It ends up being a really bad day, as days go. She's had a long line of kids with troubling issues, and she ended up unable to eat anything because her bottle of wet wipes fell onto the floor and the wipes spilled out under the dusty radiator. She's hungry, she's tired, and she's done – it's a day where she'll go home, get in a hot bath, and cry for awhile before calling her mother to talk about it more coherently.
She smoothes her candy-pink raincoat over her red hair and makes sure that she's adequately stashed her favourite yellow Mary Janes into their special shoe bag that her mother got her for Christmas. She gathers her plastic bags of paraphernalia and gets ready to walk to the car.
The rain is streaming down. Emma normally hates rainy days like these because they mean mud, and she has a hard enough time keeping her car clean without tracking more dirt into it. She watches the silver spinning coins into the clear puddles on the asphalt and momentarily closes her eyes. She's not sure she has the strength to deal with this – to try to juggle the umbrella while she cleans the door handle; to wipe her rain boots carefully before she places them onto the fresh paper mats she changes every day.
Mysophobia isn't easy.
Either way, she has to get home, so she pre-emptively pulls out her travel box of wipes and heads towards her car purposefully. But she doesn't know if it's the broken asphalt in the parking lot, or if it's the fact that she's not paying attention to where she's walking, or if she just trips, but in a matter of moments, she's on the wet ground in the middle of the parking lot and she's SOAKED.
She just freezes in shock, lying face-down on the parking lot surface, and then her big brown eyes, so anxious and wide, screw up against this stupid day and she begins to cry.
Emma doesn't normally cry loudly. She tends to screw Kleenex in her fist and bite her trembling lower lip, letting the tears seep down her face. She doesn't tend to sob much, if at all; her tears are swallowed back, her chest heaving in little hitches, until she gets herself back under control. Emma hates to cry, not only because of the mess of the mucus and tears all over her face, but because she hates losing that much control.
Today, she cries loudly. She lies, face down on the asphalt, and she cries in the pouring rain, and for once, she doesn't care who sees or hears her, because she's just done, and we all reach our breaking points.
And in the noise of the rain and the clean smell of the earth around her, her voice is barely heard at all, which only makes her cry more.
//~//
Will Schuester has just finished Glee Club practice and he's ready to get home. He's hungry, and he's looking forward to a warm meal and a night in front of the TV. Since Terri left two months ago, he's been accepting casseroles from his mother and basically eating out of his freezer or from takeout menus. He doesn't care, but he's getting a little tired of the same food every night.
The rain is pouring down and he winces, pulling out his umbrella. November is never a fun time in Ohio; the rain is cold, the leaves are soggy on the ground and he starts missing the bright, brittle sunshine of winter. He shucks on his coat, shakes out his umbrella, and prepares to run across the parking lot to his car. He just prays it will start; it's been balking in the rain lately.
However, as he reaches the doors, he stops in confusion. Right outside, sprawled across the parking lot, is a heap of candy-coloured clothing and bright, heart-printed rain boots. And it doesn't even take him a moment to realize that this must be Emma Pillsbury before he's out and beside her, stretching out a hand in the rain to help her up.
She's about the least put-together he's ever seen her. Her red hair is plastered to her forehead under the hood of the pink raincoat; her hands and arms are muddy and her myriad bags are spread far and wide in every puddle imaginable. Her face is screwed up against the rain, her normally prim, shy mouth open in distress, and she's crying. Her sobs could be heard across the football field if it wasn't for the rain, and his heart breaks as he takes her hands and tries to pull her up.
"Oh my God, Emma, are you okay? What happened?" His voice is sympathetic, shocked, and she briefly hears through the fog of her sobs that someone is here beside her. Someone is trying to help her.
She stops crying for a moment, her chest hitching, as she registers Will standing in front of her; Will's warm hands on her muddy palms, and she ends up getting awkwardly onto her sore, scraped knees, and somehow being gathered into his arms.
"Did you fall?" His voice is warm in her ear, and she snuggles closer to him, her wet face in the slick leather of his coat as he helps her to a standing position.
She breaks away then, realizing the ramifications of this fall. Her coat is streaked in mud; her tights torn and her knees bleeding. Her stuff is all over the parking lot, and she sees her yellow Mary Janes half in a mud puddle not ten feet away. She freezes, her mouth opening in a soundless gasp.
Will immediately takes stock of the situation. "Okay, Emma, it's okay. I'll help you clean it off, okay? It's not ruined. Everything's okay."
She turns wild eyes onto him. "It's muddy, oh, God, Will, there's mud EVERYWHERE and blood and . . ." She suddenly chokes and he reaches into his bag to pull out a bottle of water.
"Em, look, it's okay. Drink some water, that's it. See, it's fresh, it's not opened." He pulls out a wet wipe from his backpack (he's learned that when he's around Emma, he should be carrying both wipes and antibacterial solution) and wipes the top of the bottle quickly before passing it over to her.
Somehow, he gets her to his car; somehow, she allows him to sit her inside without cleaning anything off, and she cries, that same loud, heartbroken sobbing that he heard in the parking lot, and clutches the water bottle tightly in her hands.
Will manages to pick up her bags and rescue her shoes from the mud puddle, but by the time he gets back to the car, she's not paying attention at all.
He snaps his fingers in front of her face, and she turns to him, her cheeks whiter than he's ever seen them, and he just shrugs when he realizes that nothing's going to get solved sitting in a car with a sporadic heating problem.
"Come on, Em. I'm going to take you home."
//~//
However, it's not her home they go to – he doesn't even know where she lives. It's his apartment they pull up in front of, and she has another minor panic attack at the thought of having to sit in muddy wet clothing while he attempts to fix whatever's broken inside her.
But he shrugs and his hand on hers calms her a little. "You can take a shower. I'm going to find you some clean sweats to wear. Don't worry; I washed them with antibacterial laundry soap. I'll show you the bottle when we get upstairs."
In the back of her mind, she thinks it's sweet he's indulging her mysophobia this much. She certainly wouldn't if she were him. In fact, she wouldn't have bothered with herself at all.
When they get to his apartment, she's amazed at the cleanliness. "I hired a cleaning lady," he says sheepishly, and she finally smiles, wanly, for the first time all evening.
The shower is hot on her head and she just stands there for a few moments, letting the warm water beat into her aching head and flow down over her tearstained face. She washes her hair three times and her body twice, and then gets out of the shower, wrapping one of Will's oversized towels around her body and sitting on the toilet to examine her legs.
She's done a number on them, but they're clean. The scrapes will, however, show up under any of her sheer tights and she has another mini panic attack at the thought of having to go without wearing her normal pantyhose.
These thoughts, however, get pushed back when Will knocks on the door.
"Em, are you okay?"
She clears her throat, amazed at how rusty her voice sounds. "I'm okay. Um, do you have any Band-Aids or anything?"
"Yeah, sure." He comes in, smiling sheepishly at her, and though she'd normally care that she's sitting in a towel while a man she's crushing on is standing in front of her, she just can't be bothered to feel ashamed right now.
He goes under the counter and pulls out antibacterial ointment and Band-Aids, and then kneels in front of her, gently spreading the ointment on her cuts, making sympathetic hissing noises when her sharp intake of breath signals pain. When her knees are bandaged, he hands her a soft pair of sweats that read "Property of William McKinley High" on them.
Though she appreciates the thought, all she can do is stare in distress down at them. She looks up at him, her wet hair making red ringlets on her shoulders, and begins to cry again.
"Oh, Emma, I'm sorry," and he leans down, wrapping her damp body through the towel in his arms. "They're all I have, and your clothes are wet."
She sniffles, trying to pull herself back together. She hasn't lost it in front of anyone besides her family in a long time. In fact, she doesn't think she's ever had this big of a panic attack in front of anyone, and that's when the shame starts creeping back into her body, and her white cheeks turn rosy red.
"Um, no, that's okay," she says, surprised at the strength coming back into her voice. "I'll manage. Thank you. I'll, um, I'll be out in a second, okay?"
And she does manage, when he leaves; she manages to towel her hair dry and to get dressed in the too-big sweats, the T-shirt slipping off her thin shoulders and the sweatpants pooling around her waist and at her feet. And when she's dressed, and her hair is drying in curly ringlets all over her head, she tries a small smile in the mirror and is surprised when her eyes widen and become warm, just as if she hasn't been crying at all.
He's got the table set when she comes out and for once, she doesn't care about where the dishes have been. She sits in one of the padded chairs and crosses her legs, tries a smile, and her forced smile turns real when he smiles back.
"I'm not going to give you a casserole, but I thought maybe you'd just want something light. I know you don't eat dairy, but I have a chicken Caesar salad that I was going to eat for supper tonight . . .?"
She smiles, and even giggles a little at the response of her stomach to his words. "I didn't get a chance to eat today. I was going to just eat my lunch, but I don't know where my stuff is."
Will points at the sink, and she notices, for the first time, a slight smell of bleach. Getting up, she notices all of her Tupperware stacked on the side of the sink and her muddy Mary Janes standing on the mat beside the door.
"Will, you really think of everything," she says admiringly, and he grins.
"I knew that you'd want to wipe them off."
So she does, emptying the food onto a plate and washing them thoroughly as she starts chatting with him about the latest solos in the Glee Club and suddenly it's like they've always done this, she standing in a pair of his sweats while he cuts lettuce and mixes lactose-free milk into a salad dressing recipe he found on the Internet.
And she grins at him, her smile for once not shy, and not nervous, and all he can think of is that she's really got the most beautiful smile he's ever seen, especially when she's let her hair go and the curls frame her sparkling eyes and her pale cheeks with the roses deep in the apples of her cheekbones.
So, it's really not a surprise that when he passes her to wash his hands at the sink, she doesn't move fast enough out of the way to avoid a slight brush of the hips. And it's not really a surprise that when he's finished washing and drying his hands, that he turns to her and holds her around the waist.
And it's certainly not a surprise to either of them that she just takes the initiative, rubbed raw by her bad day and her panic attack and the fact that she's not in control of her emotions, and leans forward to kiss him.
His lips are soft and warm, his hands are steady on her back and her waist, and she melts into his arms, feeling her entire body weaken under the passion of the kiss, and when he finally lets her come up for air, she's breathing hard and he has to support her body against his own.
"You're so beautiful," he whispers, and she gives him one of her beautiful smiles, and there in the kitchen, his hands trace their way under her shirt, moving the soft extraneous cloth aside to rest on her creamy skin, to trace the bones of her back.
There's no bra to take off; he could have easily just undressed her right there, and she could have just as easily overcome her shyness enough to fiddle with his belt and loosen his pants, but he's a gentleman, and he knows this won't work, and in another moment, his hands are back on the outside of her shirt, and instead of making love to her, like he desperately wants to, he picks her slight body up in his arms and takes her to the couch, instead.
And Emma, who thought she had no tears left in the world to cry, curls up with him and sniffles into his shoulder as he strokes her hair and her back, and whispers into her deer-like ears that it's okay, and that she will get through it, whatever it is.
When she gets herself back under control, he asks her whatever could be the matter, and instead of sobbing more, she just starts to laugh.
"What? Em, what?" His face breaks into a smile, and he cups her chin, wiping the tears from her soft cheeks, and she just giggles until he shakes her a little bit.
"My shoes are ruined," she says, her voice higher than usual, and her accent strong after her latest crying jag, and she starts laughing harder at the confused look on his face.
"They're my favourite shoes," she tries to explain, but then he starts to laugh, and they sit there, side by side, laughing until she has to run to the bathroom for fear that she'll embarrass herself further.
When she comes back out, he takes her into his arms again, and she whispers into his ear.
"Thank you, Will."
//~//
The next day, it's as if none of it ever happened. She sits at her desk and she smiles at her students, and when Will pokes his head in just before lunchtime, he finds her busily and happily scrubbing down the shelves behind her desk.
"Em?"
"Hey!" Her voice is bright, her smile wide. "How's it going? Thanks again for last night. Um, I really appreciate you helping me out like that."
His gaze travels to her feet, and she blushes a little. "They're a different colour, but it's the same shoe."
"Did you just buy like five pairs?"
"Well, no," she defends herself. "Just two. You know, Will, when you find something that works, you need to stick with it."
"Yeah, I guess so," he replies, and stands there awkwardly for a few moments before placing a plastic bag on her desk.
"What's this?"
"I don't know if you'll want to wear them, but you did say that they were your favourites, so I spent some time with some shoe polish and a lot of wet wipes, and I think they're clean enough for your standards . . ." His voice trails off as she opens the bag to reveal her yellow Mary Janes, almost as new-looking as they were when she first bought them.
"Oh, Will," and her eyes are teary. "This is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me."
"Well, when you find something that works, you need to stick with it," he replies softly, and she gives him a soft smile.
And it's the right time, to tell him how much she loves him, his every quirk, his every thought and smile, but she doesn't.
"Hey, I'll see you at lunch, okay?"
"Okay." He pokes his head back in the door. "I meant what I said last night."
"What?"
"You're beautiful, Emma."
And after he leaves, she sits at her desk, sanitizes her hands, and can't keep the smile off her face for the rest of the day.