Puck sat in his truck in the school parking lot, staring out the window, the keys still in his pocket. There was no place he wanted to go, no one he wanted to see, nothing he wanted to do. There was a knot in his stomach as hard and large as a baseball, like a cancer a doctor had just told him would require two years of painful radiation and chemo and even then he had only a one in ten chance of surviving. Rachel Berry's head on fucking Finn Hudson's shoulder and his bloody hand resting halfway up her bare inner thigh in public (and he damn well knew where it would be in private) hurt, but not as much as he knew for certain it was going to hurt for two more years of high school. All the Cheerio and cougar sexual morphine in the world were not going to alleviate the pain to come.

The worst part of it was there was no one to blame but himself. The wound was self-inflicted, the product of an immature, self-created persona. He didn't deserve Rachel Berry, or anyone remotely in her exalted league; not now, not ever, not as he was. It was an "existential crisis" – a term he learned from her, as he did so much else – and he couldn't cope with it.

Over the Rainbow. Yes, that's where the Rachel Berrys of this world waited for their lovers, and he didn't know the way and he didn't have the fare. The duet with Mr. Schue went very well. He knew that because…because Rachel Berry, the sole arbiter of such matters, said so with a smile at him during the performance, and coming up to him afterwards and kissing his cheek. It was then that he again smelled her shampoo, some organic, herbal, yogurt, goat milk concoction from the Pyrenees or Shangri-la or wherever, more intoxicating than any pussy, something that he had come to associate with sore testicles and a yearning that allowed no peace. That smell evoked detailed memories of a brief time that had sped past, when a possibility slipped away before he could even grasp how much it mattered. …

He thought of the first time he got close to her, close enough for long enough to remember the smell of her for a lifetime.

"Wanna make out?"

"Sure."

He took off his shoes and lay back on her bed, smiling, confident of conquest. She came to the side of the bed, pulled down on her short skirt in a final gesture of modesty, and climbed up to lie on top of him and kissed his lips. Hers had the slightest tremor, but it seemed deliberate, not out of nervousness. She flared her lips so that the softest parts, inside, touched his, and she applied and released the pressure against him in a slow rhythm. That's when Puck understood for the first time how Finn Hudson, or anyone else including himself, could jizz his shorts from a single Rachel Berry kiss, and he needed to get her off of him pronto or he'd have to move out of Lima. And all of this without even the tiniest hint of tongue.

Puck pretended to knock her off accidentally with a sweep of a "lovely" arm and lay there with beads of sweat on his brow. He tried to put out of his mind the sense that he could feel her warmth and moistness right through her skirt, or he might have gone off untouched, and then Ohio wouldn't have been big enough to hide in. She wiped his forehead and kissed it, asking worriedly, "Are you all right? Did I do something wrong? Don't you like how I kiss?"

"No, no, no. You kiss beautifully, believe me, trust me. I should know. Where'd you learn to do that?"

"A lady doesn't kiss and tell," she said with a trace of a smirk.

A smirk! I do the smirking, not the chick! What the fuck!

He needed a timeout. He needed to settle his mind and get his shit together before he went back in. Then it came to him. She kissed like she sang. Complete concentration, practiced technique, emotional communication driven by an internal passion. And the effects on the males in her audience were similar: spinal chills and phallic stiffness.

Did she just peek at my groin? Did she just smile at my package? Yeah, a standing ovation. Take a bow. Satisfied?

The notion that his reactions were not due to her technique but to his feelings for her did not occur to him until it was too late.

An hour or so later, they lay on their sides, turned toward each other, lips sore from kissing, her head on his outstretched arm, her eyes closed, some of her hair in his face. His fingers were on her bare back, under her sweater, tickling up her spine. She hummed softly, melodically, down in her throat, as long as he pleased her. If she stopped, he understood he had to find the right spot, the right touch, and fast. He always did, and her humming would resume. She was a living, breathing, biofeedback machine, training Noah Puckerman in the intricacies of the erogenous zones of the female anatomy. He undid her bra clasp. One eyelid rose. "Just your back. I don't want to have to jump over a spot when I go up to your neck." One eyelid closed. His fingers continued their traverse. The humming recommenced. Her conquest of him was complete.