Sometimes, he stumbles.
Sometimes, he stumbles, and his heart takes that little blip that's supposed to be the regular beat of a metronome, and turns it instead into an uneven badump-badumpitty-bump when he sees her face before him, radiant and shining with the fragility of her joy. And he loves that. He loves that unevenness so much, because it reminds him that he's human. It reminds him that he's not another soulless machine in Shelby's creation, but a living, breathing, actual human, and he has feelings. Tumultuous feelings. Real, living, breathing emotion that makes his heart skip beats and jump out of time in the worst possible way. He loves this sensation. He loves the way that this makes him feel like a regular boy again for the first time in ages.
He loves this sensation. And he fucking hates it. You see, Rachel Berry reminds him that he's human. And he can't have that. So when he makes that phone call to her (has to swallow, hard, to make sure that nothing happens and that his voice doesn't waver the slightest when he demands her presence in the parking lot), he has to remember all the time that his heart has raced. Don't you know that there's only about a billion beats to a human life? He can't keep wasting them on her. He has a career. Or, at least, he will have one once he destroys her. If he can, that is, but don't remind him about that loophole.
Jesse St. James is not human. He is a soulless automaton. And therefore, when Rachel Berry looks up at him with the saddest eyes in the world and challenges him to murder another baby chick on her forehead, he does. It's the only way to regain his robot standing. He takes the tiny little pieces of his own humanity, and wipes it away from the shining metal of his heart. Rust only messes up the cogs and clockwork. And he works like clockwork. Or so he tells himself.
In the end, before he drives off in his newly-tired Range Rover, he steals a glance at where she stands, immobile, in the parking lot. Somewhere, beneath newly-shined metal in his chest, an uneven flutter bump-bumps, and he hates himself for it. The screech and stench of burning rubber as he pulls out at ridiculously breakneck speeds only serves to remind him of his own humanity.
