Noah Puckerman leant against the doorframe into his living room, huffing.
"Beth! I need to use the phone!" Beth turned away irritably, placing a finger in her ear. He had been fighting this losing battle for, like, a half hour, and it wasn't getting any easier. Being the man of the house, you'd think he'd have some authority around here.
"Noah, shut up, she's talking to Ben!" Rachel admonished lightly, following Beth across the living room floor, gently bobbing the restless toddler in her arms from side to side. "Beth, ask him if he'll be at Shannon's party on Saturday. Tell him you're going!"
"But Rach!" hissed Puck incredulously, "I need to call the fridge people! They close at five! It's fucking five to!"
Rachel glared at him and put a hand over the toddler's ear.
"Noah, what have I told you about swearing around Nava? She's at that age right now, she picks everything up, and I will not, I repeat, will not, have her learning such vulgar words from you!"
Puck huffed again and stormed through to the kitchen, slamming the fridge documents onto the island. His daughter had been talking to that douchebag for, like, ages and Rachel was encouraging it! She was fourteen for fuck's sake! She shouldn't be talking to boys on the phone, especially horny teenaged ones that were probably only after one thing. Trust him, he's been there, he knows.
Puck glared at the clock on the kitchen wall as it clicked towards five o'clock. Rachel breezes into the kitchen to check on dinner, rolling Nava from one hip to the other and adding herbs to the dinner on the stove.
"Noah, pass the salt, would you please?"
Puck glares at the back of her head and stays still, arms folded defiantly across his chest. She turns and looks at him tetchily for a moment, before setting Nava in her highchair and walking over, rubbing his arms soothingly.
"Noah, she's fourteen, and have you seen her? Boys are going to want to date her. You just have to deal with it. She's young, it's what young girls do."
"She's too young. And she never stops talking on the fu-freakin' phone."
"Your trouble, Noah," said Rachel impatiently, "is that you don't know how lucky you are. Would you rather she sneaked out to see boys in the middle of the night or that she lied to us? Or was a delinquent?"
Puck glared past his wife through to the living room, where his daughter was now sitting on the couch, smiling giddily as she laughed at whatever fucking Ben was feeding her. Rachel was right, Beth was stunning. Tall, long legs, loads of wavy light brown hair and piercing pale green eyes which were the only give-away that Quinn Fabray was her biological mother.
He took a moment to just stand and think about Beth, and his life. It hadn't really been a hard decision to keep Beth, in Puck's opinion anyway. He had taken one look at her and knew he couldn't give his own daughter to strangers. It had been fucking difficult, he wasn't about to lie – the last few years of high school he worked shifts at Burt's garage a few hours after school and then worked at Sheets 'N Things over the weekend to afford food and other baby stuff, relying on either his Mom or Rachel to watch Beth. That was how he and Rachel had gotten close; she offered to watch Beth while he worked sometimes, for free, and she brought her to visit him at work and was overall just great with her. Beth wasn't a hard baby to deal with though – she didn't really cry all that much and she adored Rachel, so it was win-win. He hated it, not seeing her all the time, but by the time school ended, he had saved up quite a bit of money (though he was in holey shoes and had had to give up his truck 'cause he couldn't afford to keep it) so he upped and went to New York with Rachel.
Well, not really with Rachel, but they went at the same time and saw each other like every day, so whatever. He moved in with his Great Aunt Aviva, who lived uptown, for a few weeks, and he and Beth lived in her back bedroom for a month or so. It was a squish, and he left Beth with his Great Aunt Aviva while he trawled the streets for work and used his fake I.D. to sing in bars in the evenings to make some money.
He saw Rachel every day. They usually took Beth someplace for coffee in the evening, before Rachel took her to her place on the NYU campus, where Beth stayed while Puck played for mere cents wherever he could and Rach did homework or whatever else until Puck picked her up at like eleven. They were hard, long days – he was conscious about the amount of time he was spending with Beth and how he was relying on his aunt and Rachel to look after her, not that either of them minded.
Beth was the most adorable, cute kid he had ever laid eyes on, not that he paid much attention to other babies. But she had loads of hair for her age, all curly, and her eyes were huge and green, and she had this way of looking at him that made him melt inside, in a totally badass way, of course.
On the fifth week of being in New York, he got an apprenticeship at an engineering place in Brooklyn. He's still there to this day, obviously in a much higher position, and he earns a damn good wage too, so he knows it's done him well. Soon after, some big shot business guy saw him singing in a bar and got talking to him, saying he wanted him to perform at his fancy-ass work do, and when he found out more about his circumstances offered him an apartment on the Lower East Side for a thousand bucks a month. Before he moved to the city, he would have fucking fainted, but he knew that here, that was a damn good bargain, especially when the place had two bedrooms and a brand new kitchen fitted. Turned out the dude was some property developing type, and he had taken a liking to Puck, so he gave him a cheap deal.
After that, his life was great. He worked fixed hours now, eight until three thirty (which was pretty good if you asked him), and he had a set salary which meant that he didn't have to play in bars for money any more. Beth stayed with his aunt while he worked, and then when she turned three he enrolled her in a nursery school and she loved it.
He and Rachel got together just after she started her second year of college, which was about fucking time in Puck's opinion. Everything after that was history really – she dropped out of college halfway through that year after landing a small role on Broadway, which her dads were pretty fucking pissed about, only to quit two months later and take the lead in an off-Broadway show of The Wizard of Oz which got upgraded to Broadway like six months later. They moved in together and then got married when they were twenty five (only after Rachel had told him that he was not doing a very good job of hiding the fact that he was going to propose and she'd rather he just did it already because the suspense was killing her).
He thought about Beth over those early years in New York. Rachel had managed to convince him that he was doing the best he could for her after he had voiced his concerns that he wasn't seeing her enough. He knew that, really – what was he supposed to do, spend every waking minute with her and scrounge for food in the Subway garbage cans? Hell no.
And anyways, Beth turned out fine. And Rachel was right, she told them fucking everything, which he supposed was good, but like hell did he want to know how cute Brad in her Math class was, or that her friend Bethany had offered her a cigarette last week (he knew he had nothing to worry about – she had looked fucking scandalized when recounting the event to him and Rachel a few weeks ago).
Quinn was in her life, but not majorly or anything. Quinn and her husband Pete lived in Connecticut, and they met up for shopping and coffee sometimes and Beth went to visit occasionally. Beth knew Quinn was her birth mother, but that didn't affect her relationship with Rachel or anything – Puck knew that nothing could take away from the fact that Rachel was her true mom.
Now, he was thirty and his life was in a fucking good place, if he said so himself. He had three gorgeous kids – Beth, obviously, his four year old son Isaac, who was a little rascal and currently at his friend's for tea, and most likely wreaking havoc, and almost-two-year-old Nava, who was Rachel in miniature (had the lungs, too). He was a successful engineer, his wife was making Broadway her bitch (THREE Tony Awards, hell yeah) and he had an amazing four bedroom loft apartment on the Upper East Side.
To be honest, he didn't have a fucking clue why he as complaining about calling the fridge people.
"I'm really lucky," he said aloud, still watching Beth, who was leaning out the open window against the sill as she chatted away.
Rachel, who was now setting some vegan mush at her place at the table alongside the chicken salad she had made for the rest of them, turned in surprise. She was still as beautiful as she'd always been – her hair was a bit shorter but she could still make him breathless with those sweet chocolate eyes. The same eyes his baby girl was just learning could get her whatever the hell she wanted.
"You've changed your tune," she smiled. "What were you thinking about?"
He shrugged one shoulder.
"You. The kids. Just stuff, you know."
She smiled and kissed him softly, her hands stroking his shoulders tenderly. He deepened the kiss, pulling her by the waist flush against him, and she pulled away slightly.
"Noah, Nava's right there," she whispered, letting him trail kisses along her jaw nevertheless.
"Doesn't matter," he murmured back, but this time she really did pull away, pecking him on the cheek.
"Later, I promise."
That night, as they sat and ate dinner, Rachel chatted about the new understudy who she was sure was trying to sabotage her health, and Beth talked about school and her friends and her history project. Eventually, Puck felt he had to ask, based on the looks Rachel was shooting in his direction.
"So, uh, what's this Ben kid like anyways?"
"OhmyGod, daddy, he's like, the cutest boy in the entire year and he has the most amazing blue eyes I have ever seen …"
Fuck his life.