Two hours of crumpled paper. Five days of planning, two failed performances, and Rachel Berry isn't so sure she can still convince herself that songwriting comes easily. She's spent about the same amount of time crying stormily into her pillows, and come up with two songs she felt were good, but that Finn vetoed and the rest of the Glee club ridiculed. Fine, then. She doesn't see anyone else trying. This is so stupid. They're going to lose Regionals.
Putting pen to paper again, she scratches across the surface with her typical teenage handwriting, big, loopy, with hearts over the "i"s, and ends up crumpling it up to throw at the garbage can by her bedroom door. She chucks a pillow after it, for good measure, which bangs against her half-closed door.
"Prima Donna?" One of her fathers calls, his voice floating up the stairs. "Everything okay up there?"
Her dads don't know anything about this songwriting venture, if only because they'd cheer her on and pat her on the head and it's not what she needs. What she needs is someone to keep her on track . . . and someone to give her the constructive criticism she needs.
"Fine!" she shouts back down, and closes her door completely. Enough is enough.
When she picks up the phone, her fuzzy slippers in the air as she lies on her bed, her first thought is to call Finn. But the truth is, she's tired of Finn. Tired of the stonewalling, the "stop calling me, Rachel, we're not getting back together, I'm with Quinn now", the long silences. So instead of calling Finn, she calls Sam Evans.
There are two reasons for this.
One is that she needs someone like Finn, but not Finn. That barely makes sense to her, but it's more that she wants someone she can order around who will still stand up to her and give her the encouragement/constructive criticism she needs.
Reason two is that Sam plays the guitar, and, well, Rachel can play the piano, but there's just something a lot more sexy about a guitar. More organic, if you want to get right down to it. More . . . romantic.
Sam picks up on the third ring, and Rachel's so nervous that her voice spills out almost incoherently into the phone. "Sam. It's Rachel Berry, and I'm calling because I've got a proposition for you."
Sam simply sounds confused. "I know who you are, Rachel. I've got caller ID."
"Oh." A little wind taken out of the professional sails she's put up for this adventure, Rachel nonetheless carries on. "Anyway, I'm sure you know that I've been trying to write some songs for Regionals, and I wondered if you'd be willing to help."
There's a long silence, and Rachel prepares herself for either derisive laughter, or the sound of a dial tone. She gets neither.
Sam replies, "What do you need? I'm not really . . . good at this stuff. And no offence, but you're not really good at it, either. We're just going to get laughed at."
His honesty is refreshing, and true, but Rachel's face twists a little in embarrassment, anyway. "Well, that's why two heads are better than one!" she replies brightly, but her face is burning. "Anyway, you're good at getting people to listen to you . . . and I think it's because you play the guitar. Your voice really isn't that good, but you have stage presence. That's important, you know."
"Uh-huh," says Sam, his voice dry. Rachel ignores this.
"I want you to teach me to play the guitar. I think that if I had that edge, and we worked together, maybe Regionals wouldn't be a bust. Maybe I could actually write something good," she mutters under her breath, and hears Sam's laughter under his breath on the other end of the phone.
"Listen," she snaps, "if this is just some kind of joke for you that you're going to laugh about with your football cretins tomorrow, then forget I called, okay?"
Sam's voice comes back over the line, calm and reassuring. "It's not a joke, Rachel. You just try too hard. I'm fine with teaching you to play the guitar. Let's meet in the choir room tomorrow, okay?"
Rachel's face burns brightly at his response, but she nods on the other end of the phone anyway. "Thanks. I'll meet you there."
After she hangs up, she stares at the canopy above her bed for a long time, until her eyes go blurry and water down her face, then she shuts off the light and falls asleep.
/~/
"No. That's not the way you hold the guitar, Rachel."
Sam's voice is still calm, but there's now a hint of annoyance in it, and Rachel puts his guitar down on the riser gently. "What am I supposed to do? The other way isn't comfortable."
Sam takes her hands gently and works her fingers so that they're in the position for a D chord. "It's not always gonna be comfortable. But it's the way it's done. Look, how long have you been singing?"
"Since I was about three," replies Rachel, her back straightening proudly. "I won my first competition shortly after that, and then I went onto – "
"Okay, but you weren't born knowing how to sing, right? Maybe you had talent, but you still had to learn the basics. Everyone does." He smiles at her, that wide smile Santana always makes fun of, and lets go of her hands, picking up the guitar, again. "Come on."
Rachel picks up the slightly heavy guitar and holds it the way he's showed her, fumbling her fingers onto the strings, and strumming. As the D chord finally makes itself heard, she smiles and looks up at him, this time saying nothing.
He smiles back, and leans forward to reposition her fingers. "Okay. Now a G chord."
This time, she says nothing, but simply puts her fingers where he tells her to, and listens to the calm strum of the chords as he teaches her, slowly, what to do.
/~/
"Twinkle, Twinkle?" Her voice is full of distaste, and he starts to laugh, the same carefree laugh she's starting to really like hearing from him.
"You've learned the chords, now it's time to learn some songs. You want to be able to make your own songs soon, right?"
"I guess," she says, though her real motive with this was to get him to play the guitar, not her. Rachel can't deny, though, that she's enjoying this a lot. Sam is really just . . . calm. He's not smart, and he's not that talkative, but he smiles a lot, he laughs a lot, and he's patient with her. In many ways, he reminds her of a slightly quieter, slightly smarter, Golden Retriever-esque Finn. Finn, though, is subject to bouts of frustration, and all she ever sees from Sam is an assured pride in himself and what he can do.
Sam starts to play the old children's song, and the sound of it lulls Rachel's constantly racing mind down to quiet and concentration.
"It's not hard," he says, giving her another one of his wide smiles. She snorts. Of course it isn't – when you know how.
She struggles with the strings – they hurt, and her fingers are smaller than his. She doesn't have the handspan he does, and so reaching the chords is harder than she thought. A few times, her pick squeaks on the strings, and he grimaces, but she manages a decent "Twinkle, Twinkle" by the end of the hour.
He sees her picking at her blisters and covers her hand with his own.
"They get better," he says.
"Will I get better?"
Again, the smile. "We haven't tried to write any songs, yet."
/~/
Rachel's frustrated and she can't shut up. She hurls insults, tears, yelling, and all sorts of annoying and obnoxious sounds at Sam, and he simply turns his back until she quiets down. Then he picks up the guitar.
"Ready?"
She simultaneously loves him and hates him right now. Hates that he never, ever gets angry or frustrated with her. Hates that he never reacts to her dramatics. But she can't help but give him respect for it . . . because she knows it can be hard not to react.
He plays a few chords and then hands it to her. "I want to hear you play 'Twinkle, Twinkle' all the way through. You can do it – we've been practicing for two weeks straight."
Rachel glowers at him. "I can't do it. I haven't been able to all this time."
"Were you able to play the piano perfectly after two weeks? Come on, Rach." He hands her the guitar. "Enough. Just play."
She takes the guitar and strums it gently, like he does, and then slowly, haltingly, plays the song he asks to hear. It's not pretty. It's not even totally correct, but she gets through the whole thing and then looks up at him just in time to see him smile.
"See?" He comes behind her and rubs her shoulders – she's fast learned that Sam is a touchy-feely kind of guy – and then takes his hands away, brushing past her long hair.
What Sam doesn't realize is that Rachel can be touchy-feely, too. She takes his hand as it slips over her shoulder and he squeezes it for a minute before letting it go.
Rachel thinks she just might be falling in love with Sam Evans.
/~/
They get past the nursery rhymes, about a month after she performed "My Headband" for the Glee club. Now she's starting to experiment with the few chords she knows, strumming thoughtfully as he borrows Puck's guitar and accompanies her. It gets a little too folk-songy, though, and she stops.
"This isn't what I was thinking for the Glee club. We're never going to win if we try to re-enact Sonny and Cher."
Sam strums the guitar thoughtfully for a few moments, and then grins. "You want me to play 'Baby'?"
"Sam." Rachel fixes him with a not-impressed look. "That might work for the hordes of screaming teenage girls you no doubt are trying to charm on a regular basis, but Bieber won't win us Regionals."
"It might."
"It won't. Come on, we're trying to write original songs." She hums under her breath and strums in time, and then his hands come into her field of vision.
"You're still coming down wrong on that string. Your fingers are going to get cut up."
She watches as he corrects her, and then looks up to see him about two inches from her face.
It could have gone a number of ways, but Rachel being who she is, it of course ended in a dramatic kiss worthy of any rom-com. His lips are as soft as they look, and despite his "trouty mouth", he is a really good kisser. And he doesn't pull away.
He doesn't do anything afterwards, though, but kiss her cheek, pull back, and correct her hands again.
"From the top?"
She disappointedly goes back to her strumming, but just before they leave, he kisses her again – this time of his own initiative.
"Meet me here tomorrow, okay?"
Somehow, she knows this isn't about any extra practice. Rachel, this time, doesn't do anything but nod her head in assent.
"Of course."