Archive of Our Own ^beta

22 Steps to Success: a list by Rachel Barbra Berry

*

She spends most of middle school wishing that Quinn Fabray will notice her.  

She imagines what their lives will be like, even, sometimes, when she’s sure nobody’s watching: giving Quinn an apple and getting one of Quinn’s peanut butter cookies in exchange, like friends do over lunches.  

Someday, she’s sure that Quinn will realize that Rachel’s talented and smart and worth knowing, and then they’ll be best friends forever.

Of course, when middle school ends, the dream shatters with the first Slushie she takes to the face.  It still takes her nearly two years to actually grow to dislike Quinn, and to firmly give up on the idea that somewhere in Quinn is honestly just a tragic girl, who just really needs someone to reach out to her.

By the middle of sophomore year, it’s fairly obvious that Quinn Fabray is never going to be her best friend, and she should count her lucky stars that Quinn has mostly stopped noticing her again, or at least is too distracted by her pregnancy to continue her ongoing dread campaign.

By the end of junior year, she’s mostly forgotten that she ever had higher hopes for Quinn to begin with, because Santana Lopez comes to her house for dinner every Thursday.

It’s almost the same thing, except that she has no expectations of Santana, and consequently ends up becoming one of her closest friends without even trying to.

(Rachel can’t even remember the last time she didn’t have to try to get what she wants, because her dads are very much in favor of making her work for everything.)

*

Two years later, it becomes blatantly clear that “almost the same thing” is the stupidest, most naive thought she’s ever had, because in all of her fantasies about sharing her lunches with Quinn Fabray, she’s never once thought about having sex with her.  

(Let alone actually following up on that thought with—and she can’t.  She just can’t think about it.  She’ll have to eventually, but not right now.  Not like this.)

The subway cart she’s in lurches abruptly, and she stares mutely out the window into the dark, wondering how, in her two years of becoming increasingly more confused about the line between friendship and something else, she ever managed to convince herself that with just one time, she’d get over it.

*

1. Be nice, even when you can’t expect nicety in return.

Santana has a nervous breakdown in junior year. Rachel isn’t much for pop psychology, but with the only counselor they have at school being--to put it mildly--a little bit of a mess herself, she can’t help the pressure she feels to just be there for Santana, in case she needs something.

It’s good teammate etiquette.  (And, okay, maybe some part of Rachel relishes being a better person than everyone else in the club.  How can she not?)

Either way, Santana’s never been like Quinn, who actually hated her.  They’ve just always moved in different circles of the McKinley social strata, and Rachel’s always had it in her to look past that; their alliances seem more accident than staged, a lot of the time, and the one thing she always remembers is the grateful look on Santana’s face when, at Sectionals, Rachel was the only person to believe that she hadn’t attempted to sabotage the Glee club.

Everyone is awful to Rachel at least thirty percent of the time, so she clings to moments like that; they remind her that one day, they’ll all grow up and then Kurt won’t be her only ally (or friend?  It’s hard to tell sometimes) anymore.

It’s hard to be there for someone when you’ve barely ever spoken to them, but she gives it a valiant go; she gives up a solo to Santana, at Nationals, and Santana absolutely kills it, which gives her a little more reason to try and befriend her.  Maybe that’s the wrong way to conceive of friendship, but all of Lima is full of underachievers who hate her.  It’s probably better for her sanity if she surrounds herself with slightly maniacal overachievers instead.

Kurt rescues her feeble attempts to actually engage Santana in a conversation by hosting a dinner party, and when Santana shows up dressed like she’s expecting to be molested, a few things click in Rachel’s head that confuse her greatly.  Because--why her?  

(She’ll ask Kurt about it years later, and he’ll stammer on the phone, mumbling something about how sexually experimental girls weren’t exactly a dime a dozen in Lima.)

Against all odds, the dinner’s actually fairly pleasant, until Finn has to stick his giant foot where it doesn’t belong, and all of her intentions to be an adult about their interactions go running out of the room with her, where she locks herself in the bathroom.

Santana goes after him, with all the determination of a hungry piranha, and some part of Rachel can’t even really believe it--even though it’s not about her, and clearly about Santana’s best friend.   It doesn’t even really matter that Santana is mostly there to defend Quinn, or that when she finally snaps at Finn to leave Rachel alone it’s only because she’s worried about glee club.

Santana gets Finn to go away, and then drives her home and says a few things about how neither of them should really want Finn, and when Rachel exits the car and hugs her Daddy, she feels briefly like she was a part of something, even if it was just something small.

Rachel’s shields have been raised and solid since junior high by necessity, but she’s never quite been able to stop the littlest of cracks in them from forming on those rare occasions where people surprise her.

Santana surprises her.  She eventually rewards that with a dinner invitation that changes everything about her life.

*

On the flight, she can’t help but think to what she could’ve done differently.

Other than everything, obviously.

Scenes from a movie flash before her eyes; a moment in their Starbucks, where she just cradles Santana’s hand in her own and says something incredibly trite like, “I’m ready to be with you, once you’re ready to be with someone”, and Santana gives her that baffled, fishy look that she sometimes get before she smiles (innocently, genuinely) and insists on paying for the coffee because their year-long routine has suddenly become a date.

Her stomach clenches violently at the idea, because it obviously was never going to happen like that.

She just wishes it hadn’t happened as it did, because she woke up looking at Santana, flat on her back with one arm raised above her head, smiling in her sleep, and immediately thought, I don’t ever want to leave here again.

She’s not stupid.  She’s in so far over her head that she can’t even produce a single coherent thought to explain to Santana why she needs to be elsewhere, right now.

The stewardess offers her a moist towelette, and her dads are going to kill her for comping on a business ticket just to get the earliest flight out, but it’s all she could think of doing.

The entire city feels like it’s conspiring against her now.  Maybe the fresh air of Lima will help her settle, and give her answers to questions she can’t even bring herself to ask.

*

2. Embrace unexpected opportunities.

When Sam asks her to prom, her immediate gut reaction is that it’s a joke; her second reaction is that this will be the third time she’s interacting with someone who was once Quinn Fabray’s, and there is the distinct possibility that Quinn will, in fact, go postal about it some point.

She can’t even really justify it to herself anymore.  There are other boys, but somehow, all the ones that matter just end up shifting between them like their entire lives are just some ridiculous game of Pong.

The problem is that Sam is nice, and buys her a corsage before he even knows if she’ll accept, and--

It’s too embarrassing to ever say out loud, to anyone, but she cries in the bathroom for five minutes afterwards, because even when she was with Finn he never made her feel special in the way that this tiny, stupid gesture did.

(She’ll find out from Sam that Santana made him ask her somewhere around the time they’re packing up to go to New York, and at that point, already, her feelings are tangled in such uncertain knots that it blows away her entire memory of the night.  At the time, however, it had felt like this:)

The highlight of the night is finding out he’s a surprisingly capable ballroom dancer given how uncoordinated he is the rest of the time;  the low point is when Santana’s car gets trashed by those homophobic idiots on the football team, and Sam nearly loses an eye trying to make up for that.

Rachel’s astounded, because Santana wasn’t ever nice to him and dumped him kind of brutally (which, okay, perhaps the gay life crisis kind of excuses that)... but Sam lets her drive him home, and by the end of the evening she’s chewing on her pen in her pyjamas, wondering how to summarize what a wonderful surprise he’s turned out to be.

He calls a few days later and says, “So--are you into sci fi at all?”

She’s not remotely.  She says yes, anyway, because maybe this isn’t about Quinn at all.

Maybe, whatever power in the universe brought them together understands her in ways she doesn’t quite understand herself yet.

*

Puck’s waiting for her by the luggage carousel, and she buries her face in his chest immediately, crying before she even gets a chance to say hello.

The thing people don’t understand about Noah Puckerman is that he’s the best friend anyone could ever have when their life is really at its lowest, and a pretty good friend the rest of the time. The rest of the world pays more attention to the things that he says over the things that he does, but Rachel’s always been acutely aware of people who talk in ways that aren’t verbal.  It comes with acting.  Body language matters, and with some people, it says more than the things coming out of their mouths ever do.

God knows that’s true about Santana, in the moments when she’s angry and the moments when she’s actually emotionally available.  Like she had been, right before Rachel had left.  

She’d expected a lot, but not--

(The word she’s looking for is gentle.  Santana hadn’t been soft, nor dispassionate, but she’d been gentle.  

How is she supposed to just pretend that it hadn’t meant anything, like Santana will undoubtedly need her to?)

Another loud sob echoes through the arrivals hall, and Puck buries a hand in her hair, kneading her skull gently, still not saying anything.

Some part of her feels strangely lucky to have this.  The rest of her just feels like she’s lost the one thing that mattered.

*

3. Build lasting friendships now, because you won’t know if they’re genuine when you are actually famous.

Her family has always been about threes.  

She can’t really imagine it any other way. There are pangs of regret at Shelby, and what Shelby did, but her family has always been about threes, and nobody that they’ve had over--not Finn, not even really Sam--seems to fit into her family the way that they should.

Except for Santana.

Dad loves her; like, adores her.  Even when Rachel herself isn’t entirely sure about this whole ‘Santana comes for dinner’ invitation that she extended, and when she’s mostly relieved that it just hadn’t been unbearably awkward, her dad stops by her room at the end of the night and says, “She one of the bad ones?”

The answer is yes.  The answer is no.

“I have no idea, but she’s trying,” Rachel finally says, and her dad just says, “Yep, that’s sort of how I felt, too.”

The fourth place is set every Thursday from that moment onwards, and there is a distinct space for Santana on the futon, lazily picking at some popcorn that she doesn’t ever really eat because it goes against the Cheerios diet.

She’s sarcastic like Rachel’s dad, and astute like Rachel’s daddy, and most of all:

She’s nothing like what Rachel was expecting, because underneath all of that bluster about living on the rough side of the tracks and needing to be a perfect, cold cheerleader, Santana’s brain is moving a mile a minute.

(Two weeks later, she doesn’t dwell overly much on the fact that she didn’t see Dave Karofsky do anything to Santana.  All that matters is that she believes Santana immediately, and knows that from that moment onwards, Santana will never participate in all the high school drama that Quinn doesn’t seem to know how to let go of.)

They’re not friends, exactly.  But Santana fits into her life in a way that surprises her constantly.

*

The drive back to Puck’s dormitory is quiet; there’s country on the radio, and Rachel unwillingly thinks of the sad songs that Quinn sometimes hummed near the end of their senior year when she’d thought she’d been alone in the choir room.

“Did she do something?” Puck finally asks.

Rachel stares out the window, at the vastness and the emptiness of a place that she once called home, and finally shakes her head.

“No.  I did.”

*

4. Fight with words when you can; fight with actions when there is no other choice.

She’s never hit anyone.
Granted, she’s hit first, but she has no idea how Santana even got this deeply under her skin when other people have been trying for years and have somehow failed.

Maybe it’s the fact that she’s covered in wet, icy-cold crap.  Maybe it’s the fact that Santana’s bitterly realistic assessment of how she’ll never be anything worthwhile at McKinley hurts more than Quinn’s years of grotesque, unbelievable insults ever could.

Maybe it’s the broken anger on Santana’s face when she says the things nobody else wants to say to Santana about Brittany.

Either way, her shirt is torn and she has no idea how far this would’ve gone if Quinn and the boys hadn’t shown up when they did.

Santana shrugs the arms restraining her off and stalks off into the distance, and Quinn gives Rachel a pointed look.

When she apologizes in detention, Santana does exactly what she expects: deflects, insults, and rolls her eyes.

It’s only when she realizes she has apparently now has expectations of Santana to begin with that the word ‘friendship’ comes to mind.

*

Puck calls Quinn.

It’s an awful idea, but she doesn’t really know how talk to him anyway.  It’s not like he’s a bad listener, but he’s Puck, and--

She doesn’t want to talk about it anyway.  It’s just that over the years, somehow, she’s become more and more similar to Quinn, and Quinn has become more and more similar to her.

It’s difficult to think that anything other than Santana could have caused that.

Quinn doesn’t bitch at her, or lecture her or, do much of anything other than sit down next to her on Puck’s bed, still in her cheer-leading uniform, and say, “I find that getting trashed usually helps.”

Rachel laughs, because she doesn’t know anything about the people she left behind in Ohio anymore; not really.  Quinn surprises her with a bottle of beer from Puck’s mini-fridge, and then toasts to a better tomorrow, which sends the beer down Rachel’s throat with an uncomfortable burn.

“How do you do it?” Rachel finally asks, when they’re two beers further down the stack, and Puck’s gone out to get some take-away from a local Chinese.

“Do what?”

“Recover from making what is probably the biggest mistake of your life,” Rachel says, staring at a picture of not-so-baby-anymore Beth on Puck’s nightstand.  She wonders what the girls he brings home think of it.  

(She wonders if he even brings girls home at all anymore.)

Quinn tenses, and then relaxes, and finally says, “We’re not close enough for this level of sharing, Berry.”

“Yeah, well,” Rachel says, sighing and letting the bottle slip down to the tips of her fingers until it just dangles there.  “Maybe that’s why I’m asking you.”

Quinn says nothing for a long while, but runs a hand through her hair and says, “All mistakes can be turned into something less regrettable.”

“I didn’t think you dealt in platitudes.”

“I don’t,” Quinn says, staring her down until she looks away, back at the empty bottle.

(Her legs ache; there’s a bruise on her neck where Santana’s lips latched, and she knows she’s not hidden it well enough.

Quinn is all about letting secrets simmer, though, and either way.  She’s not kidding herself about who will tell Quinn about what’s happened.  It won’t be her.)

*

5. Cherish those moments when you get to truly be yourself, around the people who love you.

Santana is part of the family, in a twisted and surreal way.

When the Cheerios need money, Rachel’s dad literally spends an entire weekend on the phone, calling in favors to see if anyone can help the team out.  He sells the idea of Santana in a way that Rachel finds almost circumspect; words like ‘brave’ and ‘charming’ are thrown around, and she makes a face at him at the latter statement in particular, because Santana’s about as charming as sandpaper.

Well, most of the time, anyway; when she’s jokingly bitching about their vegan meals every Thursday before teasing Rachel about Sam and rolling her eyes when Rachel’s dads gently tease her about how dumb cheerleading is, she actually kind of is.

The Cheerios are something that’s separate from the Santana that shows up at her house every week, though; it’s a part of Santana and Quinn’s friendship, not Santana and Rachel’s, and she knows better than to propose things.  Instead, she waits for Santana to come out and ask questions first.

(That proves to be a valuable technique of managing her.

Most of the time, anyway.)

Sam is beyond amused at their friendship, and likes to joke about how really, they should hang out with Quinn as well so that his life can officially be the most awkward life to have ever been lived.  He’s so kind, and so lovely, and she honestly relaxes around him in a way that she’s never been able to relax around anyone in high school--

--but some part of her already knows that the much more pivotal moment in the summer of her junior year is being told by Santana that New York is probably a go, and they won’t actually stop being friends.

It’s like being told about a secret that she didn’t even know she was waiting to hear.

(It doesn’t even occur to her until months down the line that maybe, that reaction should’ve been reserved for Sam’s college decisions.)

*

They go out and shoot some pool.

Rachel’s at her best when she’s drunk, and one of Puck’s buddies--Andrew, she thinks, but she’s not sure--tries to chat her up when she racks for the second game.

He has brown hair and brown eyes.

Quinn thankfully intervenes with a, “Hey, she’s taken” that sounds both completely wrong and completely right.

Rachel heads to the bathroom shortly after that and washes her face, three times.  It doesn’t help with the ache in her chest, but it clear her vision just enough for her to hustle Puck for another twenty bucks.

*

6. Be honest with those that deserve honesty, and protect yourself from those who don’t.

It doesn’t really matter that it’s not called a GayLesbAl.

Rachel has seen female friendships develop around her her entire life, and there’s always been something about easy teasing and good-natured ribbing that has felt completely alien to her.  (She’s too high-strung; she responds to things too extremely; the only person legitimately more hair-trigger than her is probably Quinn, and if she had to put a name on Quinn’s behavior over the past two years she’d be reaching for a medical dictionary.)

Santana, however, screws her perception of what she is and isn’t cut out for up so quickly that it's done with before she can even come up with a way to process.  She gets teased about being too verbose and too serious, rolls her eyes and comes up with a short answer and almost sticks her tongue out, and Santana gives her a grin that--

--she’s going to have to give her dad some credit, maybe, because it is charming.

Sometimes, Rachel wonders unwillingly just how popular Santana would be if she let herself be that Santana all the time, as opposed to the somewhat maniacal punch-happy bully that she seems to think she needs to be.

It doesn’t really matter, though, because that maniacal punch-happy bully is probably the best friend she’s ever had.

She’s not Santana’s best anything.  It smarts, a little, but it’s to be expected when Santana and Quinn have been close since childhood.  She doesn’t want to compete.   And not just because she doesn’t think she can.

‘Best friends’ is the only logical way to explain why Sam sort of feels out of place at Thanksgiving dinner, whereas Santana pelts a bit of sweet potato at her daddy without even so much as wondering if she’s overstepping any boundaries.

Maybe it’s just that Santana doesn’t have to worry about any shotguns being held to her head, and Sam’s just a little too afraid of her dads to really relax, but...

They humor Sam.  And they love Santana.

Some part of Rachel can’t help but wonder why that is.

(There’s a moment, just after Thanksgiving dinner, where they seem to be exactly on the same page about how this last year has changed them.

Santana’s apology for her past behavior is grudging and stupid, but the look on her face is not, and Rachel almost forgets for two seconds that Quinn is the one who gets these pieces of Santana all the time.  Maybe, Rachel just gets them when it really counts.)

*

Puck sleeps on the sofa in the living room and Rachel tosses and turns in his sheets.

They smell like him; manly, familiar, and yet somehow risky.

She hates it, because she’s already forgetting what Santana’s bed smelled like.

(The answer was them, when she woke up the next day.)

Her eyes hurt from crying too much, and so she doesn’t; she just stares up at the ceiling and bites her lip, and wonders for the millionth time if she’s just an idiot or if this is the reality of falling for someone.

Hollywood makes it look a lot more glamorous, but there is nothing cute about this kind of hurt, and really--after two years of watching Santana crumble like a deck of cards every time Brittany walked by, she should’ve known that much.

*

7. There will always be witnesses to your worst moments, so you should make sure that they’re people you trust.

She wakes up with an eye-splitting headache after the party, and the faint memory of talking to Santana about sex and how she wasn’t ever going to have it.

Even more blurry is the memory of Santana holding her hair back, murmuring in either English or Spanish or maybe an eclectic mixture of both about how it was going to be okay.

(Quinn’s eating disorder is McKinley’s poorly kept secret, and Rachel knows that that was probably more about experience with heaving girls than about--well, whatever.)

In a dark bathroom at Puck’s house, Santana apologizes for something that Rachel doesn’t even want an apology for anymore, and that Santana doesn’t need to apologize for to begin with.  She can’t even remember the last time she thought about Finn, or Finn’s virginity.  

What she won’t forget, though, is the pure regret all over Santana’s face when she apologized.

She’s never getting that drunk again, because if the only substantial thing she can remember about a party where she apparently damn near engaged in public sex with her boyfriend is the quiet shame in her best friend’s eyes at some stupid mistake she’d made over a year ago, alcohol is clearly not her friend.

*

When she wakes up, Puck’s in the kitchen making some coffee.

He pulls out a chair for her and says, “So, Quinn and I made the executive decision to just take sides in this, because something’s clearly really fucking wrong and--Santana’s my homegirl, but the alternative would’ve been you talking to Quinn, so here we are.”

She sinks into it wearily and cups the mug with both hands.

“What’d she do?  Go after one of your friends--someone you care about?” he asks, straddling the chair opposite hers and taking a sip of his own coffee.

“No,” Rachel says, and then laughs briefly.  “No.  It’s nothing that trivial.”

“Well, no shit, you just blew your credit card limit on a last-minute flight to Ohio, man.  I’d hope it was something serious,” Puck says, blowing on his coffee and leveling her with a steady look.

She sighs and pucks up her own mug without drinking from it, and then sighs again.

“Rachel.  It’s me.  What the fuck am I going to judge you for?” he finally says.

Her eyes are watering so quickly that she can’t blink fast enough to make them stop, and the first tear is already sliding down her cheek when she says, “You don’t have to judge me.  I’m judging myself enough.”

He sighs and says, “Not ready?”

She shakes her head and takes a first sip, wincing at how hot and bitter the coffee is on her tongue.

“Okay, well.  What do you want to do?  You can hang here for a while, but Colin--my roommate--is going to be asking questions, and...”  Puck scratches at his head, still mohawk-free, and then just says, “Do you need a ride to your parents’ or something?  Because I can do that, but it has to be today; we have practice tomorrow.”

She doesn’t need to think about this much; just wonders if her dads still stock her favorite ice-cream, just in case, and the says, “If I’m not putting you out too much, then...”

He just smiles and says, “Rach; you’re my fellow hot Jew.  Don’t be stupid.”

She tries for another laugh, because it’s sort of a threeway joke and it is funny, to think of the day when Santana finally agreed that they were in fact “the hot Jews” and not just “Puck and Berry”; it hadn’t even happened that long ago, really, because she’d needed to fix some things in her wardrobe, and God.

There isn’t a single part of her life anymore that isn’t somehow covered in Santana, and she drinks more coffee just to take the sting of that out of her mind.

*

8. When your best friend tells you that you’re being an idiot, LISTEN.

When Finn moves on, she doesn’t even really know why she’s upset.

Santana puts it into perspective for her, and redefines her impression of heartbreak.  It makes her question if she’s ever been in love, because she’s never hurt like this for anyone.  (For a missed audition, or the respect of the glee club, maybe, but for another person?)

Finn broke something in her.  But at best, it had been her undying faith that she’d fall in love with someone who fit the list of qualities she’d lined out in her Trapper Keeper in fifth grade; tall, handsome, honorable, decent, reliable, and kind.  

Not that Finn had even been most of those things, and Sam...

He’s not tall, but other than that he ticks every single box on the list, and yet sometimes, she can’t help but feel like she’s making out with her best friend.  It’s not the stuff of romantic comedies, and every time she watches A Walk to Remember (which is so melodramatic even Rachel can admit it’s idiotic) she just feels a twinge of something.

That something is now on Santana’s face, talking about what it’s actually like to have to leave someone you love behind, and Rachel feels a sinking feeling in her chest at just how much emotion Santana hides--until she just can’t anymore, and it cracks through.

The conversation ends with concern about Quinn and Puck, and while Rachel could care less about what’s going on there, it seems important to maybe distract Santana with something.  

It’s the least she can do for someone who did her a huge favor just now, by not letting her dramatic instincts blow a completely insignificant event out of proportion.

*

Puck has a mixed CD that is just old New Directions recordings, and they all sound tinny and familiar and years old, even though they’re not.  

“A different lifetime,” she says, anyway, when Faithfully fades away.

Puck smiles and says, “Q and I have been talking about taking a choir class, maybe.  You know.  For old time’s sake.”

She doesn’t really know what to say to that, and Puck’s fingers tap away on the steering wheel, until he whistles softly and says, “That club changed all of us more than I think we’ll ever know, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Rachel says, and wonders what would’ve happened if Quinn had never joined at all; if she’d trusted Finn, and hadn’t dragged Santana into loserdom with her.

It’s probably a sign of some kind that she feels worse at the idea of not having had any of the last two years than at how they’ve ended up, now, and the next words out of her mouth are, “Do you have a pen, and some paper?”

Puck nods towards the glove box, and Rachel feels past some baby wipes--which, she’s not even going to ask--until she finds an old, beaten pad of A6 with a pencil dangling on a string.

Years of therapy are hard to completely erase, and she should’ve been doing this all along.  

When the first words hit the page--I always thought that I would know exactly when I fell in love with the person I ended up with, because it would be impossible to write a good memoir without having such a convenient anecdote--she feels something in her chest let loose, and then she just can’t stop; not for the entire two hours of the drive back.

*

9. Take time out for holidays with those nearest to you.

This is her family; Santana, watching Quinn carefully, and Quinn, pretending not to care about Christmas anymore and failing a little miserably; her Dads, on their best party behavior, and Santana’s parents, thankfully present for a change.

The dinner is slightly uncomfortable, but redeemed by a small moment in the kitchen, when she spots Santana’s mother giving Quinn a one-armed hug that has Quinn stiffening and then sighing with something akin to gratitude.

It would be great, if they could all be friends; but she’ll settle for Santana’s chin on her shoulder, saying, “See, told you she wouldn’t try to stab you or anything.”

“Thanks for the babysitting,” Rachel says, and then glances up when the doorbell rings.

(The night ends with Santana disappearing with a pitchfork, and Quinn out somewhere else, and Sam watching all the classics with her on a 50 inch television that’s compensating for a lot of other stuff in Santana’s house.

She would be relaxed, except that she feels strangely like the earlier part of the evening--that oddly tense dinner, with Quinn grudgingly saying grace--was the part that she’ll remember more than the parts that are happening now.

“Hey, where are you right now?” he asks her, because he pays attention and is generally sweet and astute and she really needs to start talking to him about college and all that, but--she just can’t bring herself to think that far ahead.

Quinn’s always been moody, but more so in recent months, and though Santana hasn’t really said much of anything since the first time she raised the possibility that their golden future might not pan out...

New York is going to be too big for just the two of them, and she closes her eyes and snuggles into Sam’s neck a little bit more.

“I’m here.  Right here,” she promises him.  It’s the truth, right then.)

*

She’s still writing when Puck pulls up in front of her house, and he gently elbows her to get her attention.

She packs away the notebook and her pen, takes a deep breath, and then before she can do or say anything else, Puck says, “Did you sleep with her?”

Three years ago, he would’ve made a joke about how all of his ex-girlfriends were turning into lesbians or nuns, but right now he just looks at her with an unreadable expression that has her nodding before she can even consider if he’s okay with this information.

“And she kicked you out?” he asks, a little more sharply.

“No, I left,” Rachel says, which isn’t even the half of it, but she doesn’t know how else to explain the churning in her gut.

“Fucked her and decided it wasn’t for you?” he asks, and she sighs because everyone they know is going to be stuck in the middle of this, no matter how she ends up deciding to resolve it.

“Made love to her and realized I didn’t want to do anything else, ever again.  It would be wonderful if she--” she says, as flatly as she can, but the rest of the sentence hits her square in the guts and then she’s crying; really crying, not the muted, half-assed impression of upset that she’s been clinging to for the past few days, and next thing she knows, Puck is out of his side of the car and reappears on hers, before lifting her out of the seat and hugging her so tightly she can barely breathe.

He’s mumbling things into her hair about how everything’s going to be okay and how she’s really smart, and she’ll work something out, and she wants to laugh and tell him that between herself and Santana, she’s not even really the brains, and that’s part of why they’re here right now.

“Oh, man,” he finally says, tucking her under his chin and rocking them back and forth, and she closes her eyes and thinks he’ll make a great husband someday, and wonders when that stopped being something she was interested in altogether.

(The obvious answer is three days and two orgasms ago, but the reality of it is a lot more complicated than that.)

*

10. Learn how to cope with unexpected disappointment, as it may be a blessing in disguise.

She’s never seen Santana this distraught.

Then again, she didn’t know Santana in the aftermath of the Brittany and Artie stuff, and aside from some silent crying in the Glee club, the only type of emoting she’s seen Santana do on the regular is yelling.  This side of her?  It completely blindsides Rachel, who can only look at Quinn’s gaunt, drawn face and feel her fingers get clammy before they withdraw.  

She’s always known she’s not Santana’s first pick, but this moment is making that clear in a way that nothing else could have done; Quinn leaves,  and she gets to keep what Quinn leaves behind.  It feels like a metaphor for her entire high school years, almost, even they’ve never fought about Santana they way they always end up fighting about guys.

It takes Santana an age to calm down, and all Rachel can do is rub her back and hope that she won’t start hyperventilating; not so much because she doesn’t have the appropriate first aid training to get her to stop having a panic attack, but because she knows Santana, and knows that she wouldn’t actually want anyone else to see her like this.

Something inside of her pangs sharply when Santana finally looks at her with wounded eyes and says, “I’m going to be homeless next year.”

Rachel knows, about herself, that her desire to fix everything and befriend everyone is an unhealthy one, but all the therapists in the world wouldn’t be able to make her stop from reaching out to the girl who’s now sitting on her bed, forlorn and devastated.

“No, you won’t,” she promises, no matter how much it hurts that this would’ve never been brought up if not for a shitty student loan situation.

She’s third choice, and while right now isn’t the time to dwell on that, it bubbles out later that day with Sam, and she cries about all the other ways in which she hasn’t gotten what she wanted out of her high school years.  She has friends now, at long last, but Sam aside they all rate her second or lower in preference; and she has a future, now, but it isn’t the one that she’s secretly dreamed of, always.

Santana will recover, and will start making jokes about how they’ll probably end up killing each other sooner rather than later, and--curled up on Sam’s chest, listening to his heartbeat--Rachel starts to wonder when those stopped being funny and started just being hurtful.

“It’ll work out, Rach, you always figure out how to make stuff better,” Sam tells her, and she wishes that there was even one part of her that wanted to go to Philly with him, to a simpler life with easier choices.

Instead, she gets New York without Juilliard, and a best friend who will spend most of her time in New York counting the minutes until her best friend joins them.

(Some part of her honestly can’t tell which part of it hurts worse.)

*

Puck stays behind for a cup of coffee before driving back and hangs out with Dad in the kitchen, while she just curls up into her Daddy’s side and mutely stares at an episode of America’s Next Top Model that he’s half-watching on the television.

Her Daddy’s just like her; never really stops talking, and always has a million and one things going on in his mind.  He needs her Dad to keep from running into things and taking too-tight corners, and only together do they actually function like a cohesive, adult whole.  She can’t imagine her Dad without her Daddy, either, because he’d just drown himself in work and focus on trying to save the world too quickly.  

She wants that.  God help her, but she wants that, and she knows who she wants it with now, and she couldn’t have made a poorer choice if she’d tried.

Her Daddy’s open to her talking about this--of course he is--but she wouldn’t even know where to start articulating what’s going on in her mind.  Is this a coming out moment?  Does she actually need to tell her gay dads that she’s not entirely straight?  Because after sleeping with two girls--a friend of Ellie’s, of some sort of Latina background she can’t place, and it had basically been a mistake even though the sex itself had been fine--she can’t really pretend that she is, anymore.

(One time with Santana had been more than all the other times with Sam combined, in ways she can’t explain; emotionally, perhaps, though the languid confidence with which Santana had gone about dismantling her was--

--and of course that’s just a reminder of what number Rachel even is in her bedpost.)

She watches as Puck reappears with her Dad and almost glares at him; like it’s his fault that there’s an uncanny resemblance.  Like any of this is anyone’s fault other than her own.

“I’m coming back this weekend,” he tells her, after taking a sip.  “And we’re going on a road trip.”

“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Noah,” she tells him, a little stuntedly.

He frowns at her.  “S’not a joke, Rach.  I got my vacation time coming up; I’m driving cross-country to see Mercedes and Mike and Tina, anyway.  You should come with.”

She’s not in the mood.  For anything, really, which is why it doesn’t surprise her that, seeing her listless expression, her Dad just says, “Just come get her whenever you’re ready, Noah.  She’ll be packed up and good to go.”

Noah bumps fists with her Dad, and Rachel craves just even one moment of thinking, that’s their future son-in-law, because she could do worse than bring him home; he’s turning into a responsible, kind young man, and he’s Jewish and he’s always respected her after he apologized for the juvenile, hurtful things he did to her early on in high school.

He’d be great for her.  She knows it, and sometimes when she looks at him, and past his teasing smile and nearly-undressing-her eyes, she thinks he knows it too.

But he’s not Santana.

Her breath comes out in a sort of broken chuckle, and she glances back at the television.  Let other people make plans for her for a while, then.  She certainly hasn’t demonstrated that she’s capable of making a single decent one herself.

*

11.  A true artist knows how to compliment others who excel at artistry, and does so freely.

She’s going to support her friend; she’s going because really, she’s learned about how to function on a team in the past few years and this feels like an appropriate way for her to extend an olive branch to Quinn (again) as anything else does.  She’s going because Sam shrugs and says, “Could be fun” and Puck says, “Fuck yes, short skirts everywhere” and nobody seems to really mind.

She’s going for a whole lot of acceptable reasons, which doesn’t explain why the minute Santana turns her game face on and literally pushes an entire colony of girls through one of the most complex routines she’s ever seen--with Quinn, obviously, but Rachel realizes quite quickly that while Quinn’s model smile and pearly whites are just there for the crowds, Santana is the one who actually feels the accomplishment in what she’s doing--she can’t look away for even a second.

There are so many things to look at that in the end, she records it--maybe for Santana’s mom, who had asked her to take some pictures, and she’s fairly certain that her dads will also want to see this because--they know a lot about Santana as a person, but not necessarily as an athlete, and they wouldn’t be Berrys if they didn’t appreciate excellence.

Those are all the reasons that she can lay out there, plainly, but none of them explain why her stomach flips strangely when Santana catches her eye in the crowd for just one second and shoots a blinding smile at her that basically just says, I am amazing at this, and now you know.

“Dude, she is really good,” Sam says, lowering his artwork for just a moment to clap when they’re finally done--a horde of girls with heaving chests and sweaty foreheads, except for Santana and Quinn, who just look perfect.

The winners are announced in less than fifteen minutes, and she can’t get off the stands quickly enough to go and say some of these things, because someone has to--and she’s not really even sure who else would, what with Finn having Madison to talk to, and Puck lifting Quinn up and spinning her around, and everyone else just sort of talking amongst themselves.

It’s ridiculous that people are still afraid of Santana, Rachel thinks, pushing past Brittany and Artie and towards Santana, standing alone next to that giant trophy.

Fear is about the last thing that anyone should feel towards her, and when Santana clutches her tightly, before laughing and yelling, “Control your woman, bitch” at Sam, Rachel suppresses any notion that she’s going to have to go home later that day and journal angstily about how maybe, she’s vaguely attracted to girls.

(Or a girl.)

It can keep, until after a celebratory dinner, and the faint hope that when Santana changes out of her Cheerios uniform for the last time, Rachel will pretty much forget about this side of her and things can go back to normal.  Whatever that is.

*

The ice cream’s there, because she has wonderful parents.

It’s right next to other ice cream that nobody in her household will ever eat.

She stares at it for a long moment and then slams the door shut, before heading back to the living room with a carton and a spoon and slipping in between her dads.

(They don’t own a single movie she hasn’t also seen with Santana aside from Avatar, which just makes her think about what an absolutely worthless bitch she was to Sam, near the end, and--

She eats.  One spoonful at a time.  It fills something up, alright.)

*

12.  Don’t rank yourself; your accomplishments are individual, not comparative.

She’s trying to be excited about the move, but it’s hard to be excited enough for both of them, when Santana veers from being disinterested to looking downright depressed about the entire process.

Rachel has lists; years worth of lists, and goals, and desires, and she pours them all out on the bed between them, before finally settling on a walk-up in Brooklyn that they can just about afford together if she manages to get a job pretty swiftly.  

She can look at it in one of two ways: a new beginning, and one where she’s not going to be alone, or--a rescue attempt for someone who doesn’t even particularly want to be rescued.

So many parts of Santana are going to stay behind in Ohio that Rachel honestly doesn’t know if she’ll have a real roommate or just the shell of one when they finally get out.

Of course it ends with them yelling at each other; Santana is bitter, and Rachel has issues with clamping down on her pride.  Not that she has much left, and pointing out to Santana that third choice isn’t something she’s ever going to be happy about has an unexpected effect.

Santana makes it mean something, for just a second, and then disappears again, already flitting between so many people who don’t get along with each other that it’s a miracle her head isn’t exploding.

(She dreams about their New York apartment that night, and it’s cramped and humid and has wet walls and mold issues, and the paint won’t ever dry, and Santana won’t ever do the dishes when she’s supposed to, and then one morning, she wakes up to pancakes and Santana laughing and it feels like everything is wonderful.

She wakes up instantly, at the pulse of her own heart, and texts Sam something innocuous, feeling almost guilty about wanting New York to be absolutely fucking perfect when Santana’s not the only one going there with what is technically the wrong person.

She’s used to being jealous of Quinn Fabray by now, but my God, not like this.)

*

The map of New York is still on her bedroom wall; somehow, it belongs in Ohio more than it does in New York, and her cell phone has GPS so it’s not like she’s ever without a map.

She emails her manager at the movie theater and quits; she doesn’t know how to call the bakery and tell them that she’s also leaving, there, and might not ever come back--but if she does, it won’t be for another three months or so.

“I need a break,” she says, out loud; trying the words, and measuring them for size.

It’s the opposite of true, really.  She doesn’t need a break.  She needs answers, and the guts to ask the questions that will provide them.

All she has is a text message that basically just says it meant nothing to me.

(The part of her that knows Santana understands that it isn’t rejection so much as just an attempt to rewind time, and go back to a more comfortable place, but Rachel knows herself well enough to know that she’s never going to be like Brittany: okay with these desperate attempts to undo that don’t actually make anything go away.

The rest of her just hurts, and tries fifteen responses before finally just giving up, because she can either text back I love you or send 18 million messages and still not get her point across.  Santana’s just not ready to hear it, either way.  And maybe, she’s done giving so much of herself up for someone so blind.)

*

13.  Push those around you to be as good as you know they can be.

Santana storms out of BreadstiX, and Sam makes a face at both her and Quinn before saying, “Right, I guess I’m on suicide duty today; that’s cool guys, I mean, I’m sure she won’t actually try to maim the first person to try to talk to her.”

“Sam,” Quinn says, tiredly, and gives him a warning look.

Rachel doesn’t really understand the undercurrent between them, but Sam sighs and says, “Try not to start World War III in here, then, because I really can’t be in two places at once and I think Santana probably needs the help more, right now.  Okay?”

He presses a kiss to Rachel’s head before either of them can protest the idea that they’re going to fight, and then he’s gone.

Other than sparse moments by pianos, and in bathrooms, Rachel can’t actually remember the last time she’s been alone with Quinn.  It’s immediately unsettling, especially when Quinn looks at her with that typically dismissive look that says, you’re not worth the air I’m breathing.

“She would sound good on the song,” Rachel says, not willing to budge on this.

“Yes, she would,” Quinn says, easily, before leaning forward and saying, “Because when she sings it, she’s actually thinking about the many ways in which being in the same room in Brittany is still killing her, you absolutely blind idiot.”

It comes out fairly mild, all things considered, and Rachel doesn’t even flinch.  “Not all of us think she needs to be protected from those feelings, Quinn.  God knows she’d feel better if she just processed them and moved on.”

“You think she hasn’t been trying?” Quinn asks, sharply.  

“There’s trying, and then there’s trying,” Rachel counters.  

They’re silent for a moment, and then Quinn makes a small clicking noise and says, “Jesus, of all the people for her to move to New York to, it just had to be you, didn’t it.”

Rachel doesn’t look away, for once.  “She’s my best friend.  I know I’m not hers, but--”

“Oh, spare me, Rachel.  Not everything is about a competition.  I just wish her support system wasn’t so hung up on high school popularity politics, because honestly, she needs someone who will be there for her when she finally does move on--and what are you going to be doing?  Sitting around and waffling about how beautifully tragic her feelings for Brittany were.  I mean, what, are you planning on writing a song about it?”

Rachel glances at the table unwillingly.  “I’ve never understood just why you hate me so much, Quinn, and I don’t suppose it really matters.”

“I don’t hate you, I just don’t think you’ll be good for her,” Quinn snaps.

“And what is that to you, exactly?  Because, unless something has drastically changed in the last few weeks, you’re seeing Puck and she’s a lesbian,” Rachel says.

Quinn’s eyes narrow for a moment, and then she says, “She’s the only family I have left.  And I’m watching her move on with her life with someone who--”

“Yeah.  I know.  Anyone but me, right?” Rachel says, with a sigh.  “God.  Why don’t you just head out, and I’ll pay, and we can go back to--”

Quinn’s hand shoots across the table and covers her own, and she’s squeezing almost painfully tight.  “I’m only going to say this once, so just keep your mouth shut and listen to me, okay?”

Rachel doesn’t even manage a nod, really, before Quinn keeps going.

“She’s going to shut down.  When she’s away from Brittany, all of those feelings that she’s trying to not deal with now--she’s actually just going to shove them away, and never think of them again, until they come back up in the most horrible way possible.  You don’t understand this part of her, Rachel, but I do, because self-destruction is something she and I have in common.  So look out for it, and call me when it happens, because you won’t know how to stop her from screwing herself up, either.”

“She’s doing fine,” Rachel says, after a long and incredibly awkward silence.

Quinn actually scoffs at her and says, “Don’t be ridiculous.  She’s barely hanging on.”

She leaves a second later, heading to the bathroom, and Rachel sits and stares at the bill for a very long moment in time, wondering how with a five minute discussion, Quinn’s completely blown apart any notion she might’ve had that Santana was actually close to her.

For once, it doesn’t feel like Quinn playing head games, either, because the distinct panic in her voice at the idea of letting go of Santana was entirely real.

Rachel drops her head to her hands and wonders how this became a part of her future; how Quinn is apparently insightful enough to realize that Santana’s in trouble, but nobody’s picking up on the fact that Rachel is about three steps away from completely falling apart as well.

The deaf leading the blind, she thinks, and wonders if her boyfriend is still alive.

Quinn shows up next to her and says, “I’m sorry; I came on a little strong.  There’s just a lot going on, and honestly, I know you’re a good friend to her.  I just--”

“No, you’re right,” Rachel says, and smiles faintly.  “It would be great if I could pay attention to everyone the way I do to myself, wouldn’t it?”

The discomfort on Quinn’s face is almost worth the sting of the non-facetious self-deprecation, but not quite.

*

Kurt calls the next day and just says, “Oh, honey.”

She doesn’t have it in her to cry about it anymore, but just says, “You should send her a toaster.”

“I think we owe her more than one by now, Rachel,” he says, a small smile sounding through in his voice, and she laughs a little without meaning to.

“I feel like such a cliche,” she finally says.  “I mean--when I was sixteen, I could write all of these types of feelings off on going through a rather prototypical and expected bad boy phase, but--”

“Santana’s about as bad as a declawed kitten, and you did not just compare what happened with her to that ill-advised week of you dating Noah Puckerman,” Kurt protests.

“No.  That lasted an entire week, whereas this lasted about three hours, so there’s not much to compare,” she says.

Kurt sighs and says, “Rachel.  You can’t hide forever.”

“I need a plan, Kurt.  I can’t go back until I know what I’m going to say to her, and if I go back now, I’m just going to cry for an hour and then probably sleep with her again, because it’s easier than--forcing her to acknowledge me.”

“Why are you so convinced she doesn’t feel the same way you do?” he asks.  The chihuahua barks in the background, and mostly swallows up her response, which is probably for the best.

“Because I’ve been falling in love with her for years, and she’s just been falling out of love with Brittany that entire time.”

“What?”

“I just know, Kurt,” Rachel says, poking at a bruise on her thigh that she knows she didn’t leave there.  

Maybe a road trip will help.  The idea of being completely out of touch, and away from anything she knows--

Normally the lack of familiarity would terrify her, but right now, the things that are familiar are what’s terrifying, so.

*

14.  Say what you mean at all times, even if it is through song rather than speech.

Santana is pretty.

This is easy to admit to, because Rachel isn’t blind and anyway, has complimented Quinn on being like the single most beautiful girl alive out loud about twenty times by now.  (She has no idea why she feels the need to keep saying it, and even Finn picked up on her weird fascination with how the other girls in the Glee club look, but that doesn’t really matter.

They’re pretty.  She’s okay with that.  It’s sort of like the earth being round, in most ways.)

Santana is also, when it comes down to it, nice.

This is a little harder to swallow, after years of being called dwarf and midget and Willow and whatever else Santana had come up with, but insults from Santana are rote and impersonal and honestly easier to forget than the bigger ways in which both Quinn and Finn have belittled her, not to mention Jesse with his precision aim.  Santana isn’t one of the bad ones, per se.  She just has taken to having one very particular high school experience, but Rachel will never forget her admitting that Glee is the highlight of her day.  That moment, right there, is the one she keeps going back to whenever she needs to remind herself that Santana doesn’t mean to be a crabby, ungrateful asshole seventy percent of the time.

She’s basically nice the remaining thirty.  It’s good enough.

Lastly, Santana is one of the most emotionally open people she knows, which is so messed up because Santana would rather stab herself than admit to feeling something, but there are many times in her life where she completely fails to keep even one percent of what’s going on in her head off her face.

It’s usually “I want to murder someone” or “Shut up, Rachel” or “Why are you such a nerd, Sam?” or “Oh boy, Quinn’s having a moment” or any number of other innocuous things, but--

When Sam starts singing the lamest song in the world to her, as some sort of promise for the future, there is one moment where Rachel can’t help but look over at Santana, who is carefully looking anywhere but at Brittany while singing about being made for someone else, and--

Santana is beautiful, and unexpectedly sweet and giving, and oh my God.

She tears her eyes away after just a blink of connecting with Santana’s, because no.  Just no.  

The song picks back up, and she focuses on the guitar; it’s easier than paying attention to the words, or remembering who is singing to who, here.  She forces herself to look at Sam again, who is just so wonderful that she doesn’t have a clue what she’s ever done to deserve him.  (Even if this song is painful, and she’s been thinking about breaking up with him for weeks now because he doesn’t fit in her altered New York plans any more than he did in the original ones, and--)

He has a little speech prepared at the end.  Rachel doesn’t need to glance past him to know that Santana’s rolling her eyes and already pulling herself back together again, under the pretense that she wasn’t singing every line of that song to Brittany.

Everything about this moment is completely wrong, and so she does the only thing she can think to do: act like her life depends on it, and burst into tears.

(They’re mostly genuine, when it comes down to it, because she feels nothing but self-loathing at the fact that when her boyfriend does the one thing she’s always dreamed of someone doing for her, all she can think of is that she’s lucky to have such an amazing best friend.)

*

The road trip will take her across most of the summery, hot states, because they’re driving up from the south at Puck’s insistence.

“You need a change of scenery.  Nothing like big cities, or like, any places where we’re going to run into girls doing girls or anything like that.  We oughta just drive through a bunch of deserted places full of nothing but tumbleweeds, because you know our first end stop is LA and that shit right there is just going to remind you of New York all over again.”

It’s nice that he’s thinking about her wellbeing, but LA and New York are nothing alike, and it’s funny; back before Santana became her best friend, and got some ludicrously high score on the SATs, and copped to owning a pair of reading glasses, Rachel always figured she’d pack up her things with Brittany at the end of high school and party her way through college as a sorority sister.

(Somehow, that’s Quinn’s life, instead.

Mentally, she’d always pictured Quinn as joining a nunnery, which--yeah.)

“How did we get here?” she asks Puck, the last night before they leave.

“Shitty luck, mostly,” he says, and then curses and adds, “I’ve got to go, I’m seeing Beth tomorrow morning before we go, just so she doesn’t forget about me while we’re gone.”

Rachel feels a pang of regret at all of that sentence; that’s her mother’s house he’s talking about, and his kid, and Quinn’s kid, and …  God, her problems are so insignificant sometimes, she’s almost ashamed that they’re hurting her ability to function to this extent.

“What’s she like, now?” she asks, softly.

“Amazing,” Puck says.  

Pride shines through his voice, and Rachel wishes there was any one thing in her life she was that proud of.

*

15.  Chemistry is something that can’t be controlled, so when you find someone you have it with, work with them as often as you can.

A weird sense of renewed confidence has settled over her with graduation; or maybe it was with finally having sex, because, honestly.  Twenty-five was a long ways off, and it’s not like she hasn’t been curious, and--

The part of her that’s already twenty years in the future has this chapter all written out, and thinks back to it fondly as a fairly amazingly sweet first time.  She’ll be grateful to Sam forever, because--of course it made a difference to her, being so blatantly wanted by someone else.  (Someone attractive, and yes, she knows it’s stupid, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel it.)

She goes shopping for a new bikini shortly before graduation and tries something a little more out there than she normally would, because, honestly.  If Mercedes and Tina are comfortable with themselves, there is no reason why she can’t be.  (Viciously, she also reminds herself that Quinn has stretch marks and that even if this is a competition, the only person she’ll be competing with is Santana; she’s not competing with Brittany, because Brittany’s legs are twice the length of Rachel’s entire body, and she’s not much into self-deluding.)

It’s strange, being back at Kurt and Finn’s house--and seeing Finn’s mother look at her like the daughter-in-law that got away, but with this sad understanding that it’s probably for the best of everyone that Rachel moved on to other things.  Like Sam, who is babbling about sunscreen and how he’s pretty sure that ginger runs in his family with how quickly his face burns, and Rachel laughs at him before stripping and diving into the pool.

There’s canoodling, and it’s all kind of fun and meaningless, until she glances over and literally feels Santana looking at her, and--

“Wow, someone’s angry today,” Sam says, and she almost says something like, “Are you blind?” out loud, because that look is not anger.

(It reminds her of Puck, abstractly; Puck while staring at her legs in her shortest skirt, and yeah, of course she wears it to school just to mess with him from time to time.  It’s flattering.  It’s also harmless, because he’s just a friend, and Sam doesn’t mind the way that Finn would have.)

The aviators aren’t doing a whole lot to hide the intensity with which she’s being.... examined, and she breaks out into a cold sweat despite being in a pool and it being ridiculously hot for early June.

Sam pops up out of the water in front of her and catches a football that he then tosses back to Puck, and Rachel watches as Quinn elbows Santana in the ribs and murmurs something about getting them another drink.

Santana lifts to her feet effortlessly--like a panther, Rachel thinks--and then walks by.

She doesn’t even realize she’s looking at her best friend’s ass until she’s already been doing it for like, a good ten seconds, and then ducks under the water just to stop.

“Get us some drinks, would you?” she tells Sam, bracing herself on his shoulders afterwards.

He does it, of course, because he’s the world’s best boyfriend, and clearly she needs to spend some quality time with Google later tonight to find out if it’s possible that becoming sexually active has made her randomly sexually interested in like, everyone she knows.  

(It’s definitely some sort of hormonal imbalance thing, but even so, she has to take a drink when they play I Never and attraction to girls comes up, and the way Santana looks at her afterwards--

She fucks Sam three times that night (hell, she wakes him up the third time to do it because she can’t sleep) and feels about two percent better the next morning.  A lot of her pain then is thankfully due to a hangover, though, and when she sees Santana snoring on top of Quinn, all she can think is that they’d make a ridiculously weird but fun couple together.

Much better, she thinks, and vows to not drink around Santana ever again.

*

She’s closer to her Daddy, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t cherish these moments of waking up early and splitting the newspaper with her Dad, who just looks at her from over the top of the sports section and says, “What are we doing about your rent this summer?”

“Paying it.  I’m sorry, I’ll find a way to pay you back--my loans for Tisch, or--I don’t know,” she says, and then sighs and rubs at her face.  “I’m not going to make her financial situation desperate just because--”

“Just because what, babe?” her dad asks, and he says babe and he’s said babe her entire life, as long as she can remember, but he’s not the only one who says it and God, there goes her lip again, quivering like it’s separate to the rest of her until she sobs, loudly, just once, and says, “I think I’m in love with her.”

Her Dad, to his credit, just carefully folds the newspaper together and looks at her with a concerned expression.  “And this bothers you?”

“Yes!” she says, and then shakes her head and says, “Not because she’s a girl, God, you’ve raised me better than that--”

“Good,” he says, and then smiles faintly.  “Man, you sure do have a way of picking them.  I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, but--”

“What?” she says, and then laughs sharply. “You’re joking.  I’ve--I didn’t even know this was coming, and--”

“Oh, sweetie.  That’s why you’re not my parent, but honestly, the way you look at that girl sometimes--it’s a good thing Sam Evans wasn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch,” he says, with a raised eyebrow, and then trades their papers without saying anything else.

“But--”

“I know.  You only figured it out recently,” he says, gently.  “And then I’m sure you pulled a move that your Daddy would be proud of in trying to tell her about it, and now everything’s all screwed up, and you can’t even be in a room with her.”

She stares at him silently for a moment, because she honestly can’t tell if he’s teasing her or if this is just one of those moments where he disguises a lesson in a joke.

“You know, when Hiram first met me, he thought I was an absolute ass, for lack of a better way to put it; I was popular and kind of cocky and just generally speaking not interested in socializing with Jewish nerds, and--well, we had our moments of not really getting along.  Let’s just leave it at that,” her Dad says.

Rachel frowns.  “He’s always told me it was love at first sight.”

“For him, maybe.  Back then I thought I was going to marry a cheerleader and have her pop out five African-American babies.”

“That’s strangely racist, not to mention unrealistic, unless you were planning on having a lot of turkey basters around the house as well,” Rachel says.

Her Dad laughs.  “Yes, well, what can I say, I was young.  Anyway.  The point is, sometimes it just sort of slaps you in the face, you know?  And I’m pretty sure that it slapped you in the face, and now you’ve gone and slapped her in the face with it, so--just give it some time.  She’s a thinker.  She’ll want to think it through, and then you can go all Broadway on her ass with songs about your feelings and--it’ll be fine, because I’ve been around the block a few times and you know, I would bet good money that you’re not the only one with all these icky emotions you just don’t know what to do with.”

“Must your pep talks always mock everything about me?” she asks, disgruntled, when he’s barely hiding a grin anymore.

“Someone has to keep you grounded, girl,” he responds, and then says, cheerfully, “Oh, yeah.  Top Chef’s coming back.  Better get the TiVo loaded.”

She’s always been closest to her Daddy, and he’s going to be the one to let her cry about this until the end of days, but really--nobody’s ever known how to put things in perspective for her like her Dad.

(Other than Santana, actually, which--

She laughs, unwillingly, because this is not a thought process that she can healthily complete.)

*

16. The little moments are the ones that matter the most.  Embrace them.

They spend the entire summer doing things together, and she finally has the friends she’s always wanted.

It’s so bittersweet that she doesn’t really know what to do about it, except for hold on to every moment of it and write down the key parts as fast as she can when she gets home at night, locking them all up in journals that she won’t bring with her because--well, maybe there is that small part of her that still remembers Santana as the mean girl she once was, and this is just too much of her.

Sam is the steady, reliable background that she needs in these few weeks before her life changes completely, and it hits her by surprise that she loves him; really just sneaks up on her, even though she’s already said it to him out of a sense of obligation or misguided gratitude for everything he’s been to her this past year.

She’s been difficult, confused, hormonal and flaky, and he’s put up with all of it without asking for a whole lot in kind, except a chance to survive past the summer.

She watches Santana watch Brittany for another few weeks, and watches Quinn watch everyone from the relative safety of Puck’s arms, and packs up her stuffed animals and her Broadway posters one day at a time, and--

By the end of summer, it’s almost like this is how things are actually supposed to be, even if she’s veered so far off course that she can barely even see the main road anymore.

“Burgundy,” Santana says, over fries.  “My final compromise.”

“I am not painting our living room the color of a brothel,” Rachel says, before dipping a fry in ketchup and flicking it across the table at Santana.

“Did you just--” Santana says, staring at her for a second, and then jolting forward.

Rachel yelps without meaning to and then laughs when Santana starts cracking up.

It shouldn’t be funny that she’s still so afraid of someone she’s going to live with, but even Sam and Quinn start laughing and it just kind of is.

(Something about the entire afternoon--Quinn being civil, mostly from the dual pressure of Sam and Santana glaring at her; Sam being dorky and not really caring who sees it, even as Santana mocks him and Quinn just sort of half-smiles and rolls her eyes; and Santana being genuinely relaxed for the first time in weeks, sticks with her.

It would’ve been a great double date, except--she’s getting less and less sure of who, at that table, she wishes she’d be going home with at the end of the day.  And that in and of itself is enough to make her go:)

“Okay.  Fine. You can have your burgundy, but I draw the line at an accent wall, because the place is small enough without compressing it further with dark color schemes.”

Santana looks smug as a cat with a tin of tuna, and it should be unattractive, but really, Rachel just grips Sam’s hand a little tighter and rolls her eyes.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to acknowledge that my taste is superior, Berry,” Santana says, before toasting her victory with Quinn, who looks mostly unimpressed and a little bit restless at the topic of conversation.

“I’m not acknowledging anything.  It’s called compromise.  It’s what makes relationships work,” Rachel says, without thinking.

Santana’s smile twitches funnily for just one second, and then she says, “Yeah, I wouldn’t know about that.”

Then, she elbows Quinn and makes a pregnancy joke that has Quinn staring daggers and the moment thankfully glosses over again.

She wonders if Sam can still feel all of his fingers when she finally lets go, and also knows that he’d never say anything even if she was hurting him.

(God.)

*

She’s packing for a beach vacation almost unwillingly, and flinches when she comes across her bikini.  God, she wishes she’d never worn it.  Or maybe she doesn’t at all.  She doesn’t even know if she wants to undo everything, or just do everything again but stick it out this time; take a chance that she didn’t think she could, the morning after.

She still doesn’t know if she can, and half of her is convinced that Santana is on Chastity’s couch right now, drinking Patron straight from the bottle as a prelude to another round of what, according to Chastity anyway, had been pretty mindblowing sex all the times past.

She doesn’t even realize she’s almost ripping the t-shirt she’s folding in half until the fabric’s bulging, and then mixed in with that ludicrous jealousy is just a lot of concern.  She’s not--adventurous.  She’s not even experienced.  It’s just been Sam and two one night stands, and how the hell she ever thought she was going to make a lasting impression on a girl like Santana...

She’s never thought it would be possible to be ashamed of not being promiscuous, but it burns in her chest now anyway, because--maybe if she’d just been the best fuck Santana’s ever had, they wouldn’t be here by now.

Santana wouldn’t have let her leave.

(And yes, objectively, Rachel knows that Santana asked her to stay, but... she asked for the wrong reasons.  She wanted her best friend to not be lonely, and she wanted her roommate to not fly out of the room like a bat out of hell.  It was how they’d dressed it up, and she knows that that’s not even Santana’s fault.

It doesn’t make it suck any less hard that it was that easy for Santana to pretend that it meant nothing more than just … a thing, when to Rachel, it had been everything she’s ever hoped for in a moment with another person.

She always has been good at figuring out what it is she really needs about three seconds after she’s acted purely on want, and this is why her relationship history is littered with regret already, at the ripe old age of eighteen.)

*

17.  Make a home.  Live in it.  Don’t let anyone take it from you.

She cries, about leaving Sam behind.  She cries about leaving her parents behind, and then even cries a little when the moving truck disappears around the corner again.

She stops crying when Santana’s sitting on the sofa, looking every bit as lost as she does, and--maybe this will be okay.  The tension that she knows has just been on her side of things, lately, ever since that horrible pool party at Kurt’s, seems to have gone; and now all she has is an honest, different Santana, who lets her hair down and wears jogging clothes around the house and looks a little younger and less sure than she normally does.

She pops in Trapped in the Closet because it always makes her laugh, and then jostles Santana out of her melancholy with some pretend-adoration for R. Kelly as well as her acute memory of some of the more ridiculous and memorable parts of the musical--and then Santana looks at her with such a grateful, shy smile that she actually gets up and makes herself some lemonade just because it’s better than being confronted with things she doesn’t want for herself.

Sam is a good guy.  She loves him.  And this is just a stupid crush on one of the most attractive people she’s ever met, and--maybe she needs to talk to Kurt about her sexual orientation, in a hypothetical, abstract way, but her and Santana Lopez?

It’s never in a million years going to happen, and so she stirs the powder and some extra sugar into the glass and drinks it slowly, bracing herself for the remainder of the year.

She can do this.  She turned the worst collection of half-talented individuals into a team that won Nationals, and she’s been strong enough to protect her family at the expense of her educational dream, and she’s been smart enough to do the right thing with Sam after just one pointed reminder that truly, he does make her happy and he deserves a shot at the future.

If she can do all of those things, she can ignore the way that Santana makes her feel when she looks and thinks Rachel can’t tell that she’s looking.  It only happens every so often anyway, and only when they’re drunk, so there’s an easy solution to it and it will just have to do.

(That night, she dreams about Quinn figuring out that she has these feelings, and slapping her in the face so hard that her jaw cracks.  

“She’s not yours,” Quinn hisses at her, and Rachel jolts straight out of bed and looks at a picture of her boyfriend and then laughs at how her subconcious still paints Quinn as some sort of James Bond-level supervillain, and how--

Oh.  The part where imaginary Quinn is completely right.  Yeah.  That’s less amusing.)

They go out and buy paint the next day, and then go shopping a few days later, and Santana hops into the cubicle with her because that’s what girls do, and honestly, Rachel doesn’t know how to Google the answer to her question, which is, “Is it also what lesbians do... together?” because--she’s not, and she doesn’t actually want to know if there’s anything unusual about the way Santana is sort of staring at her like she’s been electrocuted, and how Rachel herself kind of likes that look on her face.

After years of being called ugly in various ways, it’s only natural that she appreciates … well, being appreciated, for lack of a better word.  And so what if she tries everything on more times than she really needs to to make decisions?

It’s harmless.

(It’s so wrong.)

*

Puck swings her duffel bag into the back of his truck and then opens up the passenger door with a, “Your carriage, Hot Jew” that has her smiling genuinely for the first time in a while.

“You’re not going to pester me for details?” she asks, when they’re pulling out of Lima and he’s tapping along to a Keith Urban song on the radio before fiddling with it and tuning into some 70s hard rock instead.

“Look, unless you want me to offroad because I’m super distracted by what’s happening in my pants, this is probably not--” he starts to say, and she laughs and slaps him on the arm.

“Noah!  God.  I didn’t mean those details.”

He smiles at her and says, “I know, Rach.  Geez.  And you can talk to me when you’re ready.  I’m not a chick, I don’t need to know all your shit all at once.”

She settles into the seat a little better after that, and then peers at the list of destination’s he’s tacked onto the dash.  None of them look familiar, and she’s about to say something when he shakes his head and says, “It’s a surprise.  I know you hate that shit, but c’mon.  This is about you doing something different, yeah?”

“Yeah, maybe,” she agrees, and then tips her head against the window.  “I haven’t seen this much cattle in months.”

“Miss it?” he asks, before whistling along to the start of Don’t Stop Believin’, and Rachel rolls her eyes and changes the station without asking.

“Not really.  I’m happy,” she says, and then corrects herself too late.  “I was, I mean.  In New York.  It was... where I was meant to be.”

“Dude, it still is.  This is a blip, not a change of course,” Puck says, and Rachel sighs before taking a deep breath and asking the first real thing she’s asked of Puck in a long time.

“Did you love her?  Back when you two--”  she says, and then gestures aimlessly, because she doesn’t want to be rude but calling it dating is pushing it.

He overtakes a Fiesta in front of them, with a pointed look at the old lady driving it, and then says, “Well, yeah.  I mean, I still love her.  She’s like... a bro with boobs, you know?  Santana and I have always just clicked, but--I don’t love her in the way that you’re asking, man.  Only one person ever has.”

“I’m not talking to Brittany about this,” Rachel says, a sinking feeling already swimming around her stomach.

“Nobody says you have to.  Does it really matter, how other people feel about her?” Puck asks.

The countryside flashes by them as he blatantly ignores all speed limits in favor of making decent progress away from home, and she stamps down on the urge to tell him to slow down; maybe she’s been moving too slowly herself, for too long a time now.

“No, I guess it doesn’t.  But it would help if someone could tell me how to handle feeling this way about someone whose idea of a relationship is a 2pm pit stop in a public bathroom,” Rachel says.

“Wow, okay; I expect that kind of pious bullshit from Quinn, but you?” Puck says, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m--it’s not about her choices.  I don’t judge what she’s done, but I know it’s not for me, and ….”  She sighs and gives up on talking, settling for humming along quietly to Hotel California, which sums up her problem well enough all on its own.

*

18. Take courage from the little things; they are the ones that matter the most.

They make excellent roommates, and Rachel’s crush settles inside of her like something innocuous she’s just learned to live with.  She also thinks puppies are adorable, but doesn’t feel the need to steal those whenever they come by, and so there’s absolutely no problem with living with one of the sexiest girls she’s ever known, and occasionally being pointedly reminded by her hormones that she’s not entirely straight.

A quick call to Kurt about her.... attraction to girls, in the most general of senses, merely resulted in an awkward chuckle and a stammered, “Well, at least we chose wisely in picking you as a potential make-out partner for Santana back when she was still knee-deep in a certain river in Egypt”, and while that statement makes no sense to her whatsoever, it also just hammers home that it’s not really a big deal.

She’s with Sam.  She can look, because God knows he does often enough; its human.

And, they’re actually working okay; she didn’t think their relationship would last, but he’s regularly coming up and the weekends they spend together--with Santana around as well, obviously--are the highlights of her otherwise depressingly unproductive existence.  Multiple auditions that haven’t led to anything, and her optimism about her talent is slowly starting to fade, but Santana and Sam in the kitchen on Sundays, arguing about whether or not Sonic or Tails is more bad-ass--that’s the kind of stuff that everyone should have in their life, and--

She feels a little like Brittany sometimes, because really: is it actually impossible to just want to be with two people at once?  Her life is at its best when they’re both in it, and she knows that’s selfish and ridiculous or perhaps misconstruing best friendship into something else--but still.

And then, even that fiction falls from her mind altogether, because Sam won’t stop pushing about Juilliard and she’s exhausted--two jobs, many auditions, not enough sleep, and she’d be starving herself to death if not for the fact that her roommate cooks for her a lot, and she can’t even tell when that started happening but Santana doesn’t even ask what she needs anymore, just starts making it these days, and what on earth is that about, anyway?  

Is that just something that friends do for each other--complete each other’s sentences and make each other dinner and have drinks together every day even though they live together?  Why doesn’t she have a frame of reference like any other normal person?  God, she’s almost desperate enough to just ask Quinn at this point, because--

Next thing she knows, she’s in tears on the floor of a McDonald’s bathroom, and instead of her boyfriend, it’s her roommate who sits down in front of her, proverbially slaps some sense into her, and then gives her the comfort she needs.

Her roommate, who pushes her out the door and back into her boyfriend’s willing and loving arms, and who falls asleep on the back seat while they quietly talk and Rachel promises to stop bottling everything up so much.

It’s such a blatant lie that for one second she wishes she was Christian, so she could just cross herself and be done with it, but with the amount of dishonesty she’s spreading through all their lives, her penance isn’t going to be that simple.

(Everything is completely messed up, and they have another 9 months on their lease, easily.  Even if she wanted to do the honorable thing and just get away from everything that’s running through her head and screwing with her ability to concentrate and just be a good girlfriend, she would never be able to do so without explaining to Santana why she has to go.

And she doesn’t have the words.  They’re too honest, and too humiliating, and she’s not nearly brave enough to put them out there.

She called Santana a coward once, for nearly identical reasons.  God has a funny sense of humor about these things.)

*

Their first stop is at some diner that Rachel is sure won’t cater to her diet, but Puck surprises her by showing up with a delicious vegan wrap and two drinks that they eat in the back of the truck.

“What happened with you and Quinn?” Rachel asks, when she’s eaten half of it and doesn’t even know if she’s hungry enough for the rest of it.

“Truth?” Puck asks, after a moment, before blotting at his mouth with a wad of paper and then tossing that towards the tail end of the truck.  

“I won’t tell a soul,” Rachel promises, and watches as Puck’s eyes glaze over just for a second.

“I’ll always love her.  But what I love is, y’know, what we should’ve been.  Back when were just kids, and maybe wanted to be together even though I wasn’t the kind of boyfriend she wanted to bring home to her mommy and daddy, and she was too stuck up for me to ever really stick it out with her.  There could’ve been a moment where....”  He hesitates and then shrugs.  “She’s my kid’s mom, and we’re on really good terms, and we can only fuck that up.  And when I think about her having more kids, Rach, they’re just not mine.  They’ll never be mine.”

Rachel takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, before saying, “You know, for all of Mr. Schue’s motivational speeches in Glee club, he could’ve spent a little more time warning us all how difficult it would be to be a grown-up.”

“Yeah, I know.  The only person who’s managing fine is Q, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that giving birth kind of changes a person.”

Rachel smiles faintly.  “Santana’s fine.  She’s doing great in school, and--she’s happy.”

Puck snorts and says, “Are you dumb?”

“No, I just... she’s doing so much better than I am, and …”

“Dude.  She’s hooking up with a bunch of randoms because she’s too afraid to try for anything real with how much Britt hurt her.  I’m no Dr. Phil, man, but if that shit’s healthy I’ll make out with Finn or something.”

Rachel stares at her half-eaten wrap and then sighs.  “Even if it’s not healthy, it doesn’t mean that...”

“No, it doesn’t,” Puck says, before slinging an arm around her shoulder.  “But it does mean that you’re not the only fuck-up, Rachel, so I mean.  Stop beating yourself up so hard.  What the fuck were you supposed to do, sing her a love song?  She probably would’ve laughed at you.”

Rachel smiles unwillingly.  “Yeah, I know.”

“C’mon.  There’s this line dancing bar like four hours away that’s got our names on it,” Puck finally says, after a final slurp of Coke.

“I don’t line-dance,” Rachel says, squinting at him.  

He flips her sunglasses down over her eyes again and then leans in close, before saying, “You do now, babe.”

(This babe stings a little bit less, and--maybe that’s something.)

*

19.  Learn how to deal with disappointment in a rational, productive way.

She’s almost okay with it.

And then--Chastity sleeps over for the first time.  

Oh, God, their walls are thin.  They’re so thin that Rachel might as well be in the room, and Chastity--who seems perfectly nice, actually, so it pains Rachel to think mean things about her on a whole different level--moans like she’s audition for the role of hooker #3 on some very special episode of Law and Order: SVU that--

She doesn’t even watch that show, but just lies there completely still, closes her eyes and bites almost through her lips and waits for it to finish.

Which it does.  After an hour.  (She’s not exactly researched this but common sense dictates that there’s nothing that just runs out of.... power after one go, so...)

Her iPod, unfortunately, is still cued to the Wicked soundtrack, meaning that unfortunately she can now never think of Defying Gravity again without associating it with her roommate (her roommate) getting off with another girl.

There’s breathless laughter afterwards, and Rachel actually feels like she’s going to die.

(At least, that’s what she tells herself, because the alternative...)

She’s never even considered phone sex with Sam, because it’s kind of tacky and also, while he’s a great guy, he’s not exactly Wordsworth and she doesn’t find references to a variety of sci-fi tropes arousing, but--

Instead, she just tosses and turns for the rest of the night and gets up at around 5.30 the next day, only to be cornered in the kitchen by Santana’s most recent conquest, who is nice and has an amicable breakfast with her.

She’s just going to have to learn to deal with this, though if she can help it, she’s staying out of the house when it happens in the future because this whole roommate thing only really works when she’s not confronted with sleepy, stretching Santana who looks properly--

She doesn’t really go for crude, ever, but yeah.

Fucked.

*

Line dancing’s actually strangely fun, and after three mixed drinks, she sort of gets into it, and Puck has hidden talents or hobbies that keep surprising her; at some point, he gets up with the band and takes over guitar and singing for a while, and then beckons her up and they work their way through a few country classics until Puck steals the microphone and beckons her up.

It’s the first time she’s enjoyed singing in front of a crowd since Nationals.

It’s the first time she’s been able to remember why she wants this, for her life, in ages, and she’s sharing it with someone who she knows loves her, and who she loves her in her own way.

It fixes something, even if the immediate problem doesn’t go away.  She can conceptualize a future that might not have Santana in it, and that’s probably the best thing that anyone’s been able to do for her in years.

Puck lifts her off the stage afterwards, and she knows she’s got that afterglow of a good performance on her when he looks her up and down, and says, “Damn, Berry.  Almost forgot how hot you look when you sing.”

She laughs and links their arms together and says, “Let’s run away together; start a traveling band, and just never look back.”

He looks down at her and says, “Can do, until your summer school starts.”

His guitar’s in the back anyway, and her voice is with her always.

It feels like a great plan, and when he gives her one more telling look, she pulls him down and kisses him, just because it’s that kind of moment and she really just needs it to not end.

“Rach,” he whispers, against her lips.

“I know.  It’s an awful idea, and I’m probably using you, and I’m not even sober,” she says, leaning back just enough to look him in the eye.  “But you’re one of my only friends, Noah, and right now--that’s more than enough reason for me to want you.  It has nothing to do with her, and--”

“Whatever, dude, you had me at let’s run away together.  One last irresponsible bullshit fling until we all grow the hell up, right?” he says, lightly, and just for a second, she thinks she might be the only person to really ever have understood what makes him tick.

“Yeah.  One last time,” she says, and he picks her up a second later and carries her out of the bar, laughing against her neck the entire time.

*

20.  When it all gets to be too much, talk to a trusted friend and rely on their objectivity.

She can’t sleep enough.  She can’t work enough, or pay enough bills.  She can’t stop auditioning.  She can’t stop wondering where Santana’s spending the night.  She can’t stop wishing that she could stop thinking about that, because Sam doesn’t deserve it, and she can’t stop wishing that she wanted the guy she’s with more than the girl she’ll never have because none of this is going to end well for her.

She’s not even nineteen yet, and she’s going to have a nervous breakdown soon.

Kurt picks up on the third ring, and she just blurts it out.

“I want to be with Santana.”

It’s made it real; Kurt’s gasp in response just sort of amplifies how real it already is, and she feels her legs buckle until she’s weakly sitting on the edge of her bed.

Kurt doesn’t ask any of the stupid things he could, like be with her how? or are you high?, none of which would be out of character for him at all, but--Providence is treating him well, and being in an adult relationship with one of the most adult teenagers she’s ever met is treating him better.

All he says is, “Oh, honey, no.”

He doesn’t even sound surprised, and that’s probably the part where she actually bursts into tears.

Sure, a lot of those are because she’s so tired, and she’s screwing around the only decent guy who’s ever been interested in her (which is a lie, but it doesn’t even really matter), and she’ll never be good enough for any of the things she wants, but--

He’s not even surprised, and she wonders how much longer she can keep the truth from Santana if it’s apparently obvious to someone who lives in a different state and hasn’t even seen them together in months.

“You need to end it with Sam,” he tells her, finally, when she can’t think of anything else to say, and he can’t think of anything else to tell her that wouldn’t be speculative or a lie.

“I know,” she says, and texts him immediately afterwards, asking him to come visit.

She can picture the small smile on his face, and the way he’s putting down his XBox controller just to immediately text back, and she thinks about making love to him on his Star Wars sheets and the way that he sometimes looks so proud of her when she actually knows the difference between Farscape and Firefly, and--

Santana’s head pokes around the corner.  “Hey, I’m off to the gym, want me to get you some vegan Froyo on the way back?”

“No, I’m fine,” Rachel says, not looking up from her phone, because it’s going to buzz any second now and she hasn’t had time to wash her face or anything.

Santana hesitates and says, “Look, I know I was kind of a dick about you and Sam a while back, but--”

“Actually, I’ll have that Froyo,” she says, just to say something that isn’t what’s actually on her mind, and Santana says, “Aight, later” and heads out the door.

Her phone says, Awesome babe love you and she almost flings it across the room, because maybe that will make her feel like less of a ginormous asshole.

(The truth is, nothing will, because she is one, and for what?  Someone who buys her friendly Froyo.)

She’s sick of crying about it, because there are bigger things going on in her life than this, even now, and she’s finally doing the right thing, even if it will hurt Sam, and--she just has to believe that this will all work itself out, karmically.

She’s worked so hard at being a good person that it’s too late now to start giving up on the idea that one day, she can be honest with herself again, and it will have been worth it.

*

It’s good.  Really good, actually, and she tells him as much afterwards, planting a slightly awkward kiss on his cheek like he’s one of her female friends and she’s saying hello.

He rolls his eyes at her.  “Dude, what did you expect?”

She smiles and puts her head back down on his chest.  “Honestly, I never did have any expectations about you.  Other than that I should probably bring my own condoms, but--”

He cuffs her in the back of the head and she laughs.

“Below the belt, Rach,” he says, and his hand scratches at her scalp.  It’s nice; dreamy, almost, the way they’re just offroaded somewhere and lying around, looking at the stars, under a blanket.

It would be great to be in love with him, but she’s not; and he’s not in love with her, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t right for them right now.

“I think I was there just seconds ago, actually,” she says, coyly, and then laughs when he groans loudly.

“I don’t even know where to start; if there’s such a thing as lame and sexy, you’re it,” he says.

She reaches for the bottle of Jack that they picked up on the drive over, because Puck wouldn’t be Puck without an excellent fake ID and a ton of ideas on how to cause havoc, and takes a quick sip of it, just to clear her mind.

“This isn’t going to get awkward, is it?” he asks, sitting up just enough to look at her face.

She shakes her head.  “It’s a vacation.  I think we’ve both earned it.”

Maybe this isn’t the best way to go about making new, mature decisions for herself, but it’s the only thing she can think of doing to just stop pinning everything on one girl, who didn’t even know that she existed (not like this, anyway) until a week ago.

It could be the alcohol, or the fact that Puck did tire her out just now, but--it’s suddenly glaringly obvious to her that she’s not being fair to Santana, at all, and the only thing that can put them back on equal footing is time and honesty.

“We need to stop some place where I can buy some postcards and stamps tomorrow,” he says to Puck, who mumbles something in agreement, already drowsy.

It’s weirdly similar to the last time she had sex, except for the part where this time, she doesn’t think she’ll regret doing it.

*

21.  Celebrate all happy moments, big or small.

She’s convinced herself she doesn’t stand a chance, and she broke Sam’s heart over it anyway.

Then, things get messy, because Santana shows up with thoughtful Christmas presents--even though Rachel had resigned herself to not seeing her at all over the break--and it’s awful, because it gives her hope.  Santana still doesn’t give a crap about nearly all the people around her, so the fact that she’s paid attention, and knows what to get Rachel to really cheer her up is just--

Does it mean anything?

Rachel doesn’t have a clue anymore, but accepts that some things, she can have; the way that Santana lets her clutch her arm on the flight back, for instance.  The last of the tofu, and the last of the wine.  First dibs on the shower, practically always.  An extra ten minutes to get ready.

She didn’t think she’d ever describe Santana as considerate, but--

She stops analyzing it altogether, and instead focuses on home.  It’s important to her to be settled, in New York, because her family was everything to her in Lima and it’s bizarre to think that she should branch out, now that she’s in a new city and isn’t destined to be an outcast anymore.  Sure, she’d like to have an active social life, but more than anything, she wants what she’s slowly but surely getting:

Game nights with friends; movie nights with other friends.  Dinners that are ready for her, stocked refrigerators, notes to say ‘hey’ or ‘I’m going to be late’, and almost-fun cleaning parties where she gets to work her way through her collection of bad early-2000s music and Santana pretends to not know all the words to all of Fergie’s songs.

It’s home.  It’s perfect, and they have Veronica Mars DVDs, and maybe she can just forget about all of this stupid crush business because honestly, not many people are lucky enough to have friendships like this.  Maybe, Santana does just think of her as another Quinn, but it’s going to be completely enough from now on because--she’s tired of trying to read between lines that probably aren’t even there, outside of her mind.

That kind of thinking has already lost her her boyfriend, and she’ll be damned if it also means she loses her best friend, so she watches the DVD and speculates about who it was that actually assaulted Veronica at that party, and blinks when fireworks go off behind them, and then can’t do anything when Santana just clambers over towards her and kisses her in a way that--

Well, it would’ve been friendly if she hadn’t shot out of the room a second later.

She’s on the phone with her dads while desperately trying to make sense of it all, and has no idea what she’s even saying to them, other than she loves them too and hopes they have a great 2013.

Her heart is almost pounding out of her chest, and it takes years of practice for her to school her face enough to stop by Santana’s room and mouth a, “Happy New Year.”

Then, she hides.  Like, actually hides in her bedroom, and replays the moment and wonders if there’s anything she could have or should have done.

The problem is, as much as she understands Santana better than most people, she doesn’t understand what the hell just happened, and in the end has to write it off on tradition and loneliness and a bunch of other stuff that means it wasn’t anything special.

Her lips tingle.  Her head just hurts.

*

The plan’s abandoned after that, and they just follow the highway out west, stopping at every roadside bar they think they could temporarily gig at for a bit of change and some free drinks and dinner.

Rachel smiles when Puck grins at her and starts playing the intro to Need You Now, and even though lyrically that song smarts like hell, they harmonize on it like never before--probably because they’re both thinking of other people when they’re singing it, and that’s what makes it kind of twisted and amazing all at once.

She tries out different brands of whiskey at his insistence, even though they all taste exactly the damn same, and he even orders a vegan burger at some point after she’s special-instructed the chef on how to prepare one for her.  

“I feel like a fucking rabbit eating this,” he tells her, when he’s done chewing on the last bit of one.

She knows she’s drunk when the only thing she can think to say in response is, “Are you going to hump me like one?”

His glass tips over halfway to his mouth and he spills a ten buck shot all over his lap, and then just cracks up laughing and pulls her in close.

She hasn’t thought of anything during the nights in at least four days now, and it’s fucking wonderful.  Wonderful, because every morning when she wakes up, she takes a new postcard out of the deck and starts writing out everything she knows she needs to say to Santana.

They’ll go on the post as soon as she’s sure she can fit the entire message on, and then she’ll send out one a day, just because the one thing she didn’t give Santana before is time to process, and she’s not about to make that mistake a second time over.

*

22. Treasure honesty, even when it hurts; it will help you grow into the person you want to be.

Her head is pounding.  God, and she wasn’t even all that drunk last night; no, that honor goes to Santana, who--

She’s trying so hard to just keep it together, because she’s sure all of it’s just in her head now that she’s seen Santana with Quinn again, even if it’s just been for a few days.  She’s just so foolish, and all of that hopefulness basically just landed her in a corner where the most she’s going to get from Santana is a drunken hook-up.

It’s not worth her life, or the home they’ve built in New York; it’s not nearly enough of what she actually wants.

The headache is basically just punishment for her acute awareness that she should be really grateful that Quinn walked in on them last night, because it would’ve ruined everything.

Of course, she knows Quinn well enough to know that she’s not off the hook, and a manicured nail is already tapping against the kitchen table when she rounds the corner and heads immediately for the coffee maker.

A conversation about whose fault it is that Santana got so drunk in the first place derails completely, and they’re shouting at each other like this is still high school and Santana is Finn, and something in Rachel just snaps.

“Maybe I’m a little sick of taking into consideration how damaged Santana is, okay? It’s not an excuse for every single thing she does to screw up her life. She’s not the only one with problems,” she snaps at Quinn, who stops arguing on the spot and looks at her.  Really looks at her.

Rachel lowers her eyes after a moment and goes back to fiddling with meaningless things in the kitchen, because she knows she’s done it.  She’s given up her hand, and Quinn knows what’s going on with her now, and--

It wasn’t ever going to happen anyway, but she’d managed to fool herself into thinking for a very long time that the only thing standing in her way was Santana’s disinterest.  (Like that isn’t enough.)

She jolts when the bathroom door slams shut, and then jolts again when Quinn says, softly, “You’re right, actually.  And don’t think I’m not also furious with her for doing this to you.”

Rachel turns around and stares at her for a long moment, and Quinn finally looks back at her and says, softly, “You know, the key to maintaining a …  friendship is communicating.  With words.  You might want to consider doing some of that, before it’s too late.”

It’s not a blessing, and some part of her resents Quinn more than ever before, but when Quinn just goes back to staring at the television, she knows she’d just be petty to tell her to mind her own business.

If she’s learned anything this weekend, it’s that Santana’s business will always be Quinn’s business, and that’s reason enough for why she’s relieved that she’s going to be in Chicago over the summer.  She can’t handle another 2 months of not knowing from one minute to the next if she’s hallucinating things, or if maybe, there’s something there.

*

Puck doesn’t ask to see the postcards, but one night, after another bottle of Jack, does start talking about the baby.

“I want her to be proud of me, y’know?  And, fuck, I have such fucking shoes to fill here.  We both know Quinn is going to get out of Ohio sooner rather than later.  She’s working her ass off, you know.  Earning her scholarship, studying all the time.  She likes to make it sound like she parties a lot just because she knows Santana will worry if she’s not having fun, but--she’s going to finish a four year degree in three at this rate, and she’ll kick ass doing it,” he says, fingers picking at the label on the bottle, until he glances at Rachel.

“Me?  I’m just that guy majoring in sports science because it’s an easy major, and I don’t want my little sister to think that college is a bad move because it won’t be for her.  But--fuck, Rach, I’m so bored.”

She rolls over onto her side, tugging the blanket up a little higher, and then says, “What would you be doing if you could do anything?”

He looks away from her and says, “This.”

“So what’s stopping you?  You’re good, Noah.  You know I wouldn’t be saying that to you if I didn’t mean it.”

He scratches at his head and she pushes his hand away, running her fingertips along his scalp for him instead.  “I just don’t want to turn into my dad, you know?  Failed rock star.  Deadbeat fucker who couldn’t ever make it to the big moments.  I want to be more fucking reliable than that.  Just--someone who’s around, and not just in the magazines, even.  It’s not about the fame, I just--”

He stops, clearly frustrated, and Rachel’s fingers still at the back of his head, just gently pressing there.

“You just want a chance to do what you love,” she says, with a faint smile.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and then looks at her.  “Like you got.”

“I almost blew mine,” she says, softly, and then sighs, thinking about her student loans and whether or not she’s ever going to see anything bright about the audition process again, after how her last audition revolved.  “But--you’ve reminded me why I wanted singing to be my career in the first place, and...”

He whistles the first few lines of Don’t Rain on My Parade, and she laughs, before sobering.

“Honestly, Noah.  I think that if you have something you love this much, you just owe it to yourself to chase it.”

He glances at her, picking the last bit of the label of the bottle, and says, “I’m going to be an asshole for just a second here, but dude, those are some big ass words from someone who just hightailed it out of the bed they were in with the girl of their dreams, or whatever.”

It doesn’t hurt so much anymore, to have someone remind her.  “I know.  And I know I really messed up.  I shouldn’t have slept with her like that to begin with, and then I definitely shouldn’t have left.  I just--I didn’t want her to say it was a mistake, first.  I know she might, and it’s okay, but--”

“Rachel,” he says, shutting her up with a look.  He sighs, and then says, “Look, this basically disrespects the bro code completely, but you are just too stuck on thinking that some chick like Santana could never be into you, so, shut up and listen to me.  Lopez called me a few weeks ago, being all like, I can’t stop thinking about this chick I really shouldn’t want to fuck, and how do I make it stop.”

Rachel blinks at him.  “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” Puck says, stretching with a sigh, “she fed me some bullshit about it being her college librarian but I went onto the Barnard website and there is no way she wants to double-tap some fifty year old lady gray hair and nerd glasses, right.”

“Right,” Rachel says, weakly.

“So, I went through my mental checklist of chicks that Team Stud would like to tap but that would just be off limits for whatever reason, and after figuring it’s probably not Quinn because Santana’s not that crazy, that pretty much only left one person,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s a lot of speculation,” Rachel finally says, but when hands the bottle over wordlessly, she drinks gratefully.

“You don’t speak our language, dude.  When Santana calls in a panic because she wants to fuck someone, she doesn’t just want to fuck them.  If that was the issue, she’d have just gone out and done it.  Fuck the consequences.  S‘how we roll,” Puck says, before stealing the bottle back and taking another sip.  “So--yeah.  You’re a fucking moron.  Shouldn’t have run off like you did, but whatever.  She’s not perfect either.  She’ll get over it.”

It sounds almost too good to be true, especially given the source, and some of that must be showing on her face, because a moment later Puck rolls his eyes at her and says, “She’s a fucking idiot if this time apart doesn’t make it clear to her that you’re a primo catch, dude.”

“I did royally screw the pooch, as they say,” Rachel says, reaching for the whiskey again and finishing the last of it, “... so maybe you can put in a good word for me.”

He looks at her seriously.  “I know you’re just fucking around, but if you ever need a reference; you know, about how you’re pretty cool for a chick, or how good you are in bed, I’m totally your guy,” he says, before fishing around his pockets and digging out some cigarettes.

She laughs and says, “Thanks, Noah.  You’re at the top of my very short list, obviously.”

He grins and lights up, and she watches him smoke one silently, before reaching for her stack of postcards.  

Maybe they’re saying too much, at this point, when all they really need to say is the I love you, and I’m sorry, that it all really boils down to.