You sit on the living room couch, staring at the rug, clenching your toes around the socks bundling in your shoes. Your fingers are laced together and your eyes are heavy, and you're a little bit sick to your stomach. Every hope you've ever had of getting out of Lima was just trashed and thrown away. You're not good enough. Not a good enough quarterback. Not a good enough singer to even consider. And you'll never be good enough. Not for her. Not for New York. You resign yourself to an Ohioan prison for the rest of your life.
You want to scream. Punch another wall. Go back in time and practice harder, or stop wasting your time on something that would never go further than high school. Your eyes shift to the table in the corner of the room, where you've thrown your car keys and the West Side Story program when you came in, your breath catching while you kicked your gym bag with all the strength you have until your toe bled.
You still hear her voice. It carried, echoed, billowed through the auditorium, and left people in awe or in tears, whispering to each other about how brilliant she is for being so young, and such a small person. Your eyes never left her on stage, only scanned the audience when there was a scene change. You're proud and enamored, and…heartbroken, but you had to go. Your dream was over, but hers was still active, really just beginning. You pulled yourself together and sped to the market to buy her flowers – the prettiest ones you could find – and you swallowed your sadness and worry and anger and lost yourself in her - in Maria.
You were the first to stand and cheer for her when she and Blaine took their respective bows, and then you raced into the hallway in pursuit of the stage door, hoping to see her and give her the flowers before she was stampeded with hugs and praise. You're too late, you find, as she's being squeezed and lifted up by one of her fathers, and everyone is crowding around her laughing and recapping. You leave the flowers at her make-up station, hoping she knows they're from you, and drive home with the thought of forever being simply mediocre.
There's a knock at the door and you suspect that it's Kurt, having forgotten his key again. But she's there, looking up at you in the moonlight with her shiny brown eyes. You swallow thickly, not prepared to see her tonight, and afraid that you'll burst into tears and ruin her performing high. She looks nervous to see you too.
"Hi," she says, almost intimidated, sorry for the way they left things.
You look away.
"I got your flowers…they were beautiful."
You're glad. Relieved.
"You were really good."
She asks to come in, and you back up and open the door for her as she walks past you. You tell her why you're there alone – Kurt is with Blaine and your parents are off doing things for Burt's campaign. You want to hear about her night – what people said about her performance, who went to the after party that you were obviously invited to but weren't in the mood for – you want to everything, but you just can't hold it in anymore. She thinks you're still mad about the other night, mad at her, and that's why you're distant and cranky and stiff when she removes her coat and sits down next to you. It's been stewing inside you for hours, and you decide you just have to tell her.
"He didn't like me."
You know you have to explain more, but you're afraid to talk too much, knowing your voice will crack and you will probably even cry, and you don't want to in front of her. She's confused and questioning, so you explain, and now you don't care if you cry because you know she won't judge you for it like a different girl would. You yell, explode, tell her you're not good enough and you're stuck, finally having your life-altered tantrum. You collapse into a chair, and she rushes to you before a tear even has a chance to appear in your eyes.
"Your dreams aren't dead," she says, her hands on your knees. "You've just grown out of them. You have to find new ones now."
But you don't know how. Everyone around you seems to have a plan for their futures, and the only chance you thought you had of being happy and moving on from Lima is gone. High school is almost over. College application deadlines are coming fast. How can you find a new dream in such a short amount of time? You just don't know how.
"Then we'll figure it out together."
Her confidence has always shocked you. Her bold, brave reassurances whenever you got down on yourself. Youlikethewayshedreamssobig. That's something nobody could ever take away from her, and you're envious of her game planning and ability to take things as they come and find new courses of action whenever anything went wrong. She holds your hands.
"You're special."
You think she's lying.
"You know how I know that? Because I'm gonna give you something that no one else is ever gonna get."
She kisses you, and grips your neck and her lips are soft and warm and comforting, and you want to drown all your sorrow and worry in her, and her lips, and feel the pain ease away in her fingertips and with the movements of her tongue. But you pull back, and loosen her hands, because you know why she's doing it. You don't want her to go through with this for the wrong reasons. You tell her the play is over and there's not point now, because you know in your head that people were fully convinced of her portrayal of Maria without her having to be literally sexually awakened. What's the point of doing this, when you can wait a few weeks, or however long it takes, and get a hotel like you'd planned just so it's more special?
She admits that she was wrong and stupid, and that she let her ambition take over and get it in the way again. You wonder what happens now – why she feels differently than she did a few days ago. You wonder if you should both just forget it ever happened and let the next step come naturally, whenever you're both ready and the time is right. But you remember what she said the other night.
Who and when is gonna feel more right than you and now?
And she loves you.
"And now I'm just a girl," she says. "Here with a boy that she loves, and wanting to remember this moment for the rest of her life."
She kisses you again, and you kiss her back, no longer wishing to protest, gripping her tiny waist in your huge, trembling hands. Her fingers dig into the back of your head, her nails grazing your neck, and her other arm moves up and wraps around your shoulder, and everything on your mind starts to get a little fuzzy. She leans her forehead into yours and you feel her warm breath on your moistened lips, and she kneads the fabric of your sweater in between her fingers.
"You…you want to go to my room?" You manage to speak, quietly, breathlessly, and she pulls away so you can look at her.
She sits now, in between your legs, her legs folded under her, feet under her butt, and presses her lips together, looking around. "Why don't we stay here?" she says. "By the fire place."
She waits for you while you run upstairs, tripping on the way up over your own feet. You pull two pillows off your bed and whip the outside blanket off, knocking a lamp over - but you don't care and you'll deal with the broken glass later, because she's there and she's waiting for you andthisisallreallyhappening.
You roll up the blanket in your arms and hold the corners of both pillows in one hand, and manage to shove a few condoms from your nightstand in your pocket before you're halfway down the stairs.
Her back is to you when you enter again, all the lights off now, and you see that she got the fire going on her own. Her shoes and dress are off and sit neatly, folded and stacked, next to your discarded gym bag. She turns to you, in only a nightgown, and her hair pools to one side, exposing a shoulder in the glow of the fire, and your knees kind of buckle under your weight.
She shifts, her eyes bright, getting to her feet so she can take the pillows from you. You swallow thickly, eyes scanning down her legs that are astonishingly shiny and go on for miles. You follow her to the center of the room, feeling the heat of the flames as you get closer, and watch her delicately place the pillows side by side at your feet. She takes the blanket from you next as you decide to lose your own shoes too.
Your heart pounds in your chest, harder when she takes your hands in both of hers and pulls you to sit down with her. You stare in her eyes, and she looks so calm, and you wonder if she can tell you're so nervous you feel like throwing up. Then her hands are on your face and she closes her eyes and waits to be kissed, and you can't help but pause for a second to just appreciate how beautiful she looks right now. You take her top lip between yours, gently, slowly - you have all night, and this has to be as perfect as you can make it. She inhales deeply in her throat, and you can feel her hands gripping the bottom of your sweater, pulling it up, and breaking away so she can lift it up and over your head.
She tosses it toward the couch and meets yours eyes again, taking the hand you're not leaning on in hers. "There's no one else I'd rather be with here tonight," she says, and now you can see that she's just as nervous too. You smile and agree, and she kisses you again before you can say anything else.
She pulls the blanket over both of your feet and her eyes gesture for you to lie down, and you stare into them as your heads hit the pillows. You pull the blanket over her, and your hand reaches around her back, hers fisting your shirt, and your lips meet again. She grazes your lips with the edges of her teeth, and your hand slides against the warm skin on her back, and the fire noisily cracks and flickers and warms you to the point of sweating. You intertwine your fingers, rub noses together, and kiss each other's foreheads and necks - any skin you can find - and she ends up rolling you over so she can lie across your chest.
She leans up on both hands, her hair encircling her face and yours, and she tells you that she loves you so much. She folds her hands against your belly, and leans her chin on them, staring at you dreamily, lovingly, like you're the most beautiful thing she's ever seen in her life. You tell her you love her too, but it comes out quieter than you thought it would, and you swallow the pain in your throat you get when you try not to cry. You run your hand over her hair, and she smiles again, and you wish things could be always like this for the two of you - so trusting, stable and intimate - for the rest of your lives.
She leans up to kiss you again, and your arms wrap around her completely, and you begin to lose sight of any bad feeling you've ever had before this moment. Everything is warm and numb and Rachel. She undresses you, kissing your bare chest here and there as your shaky hands fumble to make any kind of contact with her skin. You shiver even though you're physically warm, feeling her naked and vulnerable, breathing underneath you. You break the first condom in your hands, pulling and snapping it too tightly at first, and she giggles and helps you and you stop breathing when you feel her fingers on you beneath the blanket. You whisper and kiss, and move together in the darkness and faint glow of the fire, and it's awkward and a little uncomfortable, and terribly painful for her, but you move slowly and gently, and pause every minute to ask if she's okay.
You run your palm along her arm, seeing the goose bumps form on her skin as you lay together later. She feels drunk – happy and warm and safe in a cocoon of you. She brushes her fingers through your hair, looking all around your face before her eyes settle on yours. She has the faintest smile, and sighs as you pull her against your chest, sliding the blanket up and around her naked form while the fire dies next to you.
"You are good enough," she whispers, her thumb running across your cheek. "You may not know it yet, but I do."
And with this reassurance – the honesty in her eyes and voice, and the way she looks at you like you hung the moon…you start to think maybe you are.