So I listened to Matchbox 20's 3am on repeat for like two days and then wrote this. I'm not even sure I like it but I couldn't get it out of my head until I wrote it down. Review please.
Disclaimer: Don't own.
There's a box tucked into a corner at the top of his closet labeled porn. (It's not like anybody would put it past him.)
It's a mix of memories. Candid shots of drunken summer nights when it was just him and Finn with Quinn, and she was still pure as snow and they were still all best friends. Receipts and ticket stubs and the note his dad left on the fridge the day his world fell apart.
(The stuff every teenager collects to remind themselves of the times that settled in between the heartbreak of adolescence.)
In the bottom of the box, there's a picture, crinkled at the edges and slightly faded. She's half sprawled across his lap, blonde hair spilling over his legs and she's laughing. He thinks she might be drunk, and from the way he's smiling he knows he is.
They're fourteen and naïve and have no fear of becoming their parents. Finn's passed out on the floor just below the edge of the picture and he wonders if he even knows the picture exists.
They had spent the day in his backyard, an Indian summer blessing them with a few more days to be kids before school starts.
She's wearing white and her hair is almost white blonde from the summer sun and all he can think of all day is how she looks like an angel. Long after it gets dark they go inside and raid his mom's liquor cabinet.
They spend the next hour laying in his living room with the lights off. His feet are propped up on the coffee table. And the tv's on MTV. (Because that was back when MTV still played music videos.)
She's halfway to wasted when she pulls the camera out and all he can do it is laugh because damn he thinks he might love this girl more then he thought was even possible.
"Noah," and she's crawling across the couch to put her head in his lap. "Take a picture with me."
"No," he says only kind of serious. He does have a badass rep to protect. Finn rolls onto his side on the floor, his shoulder touching the heels of Puck's feet. (He's already freakishly tall.)
"But I want to remember this moment forever." (Later after teen pregnancy and Glee and Rachel Berry he'll look back and wonder if somehow she knew. If she understood that high school would be different from middle school, and that it would never be like this again.)
"Okay."
And that's it. All he remembers.
Three years later and MTV still isn't showing music and they can hardly be in the same room as each other. When he thinks back, he realizes that the song that played all those years ago, when Quinn was both of theirs and neither of theirs and he could kiss her forehead, had it right.
(It's all going to end and it might as well be my fault.)