"Artie", Quinn said, looking straight into the boy's blue eyes from where she was sitting on the edge of her bed. "You know I'm leaving next year."
She fidgeted slightly with her hair, which she still wasn't entirely used to being blonde again, clearly uncomfortable taking about her future. She was so afraid of ending up a Lima Loser when she left high-school, that she'd rather avoid thinking about the rest of her life at all.
"It's not as if it's gonna do me any good rejoining the Glee club", she sighed. "It's not like you can't just replace me with another girl, whose only job is to sway in the background, looking pretty." She looked down at her feet, not wanting him to read from her face how much it actually meant to her, being in the Glee club.
"But you're irreplaceable", he said with a bit of a shaky voice, thinking of how mesmerized he had been last year when she and Rachel had sung "I feel pretty/unpretty" together. She was amazing in so many ways, he thought, and her singing voice was defiantly one of the things that made Quinn Fabray stand out.
Positively shocked, she immediately looked up, staring into his eyes with her mouth slightly open. She had not been expecting him to say that at all, and didn't know what else to do but to stare like an idiot into those dreamy blue eyes of his.
As soon as he had said it, a big part of him wished he hadn't. Not that it wasn't true, but it just sounded like such a cliché thing to say that it made him want to punch himself in the face. Not only was he making a fool out of himself to the girl he'd been crazy about for a while now, but she was staring at him like she had never seen a human before in her life, making him feel like even more of a fool, if that was even possible.
Not having the slightest idea of what to do or say, he turned his wheelchair around, facing the wall. He had a hard time facing people directly when he felt like he was going to blush, or die from embarrassment, and this way he could at least pretend like she wasn't staring a whole into the back of his head.
A good ten seconds of silence followed, making them both feel as overly dramatic as Rachel or Jesse, when Quinn had gotten the time to properly think the words over in her head. She felt as if she was dreaming, because as pretty and popular as she was, she had never really felt like she was important to anyone before, and it was such a nice feeling that it was like she'd been paralyzed with happiness.
Suddenly, Artie let out an almost inaudible gasp of surprise. Quinn had put her arms around him, embracing him in as tight of a hug as possible with the back of his wheelchair in the way. It took him by surprise not only because he really wasn't expecting a hug right now, but because he was still facing the other way, his back towards Quinn, staring at the pale golden leaves on the wallpaper in her bedroom.
Her hair tickled him slightly on his neck as she laid her head on his shoudler. It smelled very much of strawberries, presumably from her shampoo. It kinda made him want to frolic in slow motion with her across acres and acres of strawberries, not a cloud in the sky, singing "Strawberry fields forever". He didn't know what else to do but to take a deep breath through his nose, both trying to calm the butterflies in his stomach and wanting that strawberry smell on his mind forever.
"Artie", she began, quietly whispering into his ear. "I've always wanted someone to say that to me."
