pull away a little so that he can take it off. But he doesn’t, and she realizes with sudden bewilderment that he’s trying to pull it further down.
“Don’t take it off.”
“What?” She detaches from his mouth, feeling her lips swollen and sticky with the flavor of the wintergreen gum he chews to hide the smell of dip from him mom.
“Your stretch marks are freaking me out. It looks like you got mauled by, like, a tiger.”
“Excuse me?” Quinn can almost hear the sound of tires screeching to a halt in her head, like this is a cartoon. Except, of course, for the fact that nothing is funny.
“Chill, baby.” He smirks down at her, and traces the underwire of her bra through the cloth. His thumb skims her breast. “Just leave it on. It’s not a big deal.”
“That’s your child inside me ruining my body,” she says icily. “Just in case you forgot.”
“Who said it wasn’t?” He runs a hand up her arm, but the warm feeling from before is gone. “C’mon. Relax.”
He tries to kiss her again, but she shoves him off.
(Finn, she thinks. It comes to her mind unwilled, sad and angry. Finn would have come in his shorts already, but he’d never say those things to her. He wasn’t cool, wasn’t slick, didn’t have game - but he’d be kissing the ugly red marks up her sides and telling her that she was beautiful, and her body was beautiful, and that he loved every change it made to grow their baby.)
“You’re a pig.” She adjusts her clothing furiously, like she’s ripping herself forcefully from her stupid, sentimental daydream. She swipes her arm across her mouth like she could actually wipe Puck away. “God. Get the hell away from me.”
“What?” With his pants undone, his confusion would be pathetic if she weren’t ready to kill him. “Seriously? What’s your problem?”
“You are my problem!” She’s shouting, which means that both Sarah and Mrs. Puckerman can probably hear her. Quinn is beyond caring. “Everything wrong with my life is because of you! Why can’t you stop screwing things up for five minutes so that maybe my life won’t suck for a little while?”
“I don’t fucking understand you,” he says heatedly. “Hot and cold. I know that you’re knocked up and all, but you need to work your shit out.”
“I wouldn’t have to work anything out if it wasn’t for you!” Quinn hides her face in a pillow, mortified. “Go away.”
He does, and she can’t decide whether she’s relieved or angrier at that.
---
Four days later, she’s made up her mind: she’s definitely mad. Puck avoids her completely, except for driving her to and from school in silence. Quinn’s given the silent treatment to plenty of people (boys) when she needed to prove a point, but she’s never been so livid. With her books clutched to her chest, it feels like more people are staring at her than ever.
Quinn catches Jesse looking at her in the hall, and something inside her snaps. She stalks him to a fairly private alcove and all but tackles him with the full momentum of her girth moving at top speed.
“Quinn! I thought you might be one of the freshman girls.” Jesse tosses his hair with a brief heavenward glance. “They’ve already dedicated a fan club in my honor. Makes passing between classes a challenge.”
“Look,” she says irritably, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” His voice is bland, but the way his eyes flicker over hers is anything but.
The bell rings, making them both officially late for class. Jesse doesn’t move. Quinn hasn’t seen him shift, but suddenly he’s looming in her personal space. He’s closer than she’d prefer, but she’s backed up against the wall and moving seems something like a defeat.
There’s the rubbery squeak of someone’s tennis shoes down the hall, and the chop of distant laughter. The hallway is as quiet as it ever gets. Quinn’s fingers slip against the stain-resistant gloss that Figgins had painted on after graffiti started showing up on walls last year.
“I’m trouble.” She lowers her voice, even though there’s nobody around. “I cheated on my boyfriend. I lied to a lot of people. Ask anyone around here.”
“That’s why I like you,” he tells her. “You’re complicated. You interest me.”
“I’m not interested in being interesting to you.”
“Even more interesting,” he says mildly. “I look forward to seeing you at practice.” He runs his hands over her bare arms, and a wholly unexpected current of excitement shimmers down Quinn’s back.
“You say that like we interact at all,” she points out.
“Not during,” he admits frankly. “But hey, afterwards. We could change that.”
“Do… what?” It’s a challenge she can’t fully voice, but one that she’s hoping he’ll rise to. It’s not like she knows him well (or at all, really), but she gets the feeling that he’s into that sort of thing.
He manages to survey the entire hallway without turning his head. He’s smirking when he drops his mouth to hers.
This one is a long, tangled kiss. It’s a token of further inquiry, an unspoken question between them. Under his t-shirt, she can feel the spokes of his ribs and the cool, untroubled brush of his skin. Her rotund belly is between them, creating a distance. Jesse closes the space with his hands.
---
After that, it’s on a matter of time before she’s up on Mr. Schu’s desk in his little office with her legs wide and Jesse’s hand inside her bra.
“If this were a show,” he says, “I’d call this plot development contrived.”
Her boobs are huge, like the rest of her changing body, milk-pale and aching. He’s careful enough, but her nipples throb like the wailing high opener of a jazz song when he strums them though the beige D-cup she currently fills out. She pushes into his hands, her teeth catching the skin that meets his collar.
“I’m… fat.” She pushes his hands away when he goes to unzip her. “Leave it on.”
Jesse palms her beachball of a belly, and his fingertips brush her sides.
“This is actually quite sensual.” He traces her navel where it pokes up through the fabric, and bites his lower lip naughtily. One strap of her dress is still off her shoulder; he pulls it up. “We can do it with clothes on, too.”
He runs his hands up her thighs, like he’s making an illustration. Little arrows of liquid heat prick her between her legs, higher up than he’s touching her.
He produces a condom from his wallet, which feels (irrationally) like an insult. She doesn’t tell him that she’s had sex exactly one time before, because that makes it sound like this time, number two, means something.
“Is this what you want?” He palms the heft of his dick, stiff and thick in its latex sheath.
“Isn’t that obvious?” she asks. Snapping a little.
“It’s not really a boast,” he says. His eyes find hers. His hand is on her lower back, rubbing patient circles as the head of his sex bumps hers. “I just want to ascertain that we’re on the same page. That you’re cool with doing this.”
“If you’re trying to ask if I consent, then the answer is yes.”
“Oh, good.”
She tightens when he moves inside her, because she’s expecting it to hurt. Jesse laughs a little in his throat, and murmurs something about relaxing. His voice is a little screwed up and she likes that, likes it enough that it catches her off guard and her body shifts.
“You are insanely tight,” he compliments her. “Wow.”
He pulls her legs wide around him. Quinn hasn’t done the splits since the demise of her cheerleading career, and it stretches more than a little. But Jesse looks down with dark eyes at the place where their bodies are joined, and she can feel every part of him against her skin, her thighs, the parts of herself that she hasn’t touched since the night she got pregnant.
“You like that?” he pants. “That feel good?”
“Oh God.” The sound of his voice does something to her, like the talking makes it dirtier. “Uh-huh.”
He cradles her hips, and the burn between her legs is becoming a slick, delicious ache. She begins to meet his thrusts with her hands bracing herself on the desk, lifting her hips.
Puck made Quinn come the night she slept with him, and her knowledge of sexual etiquette is virtually nonexistent. So it surprises her when Jesse finishes fairly quickly, groaning in her ear as he pulses inside her.
Afterwards, he uses the hem of his ridiculous hipster t-shirt to clean them both up, and zips his jacket up over the pale skin of his chest.
“Thanks for a good time, Quinn.” He smoothes her hair, and drops a quick kiss on her forehead. “You’re a cool girl.”
“Do you do this often?” she dryly asks him.
“I’m a man driven by my passions,” he explains. “An artist can’t be confined by societal norms when led to an experience that enlivens the soul.”
“Oh,” she says.
“You aren’t taking anything away from her.” His eyes meet hers frankly. “My beautiful, talented girlfriend is as yet unprepared to consummate our passion for one another. She knows that I’ve done this before. So it’s not like this is a betrayal of something between her and I.”
He makes it sound natural and so unworried that Quinn’s almost convinced.
“I’m not worried about her,” she insists. “I don’t even like her.”
“I know,” he replies. “She told me.”
That one takes her aback, just a little bit.
“You won’t tell Rachel, of course.” It’s not really a question. “And I, in return, will use my utmost discretion and won’t breathe a word to… well. I didn’t even ask who the lucky daddy was.”
“Puck,” she says, hating how sophomoric his name sounds on her lips. It’s the first time that she’s ever admitted it out loud. “It’s Puck’s.”
“The jock with the mohawk?” he asks. “Oh. That’s an interesting twist.”
“You call it a twist, I call it a ridiculously poor life decision,” she says. “It was my second time being drunk and my first time having sex.”
She realizes too late that she definitely just over-shared, despite her intent to avoid doing so. But Jesse has snapped closed the compact in which he’s checking out his hair, and he’s staring at her.
“Your boyfriend’s best friend got you drunk and pregnant on your first time out?” he says incredulously. “Oh, my God. You’re one back alley abortion and a peasant dress away from being a hit Broadway musical, you know.”
“You haven’t heard the part about me being the president of the Celibacy Club.”
He laughs, and it’s the least-stagey thing she’s heard from him yet.
---
“Why do you smell like fucking?”
Six words. That’s more than Puck’s spoken to her in ten days.
Quinn looks up quickly from her bowl of Spaghetti-Os, grateful that his mother is already at work for the evening. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Fucking. Sex. On the ride home today.” She realizes that he hasn’t touched his food. “I thought I smelled it.”
“It’s probably you,” she counters. “I heard Coach Sylvester slamming lockers in the hallway because Santana showed up half an hour late to practice. And you both have last period free… like, what a total coincidence. Second of all-”
“If I was fucking Lopez, which I’m not, maybe it’s just because-”
“-keep your idiot voice down. You’ll wake up your sister.”
“-she actually knows how to have fun, unlike some chicks.”
“I know all about Santana’s kind of fun.” Quinn lets acid seep into her words. “Last I heard, half the ice hockey team had to visit the STD clinic because of having fun with Santana.”
“You’re jealous.” His eyes narrow, and she thinks she sees triumph behind his sneer. “You can’t handle the thought that maybe Santana’s getting some of this. Baby, I told you that I can’t be tied down.”
Quinn sits back against the kitchen chair with a thump. Her stomach pops up, and the greenish fluorescent light wilts the flowers on her maternity top. Her food is tasteless in her mouth, so she pushes the bowl away.
“I’ve gotten ‘some of that,’” she reminds him quietly, “and everyone knows where it got me. Anyone else who wants some is perfectly welcome to it.”
“What’s the deal, Q? ‘Once you pop, the fun don’t stop?’” He’s still playing with his food, watching globs of miniature pasta coast from his spoon down the curved inside of the bowl. His words shoot straight across the table at her.
There’s a moment where she considers picking up her bowl of processed, canned crap and throwing it in his face. Anger flares red and hot across her vision, and her fingers curl into fists under the table. She feels his eyes on her, but she focuses on the dishes when she puts them in the sink. With the water almost hotter than she can stand, she washes everything up and rubs a soapy washcloth over the countertop, even though it really doesn’t need extra cleaning. When her elbow grease has smoothed away the blinding rage she feels, she folds the dishcloth and turns around slowly.
“You’re a jerk,” she says, quiet and deliberate. “You are disgusting, and a moron, and I hate you. It’s a good thing that I’m giving this baby up, because it would be ruined with you as its father.”
As she expected, that’s enough to shut him up. She doesn’t wait around to see his expression, just applies herself to the task of boosting her overgrown body up the stairs.
In the bathroom, she runs a shower. With the door locked safely behind her, she gives herself a careful sniff. All she can smell is a little bit of sweat and her vanilla-lime body spray.
That night, laying in bed and trying to read Things Fall Apart for English class - she’s never heard so much about yams in her life - she’s disturbed from her half-doze by the cramps. Her lower belly tightens like a fist, and the accompanying, dull pain is a cresting wave. She groans, and doubles up, and then opens her eyes wide when she realizes that these are probably contractions.
She’s only seven months along, so she figures that the baby can’t be escaping already. Biting her lip, she shuffles over to Puck’s computer. It takes nine or ten clicks to clear away all the porno pop-ups (apparently her boyfriend likes lesbians. A lot.) so that she can navigate to Web M.D.
It doesn’t take long for her to learn about Braxton-Hicks contractions, and how vigorous sex can cause them. She wills herself to slow the frantic beating of her heart and relax, thinking crankily that someone up there clearly never wants her to have sex ever again. The site says that drinking a bunch of water should help, but Quinn can hear Puck using the bathroom and shuffling around in the basket of folded laundry outside the door. So she settles for changing her position in the chair and nibbling at the granola bar she’d put in her purse after lunch.
While she’s logged on, she checks her e-mail and Facebook. The chat box in the bottom right-hand corner shows her that Finn is online, a realization that hits her like a shove. She wonders why he hasn’t blocked her, and realizes at almost the same moment that it’s probably because he doesn’t know how.
Her heart twists. Quickly, she clicks the option to show herself as invisible.
---
“Can it not be as rough this time?” she asks.
“That wasn’t rough,” he says with a sly wink. “But as it so happens, I realized something when I was reflecting back on our last rendezvous.”
He moves his hand under her skirt, and her oh! is almost swallowed.
This time, in an unused lab in the science wing, with an outdated mobile of the solar system overhead (Pluto is still in orbit around the papier-mâché sun), she lets him take her shirt off. There’s an ugly cotton panel on her jean skirt, but it doesn’t matter. She’s already made the decision to not care, to hold her head high like she’s still 110 pounds and the hottest thing in the class of 2012. Little sunlight filters through the dusty vertical blinds. He says that Figgins won’t budget for a janitor to clean vacant classrooms. It makes sense, but she wonders how he knows that.
“Lay back,” he commands.
She balances her back on a long black table while he moves a box of Erlenmeyer flasks and a rack of test tubes away. The clink of Pyrex and the smell of old experiments seem especially vivid, she thinks distantly, when he folds his tall body over the edge and uses his mouth on her.
Puck hadn’t done that, and Quinn’s not altogether sure that Finn would have even known that act existed. At first, she can’t get over the odd feeling of it - it’s warm and slippery, and the flickers of pleasure it gives her are as mild as a candle’s flame. Her fingers scramble under the table, looking for something to hold onto. But then Jesse uses his fingers, too, and the thing inside Quinn begins to brim, sloshing around in her head and her hips.
“Please… please put it in.” She barely recognizes the sound of her own voice. “Now.”
Jesse pulls her ankles and calves, helping her scoot to the end of the table. It’s the perfect height for his pelvis, and he grinds against her. She guides him inside her, and leaves her hand down there. Three thrusts later, she’s coming with a guttural moan. She shoves her free hand underneath herself to keep it from grabbing at him.
“Want to have another one?” he asks.
She shakes her head, afraid of starting contractions again. She’s a bit speechless still, residual moans being pushed from her lips when he moves. Quinn puts her hand to her mouth and bites it a little in an attempt to keep quiet. Jesse pulls it away. It’s like, now that he’s taken care of her needs, he can slow down. He thrusts carefully, like he’s being mindful of her request to be more gentle, eyes drifting closed.
One of his big hands cups the underside of her knee, pressing it up against the hard underside of her stomach. Her leg comes up, and she hooks her ankle over his shoulder. It makes him go deeper, and he groans, and sucks an appreciative kiss onto the bump of her ankle, on the side of her foot. If she could, Quinn would be embarrassed for him at doing that. But she feels herself starting to come again, the first grasping tendril of heat in her hips. Greedily she pulls at him, dragging him into a quicker pace as she sucks her breath around the skin of his shoulder. It’s like staring into the sun when her second orgasm hits, bright white light flooding her eyes and erupting through her veins. It’s easier, harder, wetter. Jesse’s lips stop on her heel and he watches her, the jagged mash of his hips slow and rhythmic again as it’s riding through her.
It isn’t until she’s arched her neck back, head dizzy and heavy and hot, that he speeds up again and finishes. There’s a long moment afterwards when he’s collapsed against her, catching his breath with his hands propped on either side of her elbows. Quinn hitches an errant gasp and he grins a little bit, tugging a lock of her hair in a way that would be fond if that were at all possible.
The thing about Jesse is that he doesn’t acknowledge her baby bump. There was that comment he made the first time, but then nothing. If his fingers brush against her distended belly, it’s no different from how he touches her any other place. It’s not like he has some kind of a fetish (which Quinn only heard of because of Puck and his gross mental catalogue of disgusting sex knowledge), but he’s not repulsed by it, either. If he notices her stretch marks - which he has to have, he’s got eyes - he doesn’t say anything about them. At first, Quinn really appreciates that. She’s so used to people staring at her body these days, people she doesn’t even know checking her out from the corners of their eyes and smirking like they know anything at all about her and her life. The absence of that constant attention is a relief, and makes her feel more normal than she can remember since the day she saw the plus sign on that pregnancy test. Even if “normal” has been replaced by crying herself to sleep in a strange bed, growing another human, and having furtive sex with a loser’s loser boyfriend in the music room after hours. She feels wanted.
But then, all of the sudden, she realizes that Jesse doesn’t see her, either. There are times when they’ll be in the middle of one of these things they keep doing, and he’s smiling, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. They don’t interact in any way at school or socially, because he’s a senior and also Rachel’s lapdog. She knows nothing about him, really. It’s not that she wants to. But at the same time, the vastness of all the unspoken things between them makes her uncomfortable, and then more so for even thinking about it. Like right now.
He’s perched on the counter watching as she washes her hands in one of the long line of sinks. Under his breath, he hums a song she doesn’t recognize and he hands her a paper towel.
Why are you really doing this? she wants to ask, or maybe I’m sorry, am I boring you? But the first one is pointless, and the second sounds pathetic, even in her own head. What comes out is:
“I can sing, too.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I sing. Well.” All of the sudden, it seems critically important that it be said. “I didn’t get into the glee club on my good looks, you know. I never get solos because your girlfriend is the little princess and Mercedes is a whiner. But I could. Sing.”
She feels stupid, stupider than maybe she’s ever felt before in her life. But the words are out, and there’s nothing she can do about them now.
“Sing, then.” He folds his arms behind his head. “I’m a thoroughly captive audience. You should sing me something.”
But Quinn’s face is hot and her throat is dry - she’s thirsty all the damn time these days, and he’s been kissing her for about an hour - and in an instant, it’s like she’s forgotten the words to every song she’s ever sung.
He stares at her, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does.
---
Only the most profound self-loathing, she thinks, could justify stealing a guy from Rachel Berry of all people. Now that Jesse’s enrolled at their school, Rachel parades him around like her gallant knight and dangles from his arm. She touches him incessantly, body language so blatant that nobody in the school (even Brittany) needs a psych degree to get the message: mine! It’s so apparent that she’s never had someone belong to her that way before, and that she’s overjoyed with the whole experience of having her first boyfriend. It’s pathetic - the way everyone actually uses it, as in lame - how happy he makes her.
Quinn can’t help thinking that there are parts of Jesse she’s touched that Rachel certainly has not, things that a virgin girlfriend can’t possibly know. The peppery, not at all unpleasant smell of his underarms mixed with his weirdo patchouli cologne. The knobby area at the back of his neck that bumps under her palm when they're kissing. The bristle of sandy hair between his legs, and the way it feels when he’s inside her. The way he looks when he comes, smug as normal but a little surprised, too.
A mean thrill ladders up her mind when she sees them together. A very tiny part of herself says to stop being a bitch, but a bigger, uglier part loves having something better, untouched, first. At having gotten Rachel back for stealing something that belonged to Quinn once upon a time, even if that something hadn’t been rightfully hers at the end.
She’s doing the best she can. She takes her prenatal vitamin, complete with an iron supplement that turns her stomach every morning. She goes to the doctor. She doesn’t flunk off the Honor Roll, even if pregnancy seems as good an excuse to become an academic slacker. She wears Spandex blends and a dress with polka dots because it was only ten dollars on clearance in the maternity section at Sears. She deserves something, she thinks. There isn’t anything else, so it will have to be this.
Brushing away the dustbunnies on the floor of Puck’s room, she bends over and carefully paints her toenails bright pink. Afterwards she lies across the bed with her feet dangling and waits a full hour for the polish to dry. Over the edge of the mattress, her hair hangs down as glossy and smooth as it did when she was a well-loved freshman (thanks to a packet of deep conditioner bought for, one dollar and nineteen cents at Sally’s). Her lower back protests the position, so she scooches her hands under her butt and stares at the ceiling. Inside Quinn's belly, her daughter flutters like an anxious butterfly.
---
“This is going to have to be the last time we meet like this.” His fingertips drum a tattoo on the inside of her thigh, sending a lazy flicker of heat to her core. “Rachel noticed marks on my back the other day.”
There are two obvious responses to that - I left marks? and Rachel saw you shirtless? Wow. But what Quinn actually does is lift her head and kind of gape at him. And then immediately wish that she hadn’t, because she’s still naked and has chin fat in this position.
“Um, what did you say to that?” she asks.
“We were going through our yoga routine. I made the fatal mistake of wearing my tank leotard, and…” He shrugs by way of completing the statement. “I told her that I had to rescue my neighbor’s cat from a tree. She seemed to believe it.”
The control booth of the auditorium is cramped, especially with the two of them spread side-by-side on the floor below the vastness of the picture window overlooking the house. Quinn pushes herself up in earnest, self-consciously covering her chest.
“You know how it is.” He hands over her dress, solicitously turning it right-side in for her. “This was fun, but we both have other things going on. It’s a natural end.”
“You should, uh, be careful,” she says. Her throat hurts like someone is twisting it on the inside. She realizes what that means, that she’s fighting back tears, and is immediately horrified.
“I beg your pardon?” Unfazed, he’s tying his shoes.
“She’s going to realize it eventually. She’s not stupid.”
“Realize what?” he asks.
“That you’re playing her.”
“I love Rachel.” He affirms it simply, like he would if saying that the sky was, in fact, blue. “You know nothing. And anyway, Quinn, I believe that you said it yourself. You’ve been recently outed as a cheater and a liar. Your credibility is damaged. The odds that anyone would believe your crazy stories are low.”
She sputters. He leans in, and presses a careless kiss to the side of her mouth. Anger fibrillates her heart, but she can’t manage the words to convey it.
“Don’t take any of that personally,” he says. “I still think you’re interesting. See you around, Quinn.”
He leaves twirling the key to the booth - just another one of his little secrets - around his finger. When the door shuts behind him, Quinn fumbles quickly for her purse between the soundboard and lighting panel, and digs out a tissue as fast as she can. Walking around the school with a face covered in goopy, tear-streaked makeup is low, even by her currently humble standards.
---
The smile Quinn holds during practice the next day feels heavy, like she’s been carrying it around for years. She’s lightheadedly impatient when Mr. Schu insists on stopping the number to change a step. The club is singing around her, but the chorus is fading into the background like a radio with the volume turned down. One moment she’s shoving at Mike’s arm around her waist, his arm suddenly too hot to bear. The room is washing over in colors, splotchy areas in her line of vision. And then the world goes black.
When her eyelashes flutter, it’s actually Tina’s face looming over Quinn’s, her head cushioned by the other girl’s knees in their lacy tights. Mr. Schu is holding her hand. And Quinn, overwhelmed with the abject humiliation of having fainted in front of the Glee club, wishes that she could sink through the floor and maybe just die.
“Quinn, honey. Are you okay? Should we call 911?”
Hearing that endearment from a teacher, even one as corny as Mr. Schu, makes her stomach roil furiously. She swallows rapidly, trying to hold down the bile rising in her throat. Her first attempt to shove off the cold floor fails, and Tina steadies Quinn before she can fall.
“Don’t call the ambulance,” Quinn mumbles. “’M fine.”
“You should stay still for a few minutes.” Artie rolls up. “Are you seeing spots? You should put your legs up and have some water.”
Brittany’s hands are cool on Quinn’s ankles, pulling them onto her lap. There’s a flower doodled on her thumb in purple ink. Moving seems pointless, so Quinn gives herself a moment. She feels uncomfortably hot, and the floor is at least cool under her back. Gold stars dangle from the ceiling, catching the overhead light.
Puck is still serving detention during the first hour of practice. Quinn has never been so grateful for the wrath of the band geeks.
Rachel’s gripping Jesse’s arm in maidenly terror, like a pregnant fainting spell could grip her at any moment. Jesse is playing the doting suitor with the fingers of his free hand twined with hers, but he’s looking studiously at the toes of his Converse.
Finn is next to Santana. He looks pale, but that’s not surprising - he’s the guy who almost lost his dinner when they went to see Paranormal Activity. Part of Quinn wishes that she could rub her face against his striped sweater and maybe take a long nap. But that’s not an option, of course. So she balls a fist under her aching back, and uses what feels like every bit of energy in her body to sit up. She summons her bitchiest expression, the homecoming queen imperiousness that hasn’t come out since the day she became unable to zip up her cheerleader’s skirt.
“That’s it for the free show, guys. Could someone possibly give me a hand?”
It takes Mr. Schu an effort to hoist Quinn to her feet, she can tell. Her maternity dress billows around her like a tent, and she slinks shamefaced to a chair to sit out the rest of rehearsal. Sipping the lukewarm grape Gatorade that someone ran and grabbed from a backpack somewhere, she tries to breathe.
---
It took three whole weeks for Puck to let go of the sulk he’s been nursing against her, a character arc she doesn’t even really notice until the following night when she catches him leaning against the door frame. Quinn hasn’t seen him since their silent drive to school that morning, since she left early for her eight-month appointment with her obstetrician. The bus ride and long wait in the clinic exhausted her, which isn’t hard to do these days. Propped up on some pillows so that her cumbersome belly doesn’t suffocate her, she’s twisting a too-tight silver ring around her finger.
“Hey,” he says.
“Don’t you have some kind of juvenile delinquency to be committing?” It’s a weak barb, which must be why he ignores it.
“How is the little chick?” he asks, and Quinn thinks of English class, and having learned that synecdoche means referring to a part of something like it’s the whole.
“Getting big,” she says. “Healthy, I guess.”
“What happened at Glee practice yesterday?” His line of questioning is like a firing squad, and she realizes that he probably wanted to ask that one first.
“Singing.” She hears herself being petulant, and can’t help it.
“What else?” he pushes.
“You obviously know, or you wouldn’t have asked.”
“Fuck, Quinn.” She can’t seem to care about the profanity, though he knows she hates it. “Don’t pull that shit. Why’d I have to hear about it from Matt?”
She looks at the ceiling.
“We haven’t been talking, Puck. In case you missed the memo.”
“In case you missed the memo,” he apes, “you totally went crazy-psycho-preggo on me and gave me blue balls, Q. I had to jerk it like three times before I got over that shit.”
“The kid you knocked me up with made me faint in school,” she snarls. “And made me too fat to deal with, apparently. Cry me a river.”
“Awww, shit.” He throws his hands up. “Can’t you just get over that already? You interpreted that wrong. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it, exactly?”
“I think you’re way hot,” he says. “I’m just not used to, you know. All that.”
Sitting cross-legged with “all that” weighing on her like a lead weight, no makeup, and her hair in a messy braid, his words still land like an insult.
“I don’t need your… sympathy.” Quinn doesn’t curse, even at this stage in the erosion of her character, so she doesn’t add the word fuck like she’s thinking.
“’S not sympathy. I was a douche. You made me feel like shit,” he mutters, sitting down heavily on the bed. He pulls at the edge of her dress. “Guess we’re even.”
“I don’t want to be even with you,” she says.
“And I don’t wanna fight. What’s with you and that fucker, Jesse?”
“Nothing,” she says. “That’s just stupid.”
“There’s nothing going on with me and Santana.” He looks her in the eye, and she thinks that he’s probably lying, but she still respects him in a twisted way for saying it. “I still want to work this out with you.”
The TV is on in the background. It’s game show hour, that gap before prime time when the old people shows are on. It’s either Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy! , which is funny because Quinn’s realizing that she’s neither lucky or smart enough to handle this hole she’s dug for herself. With the volume turned down, she isn’t paying attention to the white-toothed grins of the hosts or the winning screams of the contestants. Like it is, it’s just a bright light in the background. Puck’d tossed his shirt in the laundry pile a while ago, and she realizes that he looks good to her.
“Why don’t you stay?” she mutters, finally. It feels somehow like it’s costing her something to say those words, even though it’s really what she wants. “Just for tonight.”
There are some papers loose on the floor, homework that he never does. He shoves them around with his bare foot.
“Yeah. I can do that.”
That night, she lets him kiss her until her hair’s undone and tangling in his impatient hands, his body hot and huge and eager and feeling amazing all over hers. But she pushes him away when he goes for more. Puck doesn’t act mad, and Quinn sleepily wonders if this is what is going to pass for understanding between them. They both fall asleep side by side on his mattress with his hand under her shirt, on her stomach. Quinn wakes up at three A.M. or so (her phone is on the nightstand on Puck’s side, and she doesn’t want to disturb him). She has to pee, as usual, and she’s cold. She aches to curl herself up against the huge, warm body under the covers, but she forces herself to stay away. His queen size bed is really not that large for a football player and his pregnant girlfriend, however, and she feels like she’s doing a balancing act on the hard line of the mattress’s edge.
The shadows start to make more sense the longer she’s awake, until she can make out forms and shapes in the darkness. She sees her suitcase open on the floor, and his backpack dropped near a tangle of clothes and shoes in the corner. It’s probably stuffed with forged hall passes, detention slips, and notes from girls, she thinks. Quinn buries her face in the side of the pillow, but it’s no use. She’s heaving up noises, she’s crying. Worse, she doesn’t even know why. Her shoulders quake with the effort of staying quiet. The pillowcase gets wet with tears and snot as she snuffles it pathetically.
When she gets herself under control, she rolls over carefully. It could be the fact that it’s not so easy anymore, and that she has to prop herself up on her hands and shove off the mattress to reposition her alien body. It shakes the whole bed. That must be why there’s a flash of Puck’s eyes in the dark.
---
March passes, and the kids start counting down to spring break. Less than two weeks before her due date, Quinn is passing between third and fourth period when she sees Jesse heading for the parking lot. Seniors have open campus privileges and he has first lunch, so that’s not unusual in and of itself. Something still makes her follow him.
There’s a car with darkened windows idling outside the door. Hidden behind a pillar, Quinn watches Jesse lean in and give a lazy kiss to an unfamiliar girl. A Carmel parking permit hangs on the rearview mirror. Jesse rummages in his backpack and digs out a sheaf of papers that is easily recognizable as the music, judges’ packets, and backstage worksheets for New Directions’ performance set. Regionals are in ten days.
There’s a camera phone in her pocket and an accusatory shout in her chest, but Quinn just hugs her books and goes back inside.
She doesn’t tell a soul, and it’s not even hard to do. Quinn is beginning to realize that she’s an expert at keeping dirty little secrets.
end.