Title: Exactly What We Need to Tide Us Over
Author: actress-xx
Pairing, Character(s): Puck/Shelby
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,535
Spoilers: 3x2 - "I Am Unicorn"
Summary: Families shouldn't be scrounged together like this.
Disclaimers: I do not own Glee; title from "Attention to Details" by Averi.
The notion has crossed his mind on various occasions, which seem to come more frequently since he joined the glee club, but it's now that he decides, undoubtedly, that life is fucked up.
The apartment he's in is nice, especially by Lima standards. Its refrigerator is decorated with snapshots of his daughter, a lavender duo of her hand and footprints, and the clown her daddy sketched for her. He's got the mother of his child pressed up against a wall that's painted in a trendy shade of blue he doesn't know the name of, and his kisses are swallowing the whimpers that would otherwise threaten to wake Beth. If he squints really hard at this scenario, it isn't terribly difficult for Noah Puckerman to trick himself into believing things have worked themselves out.
Except that this isn't his apartment, and he isn't exactly proud of how he acquired the address. Except that his doodle turned into some grotesque mixture of a circus freak and a farm animal. Except that Shelby Corcoran is the adopted mother of his child, and he's no longer enough of a womanizing jock to think that this is okay.
When his sister had come home from the hospital, Puck's mother had ensconced him on the couch in a fortress of pillows, situating his arms in what had felt like an awkward position, and deposited a tiny pink entity into his hands. There's still a polaroid somewhere in his house of the Puckerman siblings, taken just seconds before they'd simultaneously burst into tears, and his mother had scooped the newborn right back up. Following the vow of fatherhood he offered Shelby, she had nodded toward her sofa and, racking his brain to remember the correct physicality of holding a baby, Puck had dropped onto the cushions, eyes locked on Beth as she was transferred onto his lap. She had floundered for Shelby momentarily, chubby arms reaching out and causing Puck's heart to skip a panicked beat, but ultimately snuggled against her father's torso. The cell phone was slipped from Shelby's back pocket, and the only tear-free image of Puck holding a child, his child, was successfully captured.
The crying would come eventually, when the picture would be shown to a pink-haired teen pregnancy statistic in the middle of a makeshift music classroom.
Puck was too mesmerized by the miniature human in his arms to notice the sincerity of Shelby's smile as she appraised the photograph, but he glanced up when she spoke.
"Lucky girl, she's got a handsome daddy."
"And a hot mom," he added instantaneously. Shelby didn't inquire as to which of Beth's mothers Puck was referring to, and he didn't elaborate. "Can you send that to me?"
Her fingers punched a few commands into the keypad, causing the pocket of Puck's jeans to vibrate a few seconds later. The sensation perplexed Beth, and she blinked up at him with wide, crystal-blue eyes. He playfully mirrored her wonder; his expression turned into one of mock surprise, with o-shaped lips similar to those of Cheerios during their routines - or afterwards, in the back of Puck's pickup truck parked behind the gym - and he tickled the pudge of her tummy until the giggles came. Shelby observed the interactions, not sure if she was more impressed or suspicious of how seamlessly he could switch from dimwit to daddy. Musing over how many other girls had pictures saved on that phone, she frowned at the idea that Beth would just be skimmed over, caught between images of Puck's various flavors-of-the-week flashing their lingerie in their bedroom mirrors.
"She was - asleep, before you came in," Shelby reminded him, catching herself before she'd used the words she'd actually been thinking: fine, content, safe. Her delivery must have been harsher than she'd intended, because Puck's head snapped up as though he'd been caught doing something wrong. The look on his face was borderline pathetic, and she was decidedly softer as she added, "I should probably put her back to bed."
He nodded, half-assing a smile as he handed his child back to her, a smile that unconsciously faltered when Beth didn't protest, didn't reach out for him the way she had for her mother. It suddenly felt unnatural for him to be sitting on the woman's couch without reason, and Puck stood in a manner that would have been embarrassingly abrupt if Shelby had seen it. Instead, the brunette was bent over the edge of Beth's bed, cooing in a tone too quiet for Puck to hear, and he couldn't shake the creepy sense that he was spying on a family moment he wasn't supposed to be a part of. He didn't know what he'd expected the end of the evening to be like; he wasn't moronic enough to think something along the lines of strumming his acoustic while harmonizing with Shelby on a lullaby was an option, but it didn't feel right.
He didn't want to have to walk out on his baby a second time.
Unsure of the words to leave the room with, he wandered silently towards the door, ultimately tossing a phrase he didn't often utilize over his shoulder.
"Thank you."
Shelby glanced back at him with a cocked brow, and he sputtered out a few more words about Beth and visits and trying his damnedest to be a father until Shelby smiled, which would have been enough to shut him up even if she hadn't started speaking.
"Anytime," she stage-whispered, stroking her daughter's hair once more before crossing to him. "Well, not anytime, but ..."
"Yeah, no, I'm sorry, but knowing you're back in town, knowing she's so close almost makes everything harder. I just - I love her, y'know? Is that weird?"
The pitiable sheepishness had returned, and Shelby itched to touch him, comfort him somehow until his features relaxed and the puppy-dog quality was gone from his eyes. She settled for another smile, and teasingly answered, "Of course not. Showing up on my doorstep with no valid explanation as to how you found us is a little abnormal, but, no, you're not weird, Noah. You're just a daddy."
This isn't his fault, he knows. He had honest to God only gone in to peck her cheek in a grateful, chaste goodnight when she'd glanced back at the crib, but she turned too soon for him to have stopped even if he'd wanted to - but he didn't - and their lips collided in a kiss that would have been short enough for them to awkwardly chuckle about if she'd pulled away - but she didn't - and his hand had slipped to the back of her neck, cuing of them to stop whatever was happening, but they didn't.
The second before his tongue had slipped into her mouth, he'd wondered if she'd taste at all like Rachel.
Now he's acquainted with precisely how Shelby Corcoran tastes, and how her hips work in the subtlest of circles when she's cornered against a wall. Slipping the cardigan off her shoulders reveals both the skin of her neck, and how staccato her breaths start to get if Puck ghosts his mouth over it.
"N - No ..."
He doesn't understand whether she's trying to put a stop to this or say his name, because either way, it's coming out as a moan. By the time he finally backs off, she can't remember what she was trying to say either. His hands drop from her hips much sooner than hers do from his chest, and he licks his lips in a way that's so accidentally sexy that she would want to laugh at the absurdity of all of this if she wasn't so ashamed. Her fingers are shaking as she gently shoves his form away from hers.
"I'm gonna go home now," he tries to state, but it comes out closer to a mantra for himself than a notification for her. Regardless, it's the first legitimate sign of maturity that Shelby has seen from this, God, this kid, and her nerves manifest themselves in a silent, hasty nod as she starts for the safety of her bedroom. Puck watches her go until his focus is stolen by the crib in the middle of the living room, and he presses a kiss for his daughter into the air before slipping out of the apartment. Both doors click shut at the same time.
Tonight, the rest of the evening will be spent with Shelby hibernating in the sheets she'd almost let a teenage boy tangle her in. Tomorrow, Puck is going to bring his joint-rolling-while-driving skills out of retirement on the way to school, promising himself that it's only for the anxiety he feels at the possibility of running into McKinley's newest teacher. The day after that, in the amount of time it takes for the stylist to bleach the pink from her hair, Quinn will formulate a plan to regain custody of Beth. Things have started to fall apart, and it's seriously, heartbreakingly fucked up, because for a few minutes, inside the bubble of that apartment, Noah Puckerman had let himself believe that things were starting to fall together.