Fic: Confessions (Sequel to Expectations) (PG-13) (Kurt/Puck) (Quinn)
Title: Confessions
Author: ma_raven
Beta: alifab
Sequel To: Expectations
Words: 2,450
Spoilers: Through the "Acafellas" promos
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Kurt/Puck. Quinn.
Author's Note: Due to peer pressure, I'm writing a sequel to Expectations, focusing on the after-the-fact discussion between Quinn and Puck. This is all y'all's fault. Also, in a drastically abnormal move (for me), this is written in the present tense. ConCrit welcome, as I'm interested to hear what you think of it.
Summary: "So...Kurt thinks you're going to kick his ass for taking my virginity."
The phone call comes three days after she walked in on them, an incident which inadvertently filled all of their lives with a kind of sadistic tension that bordered on morbid fascination. Despite his words to Kurt, Puck really isn't sure how this is all going to work itself out.
He knows Quinn, almost as well as he knows himself (or, if he's honest, probably a whole lot better). He knows that, despite her all-too-visible evangelism, she thinks things through rather than swallowing what she's told blindly. But Kurt is still something of a stranger, and there are reasons why Puck has never crossed this line before. Puck isn't even sure, if he's honest with himself, how far over the line he really falls. Part of him is curious, but the rest of him desperately doesn't want something else to deal with. Life is complicated enough for his tastes, has been ever since Finn started his descent into madness and decided to drag the rest of them with him.
It's a Thursday evening, and he's standing in the kitchen debating between nachos and leftover chinese when his phone emits Quinn's unique jingle. He keeps her ringtone as "Barbie Girl" just because he knows it pisses her off, but it serves a practical purpose as well. There are few people he will answer a call from without question, but Quinn is one of them. He likes to know when he has to haul ass to wherever he's currently forgotten his phone and when he can just ignore it. Quinn might text without regard for other people's social lives, but she never calls unless it's important. After all, that's what MySpace and FaceBook are for, as she's ever so fond of reminding him.
He answers just before it clicks over to voicemail, and the conversation is brief. "Mom's got a meeting. Can you swing Oreos and raspberry cheesecake?"
He thinks for a minute, weighing his options and deciding that a trip to the market is the least of his worries at the moment. "Give me half an hour. Oh, hey, do you mind if I bring nachos, too?"
"Double cheese?"
He laughs at the eager note to the question, because some things will never change, and dairy is always going to be the way to Quinn's heart. "I don't know, I was thinking I needed to start watching my weight..."
The indignant squawk that came over the line was barely distinguishable as language. "You jerk!" He can't help it, and the laughter continues until she huffs into the phone with an extra special dose of annoyance. "Half an hour, big man."
"Yeah, yeah. I got it." He doesn't bother to say goodbye, just closes the phone and collects his keys. He pulls them from the counter so hard they land on the floor, and it makes a muscle in his jaw want to tick. He's not worried about Quinn's reaction to what happened between him and Kurt, because if she were too upset she'd never have invited him over. It's just, this is a discussion he's never even imagined having, and he doesn't want to fuck something up. It's not unlike the way his stomach knots before a big game, and he doesn't like it any better for the familiarity.
* * *
Nights at Quinn's are a tradition that date back to somewhere around forever. Definitely since they hit middle school, but even in elementary school they'd spent more than your average amount of time kicking around together into the evenings. The biggest difference was that, after they started middle school, Puck started bringing the snacks because Quinn's mom had a list of forbidden foods that was at least as tall as Quinn was. Puck never underestimated the amount of work that went into being a good cheerleader; he was just glad he played football.
Quinn had one of those families that had crawled out of a sixties sitcom, with a heavy dose of after-school special thrown in for good measure. Quinn's father worked far too many hours, and while he was a decent guy, he wasn't really around and didn't feel he should be involved in "women's business." Quinn's mother was well put together, but she'd never met a bottle she didn't like. She'd traded liquor for the vicarious thrill of Quinn's cheerleading success, and Puck was fairly sure that, more often than not, Quinn wished her mother had just stayed drunk and uninvolved. Instead, Mrs. Fabray had traded the early nights in her bedroom for AA meetings, and he'd started spending Thursday nights at the Fabray house (and Sundays, and occasionally Tuesdays). He wasn't a baby-sitter, because boys didn't do that, but he was just enough older to mean they could hang out at her place instead of having to deal with his mom poking her head in every twenty minutes to make sure they weren't having sex (which would have been hilarious, if it had been happening to someone else, but as it stood it was just wrong, on so many levels). He was two months older than Quinn, a winter baby to her spring, and that put him just over the legal requirement of twelve years old when it came to unsupervised children when her mother decided to change her priorities.
Puck didn't bother to do more than a cursory knock before opening the front door and letting himself into the Fabray house, balancing a grocery bag against his hip as he did so. "Quinn?"
"Kitchen!"
He kicks the door closed, like he has a hundred times before, reminding himself that this is normal and familiar and that his brain needs to chill the fuck out already. It takes a moment to toe off his shoes (and he doesn't dare skip the practice, because Quinn's mom is weirdly anal like that), but then he's out of excuses and he bites the metaphorical bullet, squaring his shoulders and walking into the kitchen.
* * *
Two hours, half a package of Double Stuff Oreos, and some truly epic nachos later (if he does say so himself), Quinn's still talking cheerleader politics with a zeal she's never demonstrated before (normally, she's complaining about the fact that they exist, and bemoaning the fact that she works twice as hard as some of her teammates and is still relegated to paying her "dues" as a sophmore). Puck doesn't mind, at least not very much; he's more than happy to play the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" game. The problem is, he knows that Quinn doesn't roll that way, which means she's going to bring it up at some point in the evening, and his teeth are starting to hurt from where they've been clenching whenever he stops consciously trying to make them stop. It's not a great situation, by any stretch of the imagination, and if she eats any more sugar he's pretty sure it's going to get worse and not better.
"So...Kurt thinks you're going to kick his ass for taking my virginity." He and Kurt haven't actually talked since the incident in the storage shed, but that's a minor detail. The fact that Puck keeps a straight face through the entire statement is going to be one of those little accomplishments that he relishes forever. He'll admit that it might not be the smoothest way to bring up the topic, but the look on her face makes it totally worth it. Of course, then she chokes on a piece of black olive and starts coughing hard enough to wake the dead, but it's that initial snapshot that will stay with him if the conversation goes rapidly downhill. It's always good to get something positive out of a situation.
"Wait, you what?"
"Didn't I mention that last week? There was this whole orgy thing, up on the roof after you guys left. Half the football team, couple of teachers..."
She scoffs, rolling her eyes in annoyance. "I thought you were serious."
"About the orgy? Or the virginity? Because I know I told you about that when it happened, last year." He pauses, looking away from her still-wide eyes and focusing his attention back on the pile of chips currently occupying his plate. The cheese had melted into these awesome little designs, and he gets sidetracked for a moment following the shadows from one chip to another. When it becomes apparent that she's not going to bring up the real issue, he resigns himself to the inevitable. "Or did you mean the thing about Kurt?"
Even from the corner of his eye, he can see her nod, head bouncing too quickly to look anything but involuntary. He lets out a breath, wishing he could release the tension coiled at the base of his throat as easily.
"Quinn, it's not. I don't-" He shakes his head in exasperation; the words aren't stuck, they're just absent. "OK, look - I got nothing."
She clears her throat, the sound uncharacteristically timid. "Why?"
He shrugs, bracing his elbows on the table and wondering how the fuck he ended up having this conversation in the first place. Oh, right. Kurt. "No clue."
"Puck..."
He looks up at the tone in her voice. "I'm serious. It was a stupid drunken mistake, and I have no idea why it's still going on. It just sort of is."
"So, you're not...?" Puck really, really wants to sink into the floor at this point, because for all that he's never having this discussion with his mom, Quinn is doing a fair impression. He shrugs again, not bothering to voice a response, and that has about as much impact as it would on his mom, too. "It's a yes or no question. Gay, not gay." She stumbles over the word, but the exasperated look on her face doesn't falter. "Look, I'm not going to tell anyone. I have no interest in seeing Dawson beat the shit out of you because of his daddy issues, okay? But for goodness sake, just get it over with."
"I. Don't. Know. Okay?"
"Okay, okay!" She backs off, biting her lip as she studies him. Coming to some kind of a decision, her expression settles into a practiced pout. "Does this mean you're not going to take me shopping for shoes?"
He's reminded why he loves her so much as a laugh forces its way past the slowly easing knot in his chest. "Not a chance, but if you really want a second opinion, I can ask Kurt if he'd be interested."
* * *
The next time he sees Kurt, in the hot and heavy sense of the word, it takes a conscious effort to keep from thinking about what he's doing. Just because Quinn's known him since the dawn of time and didn't push the issue, that doesn't mean the next person who stumbles on them will be so accommodating. Not that Quinn isn't causing her own special variety of problems, but there are politics involved there that he's just not going to touch. There is nothing in this world, including the promise of a blow job, which could convince him to go to the mall with the Glee Club girls (which, apparently, involved Kurt). Especially not when Quinn and Rachel have decided that they're back to their war over Finn (and that, right there, is evidence that Puck isn't gay. Because Finn? Ew).
Fortunately, once Kurt's hands find their way under his shirt it becomes that much easier to feel and forget to think. The answer is a problem in itself, however, because suddenly the question doesn't just trouble him when they're alone. He finds himself pondering it in French class, and Math class, and sometimes while they're kicking around the choir room waiting for Mr. Shue to show up for Glee Club. If the only way to stop thinking about Kurt is dragging him into an empty room and kissing him senseless, well, that doesn't really solve anything (except for immediate... issues, and those seem to resurface quickly enough). It certainly doesn't resolve concerns relating to the next person who's going to walk in on them (and if they keep this up, it is going to happen - Puck might spend some of his classes zoning out, but very few people have called him an idiot more than once). It's after some careful consideration in the storage shed out past the bleachers that Puck decides he doesn't really care what happens, which should worry him far more than it does. He can't decide if it's a good decision or a suicidal one, but it's made. For this week, at any rate.
~ Finis ~
Author: ma_raven
Beta: alifab
Sequel To: Expectations
Words: 2,450
Spoilers: Through the "Acafellas" promos
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Kurt/Puck. Quinn.
Author's Note: Due to peer pressure, I'm writing a sequel to Expectations, focusing on the after-the-fact discussion between Quinn and Puck. This is all y'all's fault. Also, in a drastically abnormal move (for me), this is written in the present tense. ConCrit welcome, as I'm interested to hear what you think of it.
Summary: "So...Kurt thinks you're going to kick his ass for taking my virginity."
The phone call comes three days after she walked in on them, an incident which inadvertently filled all of their lives with a kind of sadistic tension that bordered on morbid fascination. Despite his words to Kurt, Puck really isn't sure how this is all going to work itself out.
He knows Quinn, almost as well as he knows himself (or, if he's honest, probably a whole lot better). He knows that, despite her all-too-visible evangelism, she thinks things through rather than swallowing what she's told blindly. But Kurt is still something of a stranger, and there are reasons why Puck has never crossed this line before. Puck isn't even sure, if he's honest with himself, how far over the line he really falls. Part of him is curious, but the rest of him desperately doesn't want something else to deal with. Life is complicated enough for his tastes, has been ever since Finn started his descent into madness and decided to drag the rest of them with him.
It's a Thursday evening, and he's standing in the kitchen debating between nachos and leftover chinese when his phone emits Quinn's unique jingle. He keeps her ringtone as "Barbie Girl" just because he knows it pisses her off, but it serves a practical purpose as well. There are few people he will answer a call from without question, but Quinn is one of them. He likes to know when he has to haul ass to wherever he's currently forgotten his phone and when he can just ignore it. Quinn might text without regard for other people's social lives, but she never calls unless it's important. After all, that's what MySpace and FaceBook are for, as she's ever so fond of reminding him.
He answers just before it clicks over to voicemail, and the conversation is brief. "Mom's got a meeting. Can you swing Oreos and raspberry cheesecake?"
He thinks for a minute, weighing his options and deciding that a trip to the market is the least of his worries at the moment. "Give me half an hour. Oh, hey, do you mind if I bring nachos, too?"
"Double cheese?"
He laughs at the eager note to the question, because some things will never change, and dairy is always going to be the way to Quinn's heart. "I don't know, I was thinking I needed to start watching my weight..."
The indignant squawk that came over the line was barely distinguishable as language. "You jerk!" He can't help it, and the laughter continues until she huffs into the phone with an extra special dose of annoyance. "Half an hour, big man."
"Yeah, yeah. I got it." He doesn't bother to say goodbye, just closes the phone and collects his keys. He pulls them from the counter so hard they land on the floor, and it makes a muscle in his jaw want to tick. He's not worried about Quinn's reaction to what happened between him and Kurt, because if she were too upset she'd never have invited him over. It's just, this is a discussion he's never even imagined having, and he doesn't want to fuck something up. It's not unlike the way his stomach knots before a big game, and he doesn't like it any better for the familiarity.
* * *
Nights at Quinn's are a tradition that date back to somewhere around forever. Definitely since they hit middle school, but even in elementary school they'd spent more than your average amount of time kicking around together into the evenings. The biggest difference was that, after they started middle school, Puck started bringing the snacks because Quinn's mom had a list of forbidden foods that was at least as tall as Quinn was. Puck never underestimated the amount of work that went into being a good cheerleader; he was just glad he played football.
Quinn had one of those families that had crawled out of a sixties sitcom, with a heavy dose of after-school special thrown in for good measure. Quinn's father worked far too many hours, and while he was a decent guy, he wasn't really around and didn't feel he should be involved in "women's business." Quinn's mother was well put together, but she'd never met a bottle she didn't like. She'd traded liquor for the vicarious thrill of Quinn's cheerleading success, and Puck was fairly sure that, more often than not, Quinn wished her mother had just stayed drunk and uninvolved. Instead, Mrs. Fabray had traded the early nights in her bedroom for AA meetings, and he'd started spending Thursday nights at the Fabray house (and Sundays, and occasionally Tuesdays). He wasn't a baby-sitter, because boys didn't do that, but he was just enough older to mean they could hang out at her place instead of having to deal with his mom poking her head in every twenty minutes to make sure they weren't having sex (which would have been hilarious, if it had been happening to someone else, but as it stood it was just wrong, on so many levels). He was two months older than Quinn, a winter baby to her spring, and that put him just over the legal requirement of twelve years old when it came to unsupervised children when her mother decided to change her priorities.
Puck didn't bother to do more than a cursory knock before opening the front door and letting himself into the Fabray house, balancing a grocery bag against his hip as he did so. "Quinn?"
"Kitchen!"
He kicks the door closed, like he has a hundred times before, reminding himself that this is normal and familiar and that his brain needs to chill the fuck out already. It takes a moment to toe off his shoes (and he doesn't dare skip the practice, because Quinn's mom is weirdly anal like that), but then he's out of excuses and he bites the metaphorical bullet, squaring his shoulders and walking into the kitchen.
* * *
Two hours, half a package of Double Stuff Oreos, and some truly epic nachos later (if he does say so himself), Quinn's still talking cheerleader politics with a zeal she's never demonstrated before (normally, she's complaining about the fact that they exist, and bemoaning the fact that she works twice as hard as some of her teammates and is still relegated to paying her "dues" as a sophmore). Puck doesn't mind, at least not very much; he's more than happy to play the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" game. The problem is, he knows that Quinn doesn't roll that way, which means she's going to bring it up at some point in the evening, and his teeth are starting to hurt from where they've been clenching whenever he stops consciously trying to make them stop. It's not a great situation, by any stretch of the imagination, and if she eats any more sugar he's pretty sure it's going to get worse and not better.
"So...Kurt thinks you're going to kick his ass for taking my virginity." He and Kurt haven't actually talked since the incident in the storage shed, but that's a minor detail. The fact that Puck keeps a straight face through the entire statement is going to be one of those little accomplishments that he relishes forever. He'll admit that it might not be the smoothest way to bring up the topic, but the look on her face makes it totally worth it. Of course, then she chokes on a piece of black olive and starts coughing hard enough to wake the dead, but it's that initial snapshot that will stay with him if the conversation goes rapidly downhill. It's always good to get something positive out of a situation.
"Wait, you what?"
"Didn't I mention that last week? There was this whole orgy thing, up on the roof after you guys left. Half the football team, couple of teachers..."
She scoffs, rolling her eyes in annoyance. "I thought you were serious."
"About the orgy? Or the virginity? Because I know I told you about that when it happened, last year." He pauses, looking away from her still-wide eyes and focusing his attention back on the pile of chips currently occupying his plate. The cheese had melted into these awesome little designs, and he gets sidetracked for a moment following the shadows from one chip to another. When it becomes apparent that she's not going to bring up the real issue, he resigns himself to the inevitable. "Or did you mean the thing about Kurt?"
Even from the corner of his eye, he can see her nod, head bouncing too quickly to look anything but involuntary. He lets out a breath, wishing he could release the tension coiled at the base of his throat as easily.
"Quinn, it's not. I don't-" He shakes his head in exasperation; the words aren't stuck, they're just absent. "OK, look - I got nothing."
She clears her throat, the sound uncharacteristically timid. "Why?"
He shrugs, bracing his elbows on the table and wondering how the fuck he ended up having this conversation in the first place. Oh, right. Kurt. "No clue."
"Puck..."
He looks up at the tone in her voice. "I'm serious. It was a stupid drunken mistake, and I have no idea why it's still going on. It just sort of is."
"So, you're not...?" Puck really, really wants to sink into the floor at this point, because for all that he's never having this discussion with his mom, Quinn is doing a fair impression. He shrugs again, not bothering to voice a response, and that has about as much impact as it would on his mom, too. "It's a yes or no question. Gay, not gay." She stumbles over the word, but the exasperated look on her face doesn't falter. "Look, I'm not going to tell anyone. I have no interest in seeing Dawson beat the shit out of you because of his daddy issues, okay? But for goodness sake, just get it over with."
"I. Don't. Know. Okay?"
"Okay, okay!" She backs off, biting her lip as she studies him. Coming to some kind of a decision, her expression settles into a practiced pout. "Does this mean you're not going to take me shopping for shoes?"
He's reminded why he loves her so much as a laugh forces its way past the slowly easing knot in his chest. "Not a chance, but if you really want a second opinion, I can ask Kurt if he'd be interested."
* * *
The next time he sees Kurt, in the hot and heavy sense of the word, it takes a conscious effort to keep from thinking about what he's doing. Just because Quinn's known him since the dawn of time and didn't push the issue, that doesn't mean the next person who stumbles on them will be so accommodating. Not that Quinn isn't causing her own special variety of problems, but there are politics involved there that he's just not going to touch. There is nothing in this world, including the promise of a blow job, which could convince him to go to the mall with the Glee Club girls (which, apparently, involved Kurt). Especially not when Quinn and Rachel have decided that they're back to their war over Finn (and that, right there, is evidence that Puck isn't gay. Because Finn? Ew).
Fortunately, once Kurt's hands find their way under his shirt it becomes that much easier to feel and forget to think. The answer is a problem in itself, however, because suddenly the question doesn't just trouble him when they're alone. He finds himself pondering it in French class, and Math class, and sometimes while they're kicking around the choir room waiting for Mr. Shue to show up for Glee Club. If the only way to stop thinking about Kurt is dragging him into an empty room and kissing him senseless, well, that doesn't really solve anything (except for immediate... issues, and those seem to resurface quickly enough). It certainly doesn't resolve concerns relating to the next person who's going to walk in on them (and if they keep this up, it is going to happen - Puck might spend some of his classes zoning out, but very few people have called him an idiot more than once). It's after some careful consideration in the storage shed out past the bleachers that Puck decides he doesn't really care what happens, which should worry him far more than it does. He can't decide if it's a good decision or a suicidal one, but it's made. For this week, at any rate.
~ Finis ~