Glee Fic: to burst in motion
Well. So much for going to bed early and what not. It's like nine hundred degrees in our apartment and what better way to cope? For marketchippie who is the perfect enabler and who is supportive when I occasionally breakout into talking about twirling and things. Which is everyday.
to burst in motion
glee ; rachel/jesse ; 6,510 words, PG
they will laugh about it. they may tease her. they all know she really means it: she is not coming back. spoilers for new york.
-
Backstage is quiet. She cannot bring herself to sneak into the front. It’s silly, really, New York and the butterflies in her stomach.
The stage is empty. Nobody’s in the mood, so lingering and staying behind was really easy; they leave for Lima in the morning and she knows how to get back to the hotel. They won’t miss her. But she is looking at the stage too, the audience and the empty seats trying to see something outside a stupid kiss, and trying to go back to that moment that Kurt and her shared earlier. She shouldn’t linger that long, she scolds herself.
“How was the date?”
Jesse’s voice does not surprise her. Her mouth twitches and she looks down. Her hands smooth against her dress. “It was sweet,” she says quietly. Rachel turns and he leans against the wall next to her. “We went for a walk,” she adds. “He wore a suit. He brought me flowers.”
“Tulips?” She looks at him in surprise. Jesse reaches for her, grinning. “You were more of a daisies girl, last time I checked,” he says. There is no mention of Finn or sabotage. He is just talking to her. “You still like daisies, right?”
“I do.”
His hand curls around her elbow. She lets him drag her forward. Her dress flutters against her legs and she’s careful, maybe too careful - it’s silly but she doesn’t want to scratch the floors.
He doesn’t ask: are you okay? She doesn’t need him to, she decides. Her hand presses against his chest and she studies her fingers as they spread into his jacket, tugging at the sides. He smells a little like cigarettes. They’re not good for your voice, she wants to tell him She should be back at the hotel and upstairs, in bed with the other girls, but the truth is she’s been sleepless ever since they arrived in the city.
“So I’m going to stay,” he tells her. He gently pulls his hand away from his jacket. He steps around her too. “I pulled the - consider this therapy card with my parents. I have a few friends. I have a better plan. It was only a matter of time that I’d go and make my way to the top in the most unconventional way.” He stops and turns, grinning. “I do like the promise of things,” he pauses and waves his hand, “unconventional things.”
Rachel rolls her eyes. She follows too. He makes a sweeping movement to the center of the stage, swinging his arms back. They sink into his pockets of his jackets - that stupid, stupid leather jacket that he thinks makes him a lot cooler than he is. But she won’t tell him that. She likes the jacket.
“Congratulations,” she says after awhile.
He chuckles.
“I mean it,” she says. She shifts onto one foot, pulling off her heel. It hits the floor sharply. “You deserve to be happy,” she says too. “And if UCLA wasn’t it, it wasn’t it. We both know you were going to find your way here one-way or another. But it wasn’t going to be -”
“As the show chorus whisperer,” he finishes. Rachel laughs and tosses the other heel to the side. She mimics him, rolling back on her heels and the moving to stand on her toes. She does a little spin and he watches her. She can feel the flush on her cheeks.
They stay quiet. There is too much to say, she thinks.
No one says a word outside. She stands next to Kurt; she can’t look at Finn and Finn can’t look at her and there are no discrepancies. She tries and thinks like she did last year: she will have to work harder, she will have to push harder, but standing in the middle of New York, there is a much different set of rules.
It’s that Finn has the worst timing. This is why she goes back inside.
“You know,” he says. The jacket is gone. Somewhere by her heels, she thinks. He’s sitting on the edge, his legs swinging out as they watch the empty audience. Rachel narrows her gaze to the top row. “It doesn’t mean that we have to stop talking.”
Her lips curl.
“I know you still think the occasional worst of me, but I think we could do this the right way. A slow courting, the romance -”
“You’re awful.”
Jesse drops his head back, looking up at her. He smirks. “You love it.”
“You’re not even patient,” she says.
“I am too.” He looks mildly offended. She laughs a little, shaking her head. “I was home for a little while. I didn’t even think it would be that long.”
“You just proved my point.”
He shrugs, as if to say he’s letting go of the point - it’s not an admission, of course, but she watches as his mouth twitches and he falls into some sort of dramatic pout. She shakes her head and then moves to sit next to him, her legs swinging out.
“Does he make you happy?”
“Jesse,” she warns.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Does he - I’m trying to avoid turning it into a competition because you know I’ll make an argument and the best one at that - but does he make you happy?”
“You can’t let me enjoy being here?”
He waves a hand. “You’ll be back. It’ll be different too, I promise.”
“Uh-huh.”
He nudges her and she fights a smile. He reaches down and makes a grab for her leg, pulling them over his lap. His fingers curl around her calf. She makes a soft sound, ducking slightly as he starts to rub his fingers into her skin. He laughs when she grimaces but keeps her close.
She lets him, of course. He doesn’t press too much. Instead, his fingers seem to assume movement as if it were an old habit. They watch the empty rows in front of them and Rachel starts to count the seats that wrap around the edge; she tries to remember the people that sat around the stage, the faces, but they still seem to merge into one.
“I’ll be back, huh?” her voice is soft, and she leans back, resting on her hands. She cranes her neck up, studying the ceiling. It peaks in the strangest of places, the corners, the center, and above the rows in the back. She picks at her dress again. “I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s -”
“Not Finn,” she says dryly.
His mouth twists. “Am I that much of an open book?”
She doesn’t answer. Her throat tightens and it’s odd, too odd how the sudden memory of the how they ended the first time comes back. She watches his hand on her leg, his fingers pressing against her skin. He kneads, folding his hand into a fist and then relaxing it over her knee.
“We’d be okay here,” she says. She’s careful. “You and me,” she tells him. “I always thought we’d be - well, of course, there were at least nine different scenarios that played out in my head, sometimes even in front of my mirror. I wanted to tell you off a lot, but, well, I’m a class act and as much as I’m a fan of past be past, you are still a jerk.”
He pokes her side. “Water under the bridge.”
“You’re enjoying this too much.”
“I am sorry,” he says.
“You told me,” she nods.
He sighs.
"And I told you," she says quickly. "After prom even - we're past it. It takes quite a bit of effort to hold a grudge and when I look back I just ... I know."
"You know?" He doesn't hide his confusion. His hand stops at her knee. His palm is warm and his fingers flex against her skin.
But her mouth curls and she's serious, struck by the moment with a strange kind of confidence. She looks at him and sees the combination, the boy that she first met and the boy know - it makes her wistful, she thinks.
"Just be patient with me," she says. "That's what I want from you."
Jesse says nothing.
Finn waits up for her. He sits in the lobby and watches Jesse leave the hotel after taking her back. It’s too early of a flight back in the morning to Lima, back to high school, back to a summer that she feels completely unprepared for.
“They hate me,” he announces.
“They don’t,” she says tiredly. They won’t look at each other.
He watches Jesse disappear with her. Her fingers are still curled in the heels of her shoes. She wonders if she could ask him the same thing.
But she tastes the kiss still and it has a weight, a kind of uncertainty that feels so heavy all over again. She feels tentative. Finn’s hand reaches for hers, his fingers grazing the back of her hand. She pulls it away, swinging her arm and her shoes. This is stupid, she thinks.
“We’re okay,” she murmurs. She rubs the back of her neck, looking up at him. She offers a small smile. “There’s next year,” she says. She looks back to the door, and then outside again, her mouth turning. “And then -”
“You’re here,” Finn finishes.
Her lips purse and she reaches for him. Her fingers curl in his sleeve and she tugs him back. There’s a metaphor here, she doesn’t say.
It takes an entire summer of small dates, strange dates, and sitting around a coffee table with Kurt and Blaine, talking about New York as if she never left. She doesn’t tell anyone that Jesse calls her, texts her, but she’s sure both Finn and Kurt know - Kurt because she’s a terrible liar and Finn, well, Finn if only because he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Jesse calls late though. He sends her pictures of that not so small studio and she saves them in her email - she doesn’t look at them, no, not every day, but she keeps them if only to know that they’re there.
“So,” he says when she picks up. “Kiss him?”
She scoffs. “May I remind you,” she drawls, “about that time you drunk dialed me and there was blonde named Tiffany and she had enormous - and you said enormous, or was it gigantic? I think -”
“Point made.”
She smirks. He laughs too and she moves to her bed, dropping back and staring at the ceiling. There is bag on the floor, still unopened from New York. She kept silly things - the napkin from breakfast with Kurt, a pen that the theatre attendant slipped them with roll of his eyes and sharp, amused stupid kids, there’s the program, there’s Sunshine’s number and a postcard, something from the gift shop in the hotel.
“Rachel?”
“Sorry,” she says. She rubs her eyes.
“You’re draining my phone bill.”
“You keep calling.”
“Well.” He pauses and she lets out a soft laugh. She hears the sounds on the other line - his kitchen or bathroom, she imagines. He sleeps less, she’s figured out. There are auditions and he’s writing - he’s excited, she knows that too. She likes that he calls her like this.
“So what is it now?” she asks. “Word choice? Neighbors? Lack of a piano?”
He snorts. “I have a piano.”
“It’s -” she cranes her neck back, catching the clock. “Almost midnight.”
“Romantic, right?”
“Stop it,” she says. She can barely hide her amusement.
“I didn’t say anything,” he says with a laugh. He yawns obnoxiously. “You could come visit me, you know. Offer still stands.”
“You never made the offer.”
“Unspoken, of course.”
He’s baiting her, and she knows - it amuses her now, listening to the different pitches and tension his voice takes when he’s trying to be playful. She misses him, she thinks. She expected this too but that’s the sort of thing that she doesn’t share. She doesn’t want to share Jesse.
She bites her lip. “Send me keys,” she says. He won’t do it, she thinks. “And then I’ll believe it.”
It’s a stupid thing to say; this is Jesse and she can taste the challenge. She can imagine that look that he gets, or maybe still gets with a different twist - it is still Jesse all the same.
But then he laughs. “Be careful what you wish for.”
Finn brings her flowers. It’s the hottest day of the summer, not counting their last day of school where the entire Glee club cornered themselves into the room because it was the only place the air conditioning worked. They sit on her porch and she tucks her knees to her chest.
“Sorry,” he says. His lips press against her jaw. He smiles and she takes the tulips from him, fingering the stems. “That I was, you know - the timing, I guess. There’s that too.”
“You keep apologizing,” she says gently.
“I feel like I have to.”
She frowns. She doesn’t ask why. Apologies are strange things, she thinks. They come and they go. They made a promise not to talk about the year before, or the subsequent one that’s coming.
“So how’s New York?” he asks her, and it’s a quick change of the subject - Finn’s a little wary about asking about Jesse but more diplomatic. It’s funny. With Jesse, she thinks, there’s just no filter, polite or not.
“He’s fine,” she says, amused. “He’s running around with quite the crowd, from what I hear, writing - I hope - and doing Jesse things. I’m sure you can fill in the blank there.”
Finn shakes his head. “I guess.”
Rachel bites her lip. She catches the mistake. She’s been so good about keeping one to herself and the other to the utmost basic. The thought crosses her mind again: she just doesn’t want to share Jesse.
“I don’t - ” her fingers brush over the tulips. “I wish it were as simple as saying to you Jesse is just talking to me about New York and writing and - I don’t know. I wish I could explain it but it’s complicated and it’s mine and it’s his and there’s only so much I can … talk about it. I appreciate you asking. Like I appreciate him asking about you - ”
He raises an eyebrow. “The kiss?”
Rachel flusters. “It doesn’t matter.” She bites her lip again. “The point is all of you, not just you and him - you’re all going to be a part of my life in one way or another. Things are different. Things are just different.”
Finn is quiet. Her stomach is in knots. Maybe she said the wrong thing, she thinks. Maybe it just needed to be said. But slowly, very slowly, he wraps an arm around her shoulder and presses a kiss to the side of her head.
“So I had an adult conversation today,” she tells Jesse later.
He laughs. She listens to the piano on the other side of the line. There’s a murmur and she ignores it, moving through the kitchen. The end of her dress is sticking to the backs of her legs.
“How was it?” he asks.
“It was -” she shakes her head. She should’ve called Kurt, she thinks. “It was good,” she says. She’s careful. “It was one of those moments that happen and you’re really surprised that people listen to you.”
He scoffs. “People listen to you, Rachel.”
She blushes. She’s glad that he can’t see her. Her fingers press against her neck, then over her cheeks as she follows the flush. She’s glad he can’t see the tulips in her sink or the two empty glasses of lemonade that are still out on the porch, empty and dry.
“No.”
“No?”
Rachel shakes her head as if he could see her. “People listen to me when I sing,” she says. “Sometimes, I - I still fight to be heard. But listen is word you can use loosely, you know?”
“Stop it,” he says.
She feels herself flush but he doesn’t press. She’s quiet and listens to him press on the piano keys. She is tempted to look at the pictures he’s sent her, of course. But she knows where he’s put it: in the corner, by the window so that he can look at the city.
It’s what she’d do.
He stops and clears his throat. “Check your mail.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer and she’s up, moving to her desk where the mail from downstairs sits. Her dad probably put in her room and it’s not hard to spot the envelope with his handwriting present. It’s small, she thinks with surprise.
“You sent me a t-shirt?” she teases. He snorts and she slips a finger under the flap of the envelope. She gets a post-it and frowns, reading Jesse’s simple open invitation. She finds the key digging into one of the corners, pushing itself into creating a tear.
She’s quiet. Her hand trembles.
“I’m a lot a things,” Jesse says. His voice breaks on the other line and her head is starting to spin. It’s like that last time, singing with him when he arrived back into Lima, the stage at Nationals, prom - everything is out of order and in a panic, she’s in a panic because this isn’t the thing you do when you ask someone to be patient.
“I’m a lot of things,” Jesse says again. “But I’m also consistent. My hair’s pretty great -” she lets out a watery laugh and he continues. “I know what you asked me, I also know that you’ve got a year and there’s no such thing as early start. So come, don’t come - wait until Christmas, bring Kurt - or, you know, don’t. This is just me asking you to make a little bit of room for me.”
Her fingers wrap around the key. “You’re something else,” she says finally.
“I know,” he says, and she laughs, rubbing her eyes.
“Come and go, huh?” It feels different, saying it. It feels heavy and scary and a part of her wants to retreat and just breakdown to say no, no not yet. But this is Jesse and with Jesse, it’s about jumping in headfirst.
He’s serious. “Come and go.”
Rachel tells Finn the next morning. There is nothing to lie about, after all.
(The truth is that there is quite the difference between being ready and being ready; there are number of things that she still carries her, from her mother and that stupid tape, to Finn and him being the one that wants and thinks he gets to decide that he’s ready. She doesn’t tell him for him. She tells him because it’s hers and she makes the choice to.)
It’s not that simple, of course. July comes around and she’s asking Kurt to come along for the weekend. New York is their Paris, they say to their parents and it’s weirdly appropriate and more than acceptable when college is thrown into the mix.
Jesse’s place is not the small place that she pictured, or Kurt pictured, and as she spends the entire cab ride and subsequent trip inside, she remembers that it has to do a lot with guilt and parents and too many trips overseas. Kurt doesn’t ask about the key, like Finn doesn’t ask about the key, and they let themselves in like they’ve been living with him all this time.
“When’s he coming?” Kurt asks.
“He said something about a dinner with some friends,” she tells him, shrugging. “And then he’d be home pretty late - that we’d have breakfast tomorrow, meaning you and I will have breakfast tomorrow and for him it’ll be some kind of late lunch and dark sunglasses and -”
Kurt rolls his eyes.
“What?”
Her friend shakes his head and they look around Jesse’s place - it’s the piano, the art, and Kurt taking her hand, dragging her into Jesse bedroom and opening the window to the fire escape. There’s some dry dig at Jesse’s expensive but obvious taste and attempt to be a city artist but she doesn’t care.
It’s hard to explain what the city does to her: it’s like the last time, of course, and she can feel it in her, from the tips of her fingers and the back of her throat, the way relief seems to sink into her shoulders and how she has to catch herself saying that this is home. When she looks at Kurt, when he launches into a playful reprise of Moon River, it’s in his eyes too and they smile at each other.
Rachel finally breathes too.
Jesse comes home when Kurt calls Blaine, still outside with a coffee. She’s at the piano, brushing her fingers against the keys but not playing.
“Hey.”
She looks up when he drops his keys by the door. He looks tired, she thinks. He shrugs off his jacket and offers a smile. He studies her and then looks to the open bedroom door. He nods and she nods back, a quick exchange of yes, yes, of course Kurt is here.
He moves to the piano and she shifts over so that he can sit with her. His key - her key is deep in her purse somewhere, next to her phone and the reminder that she’s going to have to call her dads again, to make nine more reassurances to them that yes, of course, Jesse’s going to be okay. They don’t trust Finn either and maybe, oddly enough, Noah is the only one that’s a step further but only because he makes them laugh.
“So you’re here,” he says.
“I’m here,” she says.
“Weird, right?”
She laughs. “I’m too used to talking on the phone with you.”
“I was serious about leaving,” he says. So am I, she thinks. She starts to move her fingers over the piano keys, falling into playing. She’s not really thinking, just messing around. “You look beautiful,” Jesse adds.
“Stop,” she murmurs.
“Learn to take compliments.”
“They’re hard, these days.” If it were anyone else, she thinks. “They’re a lot harder when they come from you.”
He chuckles.
“I’m serious.”
He nods. “I know.”
They sit there then. She plays, just plays; sometimes they’re songs that she sat through and worked on in Glee, sometimes they’re the songs that mean too much and seem almost appropriate to just lay out, right in front of him. She knows that Kurt will come and it’ll go back into being something easy, something she knows scares her a lot more than the decision to leave and not come back, than what’s coming next, than even the stupid, strange memories of her sixteen year old self.
Jesse lets her play. And he listens too.
They meet Jesse’s friends. They have dinner and she and Kurt exchange nervous giggles, picking out people in the restaurant that they know they aren’t supposed to stare at but it’s wide, brand new world and Kurt insists the more, the merrier for his play about Kate Middleton’s sister.
He disappears though with one of Jesse’s friends, a Lauren or Lucy, over an exchange of a mutual distaste of Coldplay’s limited discography. It makes Rachel laugh and next to her, Jesse throws an arm around her shoulder. Everyone’s broken into their own conversations.
“I’m getting used to this,” he says into her ear. She bites her lip. Her fingers brush over the napkin in her lap. “I’m sure it doesn’t beat Pattie Lupone,” he says dryly. “But it’s nice.”
She looks up at him. “You’re cute,” she teases. “And ridiculous when you’re jealous.”
He grins down at her. He shrugs too. He’s right, she thinks. This is nice. There’s no sense of pressure about him or her or what’s waiting for her at home. They don’t talk about Finn or her mother or any sort of - well, she thinks, they’ll have to and she’s just going to have to get used that too. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now.
“I told them I was wooing you.”
She blinks. He laughs and his hand drops over hers in her lap. She remembers the moment they had on stage; there are times where she wonders if he ever thought about telling her everything, from Shelby to the stupid egg, to getting angry at her and then not. The coming back part, as confused as she was, seems to make the most sense out of everything.
She studies his fingers as they curl around hers. His palm presses into the back of her hand and she tries and swallows.
“How’s it going?” she asks finally.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“The key was different.” Her mouth twitches. The weight of his arm around her shoulder is different too, she thinks. “Practical, I suppose.”
“You’re a practical girl,” he says. He’s serious too. “I like that we’re talking. I don’t know if I told you that - if I didn’t, or if I’m telling you again - I just like that I’m talking to you and you’re here. I know it’s phone conversation and ultimately, the mundane stuff is just stuff.”
“Are we having an adult conversation?”
His eyes roll. But she smiles and feels his thumb start to stroke the inside of her palm, brushing her skin gently.
“I’m not going to apologize for it.”
They watch Kurt come back into the room. The table is split into different areas of the restaurant, some people are at the bar and Rachel feels like she could get used to this, over and over again.
“I don’t expect you to,” he says.
She becomes quiet, contemplative even though she’s had variations of this conversation with Finn plenty of times, with Kurt and the others - she’s long understood that Jesse’s just different. She’s not trying to explain it to him though and it scares her, unsettles her that he still gets it without her having to say much at all.
Her lips purse. Someone cuts in and asks Jesse a question, but she’s not really paying much attention. She looks for Kurt again and then remembers that she’s left her phone back at Jesse’s apartment.
“Excuse me,” she says. She lets go of Jesse’s hand, sending a reassuring smile to his friend and then stands to move. To get some air, she hears herself say.
When she walks out of the restaurant, she stops at the sidewalk, balancing herself at the edge and staring out into the city. It’s big, maybe too big and she wonders if there’s some kind of twelve step program for this - it has to include impulses, she decides, and stupid, small and insignificant focuses. Maybe she’s finally overwhelmed.
“Did I say anything wrong?” Jesse’s hand presses into her hip. “Rachel?”
“No.” Her hand presses against her throat and she shakes her head. “No, not at all. I just - just thinking about a lot of things all of the sudden.”
“Can I help?” Jesse slides out of his jacket and slides it around her shoulders. She can’t help her smile and then the blush, looking down at the ground. There’s no pleading then. He simply says: “Talk to me.”
Her mouth opens and closes. She doesn’t want to compare, she thinks. This isn’t about that, this about her and New York and starting to get used to the idea of never coming back. She’s okay with that. She knows she is, but the idea of building a life, of college of having friends that are interested and share similar interests. It’s not forced, it’s genuine, and even though she loves the others very much, this is just so new. These are Jesse’s friends, she tells herself. And yet, seeing this too - it feels wonderful.
“I needed to kiss him,” she says quietly. “Like we needed to get here - and maybe, maybe even lose. We needed to have this experience.”
He snorts.
“I’m serious.”
She looks up. “You were different, you know. You went to a school and people weren’t cruel, weren’t awful to you because you were different and you had something to show for it. I didn’t kiss Finn back for Finn or because I’m being swept back up into a whirlwind romance. I - I did it for me. It wasn’t about winning or losing or - god, I want to be so mad that we lost and yet I did it because it was that kind of song, it was me opening up and growing up and -” her hands wave out and her heart is pounding. Jesse’s coat slips a little off of her shoulders. She’s rambling quickly. “I needed to kiss him like I needed to come here with Kurt and by myself. I wanted to see you for me.”
It’s an awful little speech, she decides. She feels it in her throat, twisting. She doesn’t unravel; it feels like she has some kind of point to prove.
“Don’t ever change,” he says suddenly.
Her mouth curls. “Jesse.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re a part of this, you know.” She pulls at his jacket, fixing it over her shoulders again. “Everything here.”
He says nothing. Don’t do this to me, she thinks. Don’t make me spill everything. It’s disheartening - maybe for a moment, but for once, she thinks, she wants him to just push.
Rachel swallows. “I’ve always thought of you as a part of this.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
So they’re going here then. Her stomach knots. She knows that his friends are still inside, that Kurt is still inside, and she doesn’t want to have this unravel right in front of everyone. They still have to go back to his place.
“I told you,” she says quietly. “I told you plenty of times - from the first time I met you to right when, well, before it all happened. I’ve done stupid things but I have never not told you how I feel.”
He brings a hand to his face. He rubs his eyes and this isn’t Jesse, not the one that crashed her solo rehearsal on stage before Prom, or even before that, back in the record store and just changed everything. She feels a little silly because it should be that complicated; this is why she doesn’t want to share him with anyone: Jesse holds all her history.
“You still scare me,” he murmurs.
She freezes.
“I mean, the mechanics of it all - like the beginning, it was just about your voice and it became about Shelby and then it became about you and I and just the sheer and utter brilliance of being with someone who gets it, who got it and then I had to -”
“You chose,” she says simply.
Jesse softens. He looks away. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I did.”
The conversation stops moving though. Rachel suddenly feels too quiet for the streets of New York.
Kurt sleeps on the right side of the sofa bed. It takes awhile for his breath to even out; Rachel listens and practices the easy lie of conversation that they had after dinner: yes, yes and we’re fine.
But she can’t sleep, and she drags herself up to sit, quietly pulling herself off the bed and moving to the piano in the corner. The lid is closed but she brushes her hand against it still. She tries not to think of dinner, of the fact, the ever-present fact that Shelby is in the city and that Jesse has a relationship with her. Neither of them are ready for that.
“What are you doing?” and it’s a sleepy whisper from behind her, Jesse rubbing his eyes as he leaves his room and holds an empty glass. He stops at the piano and then turns and looks at Kurt.
It takes her a moment. “I can’t sleep,” she says.
He nods and disappears into the kitchen. She doesn’t need to look up to feel the light come on again. Her eyes are trained on a closed notebook. She makes a note to ask him, gently, warmly - but that’s not for now.
When he comes back, he sits with her. He puts the glass down on top of the lid. She almost scolds him but he pushes it gently to her. Her lips curl a little and she shakes her head, reaching it.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be,” she says too. “We’re talking.”
“We are.” He rubs his eyes. “I like talking to you. It’s not like singing it out or anything, but I - I missed talking to you.”
“We’ve been talking everyday.”
“I know.”
She licks her lips.
“I like talking to you everyday,” she says.
The glass stays between them. The water only settles in halfway; he poured for her. She feels shy.
“I -”
He touches her arm. “I love you,” he says, and he says it calmly, easily. He doesn’t need to look at her. It’s open and closed. It makes her heart swell and crawl into her throat. She feels it, oh she feels it, and she stares straight ahead, gripping the glass and praying that Kurt doesn’t wake up. She doesn’t care if he hears it either.
Suddenly they stop being those kids. Her eyes close.
“I knew today,” Jesse tells her too. His voice softens. “I mean, I plan to be ridiculously romantic and telling you everyday too. Maybe it’s not what you want to hear, but like I said. There’s a lot of flavor in the unconventional and well, it makes a great story for an interview. It’s complicated and I like complicated, I even want to write a song about forgiveness -”
“That’s silly,” she interrupts.
He grins. “As most love songs are,” he says.
“Not all of them.” Her fingers curl around the glass.
“I can think of a few.”
She scoffs. “Coming from someone who has codependency issues with the entire Queen catalogue, of course.”
“You’re just jealous,” he says.
She rolls her eyes.
“But I mean it.” He pulls the glass from her hand and takes a sip. “I’m being dramatic, but this is just my way of saying that I want to wait for you. Whatever it takes. I’ll even promise to get along with -”
“Stop,” she says dryly. “Now you’re overacting.”
“I am not.”
She laughs and he glares. They hear a sigh from the bed. Rachel takes a sip from the water and Jesse leans into her shoulder. It’s silly and simple and she almost wants to break the habit and start teasing him with something. But she’s learning with the silence.
“We have a lot of work to do,” she warns finally, and she means it, she means it in away that she means that she leaving Lima and never coming back. She feels it with every fiber, every pulse that rushes in and out of her and suddenly, it doesn’t matter if Kurt hears or not, it doesn’t matter that she’s so scared of him and what he can do to her. Finn was different, is different, in a first and final friend kind of way. But Jesse is the city to her too; she’s learning - you never quite leave a city like New York.
He presses a kiss into her shoulder, over a slip of skin from her t-shirt.
“You have a key,” he says.
It’s simple: he doesn’t ask her to say it back.
It happens that morning, Sunday before they leave. Kurt volunteers for breakfast pickup, mid-phone call with his boyfriend and she’s somewhere deep in Jesse’s bathroom, humming to the radio as she braids her hair.
She doesn’t really ask why there’s a radio in the bathroom, preferring to leave it to those genius moments he starts talking about when he fixates on writing and auditions and all the things that he wants to do. It’s exciting to listen, to know that she’s getting there. She can’t remember if he had gone back to bed after they talked or stayed up; he was playing when she woke up again and it didn’t matter. It felt nice.
He comes into the bathroom, singing Queen - of course - and smirking before he grabs her by the waist and pins her back against the sink. She laughs a little and the radio, resting on the window, sputters.
“You’re ridiculous,” she says gently. Her fingers curl in his shirt. His mouth opens but she shakes her head. Silence, she doesn’t say. He gets it and instead, she’s smiling as she tells him: “for a second.”
Just for a second, her fingers move to his mouth and she’s tracing the outline of his lip, then his cheek and jaw, and then her fingers start to drag slowly over his throat. It’s soft and warm and she’s licking her lips, ignoring how it feels when he looks at her. She is aware of how close he stands, how much it feels like all those times, even sillier, they would sit and sing and he would listen to her open up piece by piece. When he laughs, she feels the vibration back into her skin and she hums softly trying to match. But when he does it again, she can’t help but laugh back.
This is how she kisses him.
There is nothing kind about Jesse’s mouth; he is too sharp, too wide, and his teeth press into her lip, biting and tasting, selfish and a complete delight. She makes a sound in the back of her throat, her tongue rolling into his mouth, pressing over his and then licking away the taste of coffee. His fingers dig into her hip and then he’s lifting her to sit in the sink. Her head is spinning and that tiny, tiny bathroom in the back of his room feels like it’s been waiting for the both of them to catch up.
He keeps her close and she doesn’t need to kiss him again. Everything is here, she thinks.
Finn does not pick them up from the airport. Instead it is Kurt’s dad; he says something about Finn and the boys and the beach but Rachel’s not listening. The end of the weekend has Kurt squeezing her hand with reassurances and their dual promise to head into the city to see Jesse again. They talk about how perfect the weather was for the city, almost like they’re returning on some sort of college break instead of to get ready for their senior year.
Lima seems so strange and small, tucked into the corner of her seat, her fingers rapping to the glass as she half-listens to Kurt and his dad, to the murmur of the radio. She thinks small towns and classics, watching cars and people and picking up on those odd, quick street names that feel a little harder to remember even if it was just a weekend.
That night, later on his porch, Finn looks at her and knows. “You’re really not coming back,” he says.
Rachel doesn’t need to answer.
to burst in motion
glee ; rachel/jesse ; 6,510 words, PG
they will laugh about it. they may tease her. they all know she really means it: she is not coming back. spoilers for new york.
-
Backstage is quiet. She cannot bring herself to sneak into the front. It’s silly, really, New York and the butterflies in her stomach.
The stage is empty. Nobody’s in the mood, so lingering and staying behind was really easy; they leave for Lima in the morning and she knows how to get back to the hotel. They won’t miss her. But she is looking at the stage too, the audience and the empty seats trying to see something outside a stupid kiss, and trying to go back to that moment that Kurt and her shared earlier. She shouldn’t linger that long, she scolds herself.
“How was the date?”
Jesse’s voice does not surprise her. Her mouth twitches and she looks down. Her hands smooth against her dress. “It was sweet,” she says quietly. Rachel turns and he leans against the wall next to her. “We went for a walk,” she adds. “He wore a suit. He brought me flowers.”
“Tulips?” She looks at him in surprise. Jesse reaches for her, grinning. “You were more of a daisies girl, last time I checked,” he says. There is no mention of Finn or sabotage. He is just talking to her. “You still like daisies, right?”
“I do.”
His hand curls around her elbow. She lets him drag her forward. Her dress flutters against her legs and she’s careful, maybe too careful - it’s silly but she doesn’t want to scratch the floors.
He doesn’t ask: are you okay? She doesn’t need him to, she decides. Her hand presses against his chest and she studies her fingers as they spread into his jacket, tugging at the sides. He smells a little like cigarettes. They’re not good for your voice, she wants to tell him She should be back at the hotel and upstairs, in bed with the other girls, but the truth is she’s been sleepless ever since they arrived in the city.
“So I’m going to stay,” he tells her. He gently pulls his hand away from his jacket. He steps around her too. “I pulled the - consider this therapy card with my parents. I have a few friends. I have a better plan. It was only a matter of time that I’d go and make my way to the top in the most unconventional way.” He stops and turns, grinning. “I do like the promise of things,” he pauses and waves his hand, “unconventional things.”
Rachel rolls her eyes. She follows too. He makes a sweeping movement to the center of the stage, swinging his arms back. They sink into his pockets of his jackets - that stupid, stupid leather jacket that he thinks makes him a lot cooler than he is. But she won’t tell him that. She likes the jacket.
“Congratulations,” she says after awhile.
He chuckles.
“I mean it,” she says. She shifts onto one foot, pulling off her heel. It hits the floor sharply. “You deserve to be happy,” she says too. “And if UCLA wasn’t it, it wasn’t it. We both know you were going to find your way here one-way or another. But it wasn’t going to be -”
“As the show chorus whisperer,” he finishes. Rachel laughs and tosses the other heel to the side. She mimics him, rolling back on her heels and the moving to stand on her toes. She does a little spin and he watches her. She can feel the flush on her cheeks.
They stay quiet. There is too much to say, she thinks.
No one says a word outside. She stands next to Kurt; she can’t look at Finn and Finn can’t look at her and there are no discrepancies. She tries and thinks like she did last year: she will have to work harder, she will have to push harder, but standing in the middle of New York, there is a much different set of rules.
It’s that Finn has the worst timing. This is why she goes back inside.
“You know,” he says. The jacket is gone. Somewhere by her heels, she thinks. He’s sitting on the edge, his legs swinging out as they watch the empty audience. Rachel narrows her gaze to the top row. “It doesn’t mean that we have to stop talking.”
Her lips curl.
“I know you still think the occasional worst of me, but I think we could do this the right way. A slow courting, the romance -”
“You’re awful.”
Jesse drops his head back, looking up at her. He smirks. “You love it.”
“You’re not even patient,” she says.
“I am too.” He looks mildly offended. She laughs a little, shaking her head. “I was home for a little while. I didn’t even think it would be that long.”
“You just proved my point.”
He shrugs, as if to say he’s letting go of the point - it’s not an admission, of course, but she watches as his mouth twitches and he falls into some sort of dramatic pout. She shakes her head and then moves to sit next to him, her legs swinging out.
“Does he make you happy?”
“Jesse,” she warns.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Does he - I’m trying to avoid turning it into a competition because you know I’ll make an argument and the best one at that - but does he make you happy?”
“You can’t let me enjoy being here?”
He waves a hand. “You’ll be back. It’ll be different too, I promise.”
“Uh-huh.”
He nudges her and she fights a smile. He reaches down and makes a grab for her leg, pulling them over his lap. His fingers curl around her calf. She makes a soft sound, ducking slightly as he starts to rub his fingers into her skin. He laughs when she grimaces but keeps her close.
She lets him, of course. He doesn’t press too much. Instead, his fingers seem to assume movement as if it were an old habit. They watch the empty rows in front of them and Rachel starts to count the seats that wrap around the edge; she tries to remember the people that sat around the stage, the faces, but they still seem to merge into one.
“I’ll be back, huh?” her voice is soft, and she leans back, resting on her hands. She cranes her neck up, studying the ceiling. It peaks in the strangest of places, the corners, the center, and above the rows in the back. She picks at her dress again. “I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s -”
“Not Finn,” she says dryly.
His mouth twists. “Am I that much of an open book?”
She doesn’t answer. Her throat tightens and it’s odd, too odd how the sudden memory of the how they ended the first time comes back. She watches his hand on her leg, his fingers pressing against her skin. He kneads, folding his hand into a fist and then relaxing it over her knee.
“We’d be okay here,” she says. She’s careful. “You and me,” she tells him. “I always thought we’d be - well, of course, there were at least nine different scenarios that played out in my head, sometimes even in front of my mirror. I wanted to tell you off a lot, but, well, I’m a class act and as much as I’m a fan of past be past, you are still a jerk.”
He pokes her side. “Water under the bridge.”
“You’re enjoying this too much.”
“I am sorry,” he says.
“You told me,” she nods.
He sighs.
"And I told you," she says quickly. "After prom even - we're past it. It takes quite a bit of effort to hold a grudge and when I look back I just ... I know."
"You know?" He doesn't hide his confusion. His hand stops at her knee. His palm is warm and his fingers flex against her skin.
But her mouth curls and she's serious, struck by the moment with a strange kind of confidence. She looks at him and sees the combination, the boy that she first met and the boy know - it makes her wistful, she thinks.
"Just be patient with me," she says. "That's what I want from you."
Jesse says nothing.
Finn waits up for her. He sits in the lobby and watches Jesse leave the hotel after taking her back. It’s too early of a flight back in the morning to Lima, back to high school, back to a summer that she feels completely unprepared for.
“They hate me,” he announces.
“They don’t,” she says tiredly. They won’t look at each other.
He watches Jesse disappear with her. Her fingers are still curled in the heels of her shoes. She wonders if she could ask him the same thing.
But she tastes the kiss still and it has a weight, a kind of uncertainty that feels so heavy all over again. She feels tentative. Finn’s hand reaches for hers, his fingers grazing the back of her hand. She pulls it away, swinging her arm and her shoes. This is stupid, she thinks.
“We’re okay,” she murmurs. She rubs the back of her neck, looking up at him. She offers a small smile. “There’s next year,” she says. She looks back to the door, and then outside again, her mouth turning. “And then -”
“You’re here,” Finn finishes.
Her lips purse and she reaches for him. Her fingers curl in his sleeve and she tugs him back. There’s a metaphor here, she doesn’t say.
It takes an entire summer of small dates, strange dates, and sitting around a coffee table with Kurt and Blaine, talking about New York as if she never left. She doesn’t tell anyone that Jesse calls her, texts her, but she’s sure both Finn and Kurt know - Kurt because she’s a terrible liar and Finn, well, Finn if only because he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Jesse calls late though. He sends her pictures of that not so small studio and she saves them in her email - she doesn’t look at them, no, not every day, but she keeps them if only to know that they’re there.
“So,” he says when she picks up. “Kiss him?”
She scoffs. “May I remind you,” she drawls, “about that time you drunk dialed me and there was blonde named Tiffany and she had enormous - and you said enormous, or was it gigantic? I think -”
“Point made.”
She smirks. He laughs too and she moves to her bed, dropping back and staring at the ceiling. There is bag on the floor, still unopened from New York. She kept silly things - the napkin from breakfast with Kurt, a pen that the theatre attendant slipped them with roll of his eyes and sharp, amused stupid kids, there’s the program, there’s Sunshine’s number and a postcard, something from the gift shop in the hotel.
“Rachel?”
“Sorry,” she says. She rubs her eyes.
“You’re draining my phone bill.”
“You keep calling.”
“Well.” He pauses and she lets out a soft laugh. She hears the sounds on the other line - his kitchen or bathroom, she imagines. He sleeps less, she’s figured out. There are auditions and he’s writing - he’s excited, she knows that too. She likes that he calls her like this.
“So what is it now?” she asks. “Word choice? Neighbors? Lack of a piano?”
He snorts. “I have a piano.”
“It’s -” she cranes her neck back, catching the clock. “Almost midnight.”
“Romantic, right?”
“Stop it,” she says. She can barely hide her amusement.
“I didn’t say anything,” he says with a laugh. He yawns obnoxiously. “You could come visit me, you know. Offer still stands.”
“You never made the offer.”
“Unspoken, of course.”
He’s baiting her, and she knows - it amuses her now, listening to the different pitches and tension his voice takes when he’s trying to be playful. She misses him, she thinks. She expected this too but that’s the sort of thing that she doesn’t share. She doesn’t want to share Jesse.
She bites her lip. “Send me keys,” she says. He won’t do it, she thinks. “And then I’ll believe it.”
It’s a stupid thing to say; this is Jesse and she can taste the challenge. She can imagine that look that he gets, or maybe still gets with a different twist - it is still Jesse all the same.
But then he laughs. “Be careful what you wish for.”
Finn brings her flowers. It’s the hottest day of the summer, not counting their last day of school where the entire Glee club cornered themselves into the room because it was the only place the air conditioning worked. They sit on her porch and she tucks her knees to her chest.
“Sorry,” he says. His lips press against her jaw. He smiles and she takes the tulips from him, fingering the stems. “That I was, you know - the timing, I guess. There’s that too.”
“You keep apologizing,” she says gently.
“I feel like I have to.”
She frowns. She doesn’t ask why. Apologies are strange things, she thinks. They come and they go. They made a promise not to talk about the year before, or the subsequent one that’s coming.
“So how’s New York?” he asks her, and it’s a quick change of the subject - Finn’s a little wary about asking about Jesse but more diplomatic. It’s funny. With Jesse, she thinks, there’s just no filter, polite or not.
“He’s fine,” she says, amused. “He’s running around with quite the crowd, from what I hear, writing - I hope - and doing Jesse things. I’m sure you can fill in the blank there.”
Finn shakes his head. “I guess.”
Rachel bites her lip. She catches the mistake. She’s been so good about keeping one to herself and the other to the utmost basic. The thought crosses her mind again: she just doesn’t want to share Jesse.
“I don’t - ” her fingers brush over the tulips. “I wish it were as simple as saying to you Jesse is just talking to me about New York and writing and - I don’t know. I wish I could explain it but it’s complicated and it’s mine and it’s his and there’s only so much I can … talk about it. I appreciate you asking. Like I appreciate him asking about you - ”
He raises an eyebrow. “The kiss?”
Rachel flusters. “It doesn’t matter.” She bites her lip again. “The point is all of you, not just you and him - you’re all going to be a part of my life in one way or another. Things are different. Things are just different.”
Finn is quiet. Her stomach is in knots. Maybe she said the wrong thing, she thinks. Maybe it just needed to be said. But slowly, very slowly, he wraps an arm around her shoulder and presses a kiss to the side of her head.
“So I had an adult conversation today,” she tells Jesse later.
He laughs. She listens to the piano on the other side of the line. There’s a murmur and she ignores it, moving through the kitchen. The end of her dress is sticking to the backs of her legs.
“How was it?” he asks.
“It was -” she shakes her head. She should’ve called Kurt, she thinks. “It was good,” she says. She’s careful. “It was one of those moments that happen and you’re really surprised that people listen to you.”
He scoffs. “People listen to you, Rachel.”
She blushes. She’s glad that he can’t see her. Her fingers press against her neck, then over her cheeks as she follows the flush. She’s glad he can’t see the tulips in her sink or the two empty glasses of lemonade that are still out on the porch, empty and dry.
“No.”
“No?”
Rachel shakes her head as if he could see her. “People listen to me when I sing,” she says. “Sometimes, I - I still fight to be heard. But listen is word you can use loosely, you know?”
“Stop it,” he says.
She feels herself flush but he doesn’t press. She’s quiet and listens to him press on the piano keys. She is tempted to look at the pictures he’s sent her, of course. But she knows where he’s put it: in the corner, by the window so that he can look at the city.
It’s what she’d do.
He stops and clears his throat. “Check your mail.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer and she’s up, moving to her desk where the mail from downstairs sits. Her dad probably put in her room and it’s not hard to spot the envelope with his handwriting present. It’s small, she thinks with surprise.
“You sent me a t-shirt?” she teases. He snorts and she slips a finger under the flap of the envelope. She gets a post-it and frowns, reading Jesse’s simple open invitation. She finds the key digging into one of the corners, pushing itself into creating a tear.
She’s quiet. Her hand trembles.
“I’m a lot a things,” Jesse says. His voice breaks on the other line and her head is starting to spin. It’s like that last time, singing with him when he arrived back into Lima, the stage at Nationals, prom - everything is out of order and in a panic, she’s in a panic because this isn’t the thing you do when you ask someone to be patient.
“I’m a lot of things,” Jesse says again. “But I’m also consistent. My hair’s pretty great -” she lets out a watery laugh and he continues. “I know what you asked me, I also know that you’ve got a year and there’s no such thing as early start. So come, don’t come - wait until Christmas, bring Kurt - or, you know, don’t. This is just me asking you to make a little bit of room for me.”
Her fingers wrap around the key. “You’re something else,” she says finally.
“I know,” he says, and she laughs, rubbing her eyes.
“Come and go, huh?” It feels different, saying it. It feels heavy and scary and a part of her wants to retreat and just breakdown to say no, no not yet. But this is Jesse and with Jesse, it’s about jumping in headfirst.
He’s serious. “Come and go.”
Rachel tells Finn the next morning. There is nothing to lie about, after all.
(The truth is that there is quite the difference between being ready and being ready; there are number of things that she still carries her, from her mother and that stupid tape, to Finn and him being the one that wants and thinks he gets to decide that he’s ready. She doesn’t tell him for him. She tells him because it’s hers and she makes the choice to.)
It’s not that simple, of course. July comes around and she’s asking Kurt to come along for the weekend. New York is their Paris, they say to their parents and it’s weirdly appropriate and more than acceptable when college is thrown into the mix.
Jesse’s place is not the small place that she pictured, or Kurt pictured, and as she spends the entire cab ride and subsequent trip inside, she remembers that it has to do a lot with guilt and parents and too many trips overseas. Kurt doesn’t ask about the key, like Finn doesn’t ask about the key, and they let themselves in like they’ve been living with him all this time.
“When’s he coming?” Kurt asks.
“He said something about a dinner with some friends,” she tells him, shrugging. “And then he’d be home pretty late - that we’d have breakfast tomorrow, meaning you and I will have breakfast tomorrow and for him it’ll be some kind of late lunch and dark sunglasses and -”
Kurt rolls his eyes.
“What?”
Her friend shakes his head and they look around Jesse’s place - it’s the piano, the art, and Kurt taking her hand, dragging her into Jesse bedroom and opening the window to the fire escape. There’s some dry dig at Jesse’s expensive but obvious taste and attempt to be a city artist but she doesn’t care.
It’s hard to explain what the city does to her: it’s like the last time, of course, and she can feel it in her, from the tips of her fingers and the back of her throat, the way relief seems to sink into her shoulders and how she has to catch herself saying that this is home. When she looks at Kurt, when he launches into a playful reprise of Moon River, it’s in his eyes too and they smile at each other.
Rachel finally breathes too.
Jesse comes home when Kurt calls Blaine, still outside with a coffee. She’s at the piano, brushing her fingers against the keys but not playing.
“Hey.”
She looks up when he drops his keys by the door. He looks tired, she thinks. He shrugs off his jacket and offers a smile. He studies her and then looks to the open bedroom door. He nods and she nods back, a quick exchange of yes, yes, of course Kurt is here.
He moves to the piano and she shifts over so that he can sit with her. His key - her key is deep in her purse somewhere, next to her phone and the reminder that she’s going to have to call her dads again, to make nine more reassurances to them that yes, of course, Jesse’s going to be okay. They don’t trust Finn either and maybe, oddly enough, Noah is the only one that’s a step further but only because he makes them laugh.
“So you’re here,” he says.
“I’m here,” she says.
“Weird, right?”
She laughs. “I’m too used to talking on the phone with you.”
“I was serious about leaving,” he says. So am I, she thinks. She starts to move her fingers over the piano keys, falling into playing. She’s not really thinking, just messing around. “You look beautiful,” Jesse adds.
“Stop,” she murmurs.
“Learn to take compliments.”
“They’re hard, these days.” If it were anyone else, she thinks. “They’re a lot harder when they come from you.”
He chuckles.
“I’m serious.”
He nods. “I know.”
They sit there then. She plays, just plays; sometimes they’re songs that she sat through and worked on in Glee, sometimes they’re the songs that mean too much and seem almost appropriate to just lay out, right in front of him. She knows that Kurt will come and it’ll go back into being something easy, something she knows scares her a lot more than the decision to leave and not come back, than what’s coming next, than even the stupid, strange memories of her sixteen year old self.
Jesse lets her play. And he listens too.
They meet Jesse’s friends. They have dinner and she and Kurt exchange nervous giggles, picking out people in the restaurant that they know they aren’t supposed to stare at but it’s wide, brand new world and Kurt insists the more, the merrier for his play about Kate Middleton’s sister.
He disappears though with one of Jesse’s friends, a Lauren or Lucy, over an exchange of a mutual distaste of Coldplay’s limited discography. It makes Rachel laugh and next to her, Jesse throws an arm around her shoulder. Everyone’s broken into their own conversations.
“I’m getting used to this,” he says into her ear. She bites her lip. Her fingers brush over the napkin in her lap. “I’m sure it doesn’t beat Pattie Lupone,” he says dryly. “But it’s nice.”
She looks up at him. “You’re cute,” she teases. “And ridiculous when you’re jealous.”
He grins down at her. He shrugs too. He’s right, she thinks. This is nice. There’s no sense of pressure about him or her or what’s waiting for her at home. They don’t talk about Finn or her mother or any sort of - well, she thinks, they’ll have to and she’s just going to have to get used that too. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now.
“I told them I was wooing you.”
She blinks. He laughs and his hand drops over hers in her lap. She remembers the moment they had on stage; there are times where she wonders if he ever thought about telling her everything, from Shelby to the stupid egg, to getting angry at her and then not. The coming back part, as confused as she was, seems to make the most sense out of everything.
She studies his fingers as they curl around hers. His palm presses into the back of her hand and she tries and swallows.
“How’s it going?” she asks finally.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“The key was different.” Her mouth twitches. The weight of his arm around her shoulder is different too, she thinks. “Practical, I suppose.”
“You’re a practical girl,” he says. He’s serious too. “I like that we’re talking. I don’t know if I told you that - if I didn’t, or if I’m telling you again - I just like that I’m talking to you and you’re here. I know it’s phone conversation and ultimately, the mundane stuff is just stuff.”
“Are we having an adult conversation?”
His eyes roll. But she smiles and feels his thumb start to stroke the inside of her palm, brushing her skin gently.
“I’m not going to apologize for it.”
They watch Kurt come back into the room. The table is split into different areas of the restaurant, some people are at the bar and Rachel feels like she could get used to this, over and over again.
“I don’t expect you to,” he says.
She becomes quiet, contemplative even though she’s had variations of this conversation with Finn plenty of times, with Kurt and the others - she’s long understood that Jesse’s just different. She’s not trying to explain it to him though and it scares her, unsettles her that he still gets it without her having to say much at all.
Her lips purse. Someone cuts in and asks Jesse a question, but she’s not really paying much attention. She looks for Kurt again and then remembers that she’s left her phone back at Jesse’s apartment.
“Excuse me,” she says. She lets go of Jesse’s hand, sending a reassuring smile to his friend and then stands to move. To get some air, she hears herself say.
When she walks out of the restaurant, she stops at the sidewalk, balancing herself at the edge and staring out into the city. It’s big, maybe too big and she wonders if there’s some kind of twelve step program for this - it has to include impulses, she decides, and stupid, small and insignificant focuses. Maybe she’s finally overwhelmed.
“Did I say anything wrong?” Jesse’s hand presses into her hip. “Rachel?”
“No.” Her hand presses against her throat and she shakes her head. “No, not at all. I just - just thinking about a lot of things all of the sudden.”
“Can I help?” Jesse slides out of his jacket and slides it around her shoulders. She can’t help her smile and then the blush, looking down at the ground. There’s no pleading then. He simply says: “Talk to me.”
Her mouth opens and closes. She doesn’t want to compare, she thinks. This isn’t about that, this about her and New York and starting to get used to the idea of never coming back. She’s okay with that. She knows she is, but the idea of building a life, of college of having friends that are interested and share similar interests. It’s not forced, it’s genuine, and even though she loves the others very much, this is just so new. These are Jesse’s friends, she tells herself. And yet, seeing this too - it feels wonderful.
“I needed to kiss him,” she says quietly. “Like we needed to get here - and maybe, maybe even lose. We needed to have this experience.”
He snorts.
“I’m serious.”
She looks up. “You were different, you know. You went to a school and people weren’t cruel, weren’t awful to you because you were different and you had something to show for it. I didn’t kiss Finn back for Finn or because I’m being swept back up into a whirlwind romance. I - I did it for me. It wasn’t about winning or losing or - god, I want to be so mad that we lost and yet I did it because it was that kind of song, it was me opening up and growing up and -” her hands wave out and her heart is pounding. Jesse’s coat slips a little off of her shoulders. She’s rambling quickly. “I needed to kiss him like I needed to come here with Kurt and by myself. I wanted to see you for me.”
It’s an awful little speech, she decides. She feels it in her throat, twisting. She doesn’t unravel; it feels like she has some kind of point to prove.
“Don’t ever change,” he says suddenly.
Her mouth curls. “Jesse.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re a part of this, you know.” She pulls at his jacket, fixing it over her shoulders again. “Everything here.”
He says nothing. Don’t do this to me, she thinks. Don’t make me spill everything. It’s disheartening - maybe for a moment, but for once, she thinks, she wants him to just push.
Rachel swallows. “I’ve always thought of you as a part of this.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
So they’re going here then. Her stomach knots. She knows that his friends are still inside, that Kurt is still inside, and she doesn’t want to have this unravel right in front of everyone. They still have to go back to his place.
“I told you,” she says quietly. “I told you plenty of times - from the first time I met you to right when, well, before it all happened. I’ve done stupid things but I have never not told you how I feel.”
He brings a hand to his face. He rubs his eyes and this isn’t Jesse, not the one that crashed her solo rehearsal on stage before Prom, or even before that, back in the record store and just changed everything. She feels a little silly because it should be that complicated; this is why she doesn’t want to share him with anyone: Jesse holds all her history.
“You still scare me,” he murmurs.
She freezes.
“I mean, the mechanics of it all - like the beginning, it was just about your voice and it became about Shelby and then it became about you and I and just the sheer and utter brilliance of being with someone who gets it, who got it and then I had to -”
“You chose,” she says simply.
Jesse softens. He looks away. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I did.”
The conversation stops moving though. Rachel suddenly feels too quiet for the streets of New York.
Kurt sleeps on the right side of the sofa bed. It takes awhile for his breath to even out; Rachel listens and practices the easy lie of conversation that they had after dinner: yes, yes and we’re fine.
But she can’t sleep, and she drags herself up to sit, quietly pulling herself off the bed and moving to the piano in the corner. The lid is closed but she brushes her hand against it still. She tries not to think of dinner, of the fact, the ever-present fact that Shelby is in the city and that Jesse has a relationship with her. Neither of them are ready for that.
“What are you doing?” and it’s a sleepy whisper from behind her, Jesse rubbing his eyes as he leaves his room and holds an empty glass. He stops at the piano and then turns and looks at Kurt.
It takes her a moment. “I can’t sleep,” she says.
He nods and disappears into the kitchen. She doesn’t need to look up to feel the light come on again. Her eyes are trained on a closed notebook. She makes a note to ask him, gently, warmly - but that’s not for now.
When he comes back, he sits with her. He puts the glass down on top of the lid. She almost scolds him but he pushes it gently to her. Her lips curl a little and she shakes her head, reaching it.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be,” she says too. “We’re talking.”
“We are.” He rubs his eyes. “I like talking to you. It’s not like singing it out or anything, but I - I missed talking to you.”
“We’ve been talking everyday.”
“I know.”
She licks her lips.
“I like talking to you everyday,” she says.
The glass stays between them. The water only settles in halfway; he poured for her. She feels shy.
“I -”
He touches her arm. “I love you,” he says, and he says it calmly, easily. He doesn’t need to look at her. It’s open and closed. It makes her heart swell and crawl into her throat. She feels it, oh she feels it, and she stares straight ahead, gripping the glass and praying that Kurt doesn’t wake up. She doesn’t care if he hears it either.
Suddenly they stop being those kids. Her eyes close.
“I knew today,” Jesse tells her too. His voice softens. “I mean, I plan to be ridiculously romantic and telling you everyday too. Maybe it’s not what you want to hear, but like I said. There’s a lot of flavor in the unconventional and well, it makes a great story for an interview. It’s complicated and I like complicated, I even want to write a song about forgiveness -”
“That’s silly,” she interrupts.
He grins. “As most love songs are,” he says.
“Not all of them.” Her fingers curl around the glass.
“I can think of a few.”
She scoffs. “Coming from someone who has codependency issues with the entire Queen catalogue, of course.”
“You’re just jealous,” he says.
She rolls her eyes.
“But I mean it.” He pulls the glass from her hand and takes a sip. “I’m being dramatic, but this is just my way of saying that I want to wait for you. Whatever it takes. I’ll even promise to get along with -”
“Stop,” she says dryly. “Now you’re overacting.”
“I am not.”
She laughs and he glares. They hear a sigh from the bed. Rachel takes a sip from the water and Jesse leans into her shoulder. It’s silly and simple and she almost wants to break the habit and start teasing him with something. But she’s learning with the silence.
“We have a lot of work to do,” she warns finally, and she means it, she means it in away that she means that she leaving Lima and never coming back. She feels it with every fiber, every pulse that rushes in and out of her and suddenly, it doesn’t matter if Kurt hears or not, it doesn’t matter that she’s so scared of him and what he can do to her. Finn was different, is different, in a first and final friend kind of way. But Jesse is the city to her too; she’s learning - you never quite leave a city like New York.
He presses a kiss into her shoulder, over a slip of skin from her t-shirt.
“You have a key,” he says.
It’s simple: he doesn’t ask her to say it back.
It happens that morning, Sunday before they leave. Kurt volunteers for breakfast pickup, mid-phone call with his boyfriend and she’s somewhere deep in Jesse’s bathroom, humming to the radio as she braids her hair.
She doesn’t really ask why there’s a radio in the bathroom, preferring to leave it to those genius moments he starts talking about when he fixates on writing and auditions and all the things that he wants to do. It’s exciting to listen, to know that she’s getting there. She can’t remember if he had gone back to bed after they talked or stayed up; he was playing when she woke up again and it didn’t matter. It felt nice.
He comes into the bathroom, singing Queen - of course - and smirking before he grabs her by the waist and pins her back against the sink. She laughs a little and the radio, resting on the window, sputters.
“You’re ridiculous,” she says gently. Her fingers curl in his shirt. His mouth opens but she shakes her head. Silence, she doesn’t say. He gets it and instead, she’s smiling as she tells him: “for a second.”
Just for a second, her fingers move to his mouth and she’s tracing the outline of his lip, then his cheek and jaw, and then her fingers start to drag slowly over his throat. It’s soft and warm and she’s licking her lips, ignoring how it feels when he looks at her. She is aware of how close he stands, how much it feels like all those times, even sillier, they would sit and sing and he would listen to her open up piece by piece. When he laughs, she feels the vibration back into her skin and she hums softly trying to match. But when he does it again, she can’t help but laugh back.
This is how she kisses him.
There is nothing kind about Jesse’s mouth; he is too sharp, too wide, and his teeth press into her lip, biting and tasting, selfish and a complete delight. She makes a sound in the back of her throat, her tongue rolling into his mouth, pressing over his and then licking away the taste of coffee. His fingers dig into her hip and then he’s lifting her to sit in the sink. Her head is spinning and that tiny, tiny bathroom in the back of his room feels like it’s been waiting for the both of them to catch up.
He keeps her close and she doesn’t need to kiss him again. Everything is here, she thinks.
Finn does not pick them up from the airport. Instead it is Kurt’s dad; he says something about Finn and the boys and the beach but Rachel’s not listening. The end of the weekend has Kurt squeezing her hand with reassurances and their dual promise to head into the city to see Jesse again. They talk about how perfect the weather was for the city, almost like they’re returning on some sort of college break instead of to get ready for their senior year.
Lima seems so strange and small, tucked into the corner of her seat, her fingers rapping to the glass as she half-listens to Kurt and his dad, to the murmur of the radio. She thinks small towns and classics, watching cars and people and picking up on those odd, quick street names that feel a little harder to remember even if it was just a weekend.
That night, later on his porch, Finn looks at her and knows. “You’re really not coming back,” he says.
Rachel doesn’t need to answer.