Puck and Britt are just hanging out, taking advantage of his roommate's night class by sitting on the couch in the living room and watching The Big Bang Theory. She loves this show, especially the weird, nerdy guy who kind of reminds Puck of a grasshopper. He doesn't know exactly what her thing with this show is, except maybe for the fact that she's definitely been the ditzy hot blonde chick more than once in her life. He's also pretty sure that she's dated her fair share of nerds between Artie in high school and whoever she was with for the first few years of college before she and Puck got together earlier this year. Maybe it's nostalgia.
Brittany sits up and turns to face him when the show goes to commercial, folding her long legs Indian-style. "I've been doing some research."
"Oh yeah?"
Hearing these words from Brittany is kind of a mixed bag. She's always 'researching' something, and for every totally awesome outcome, there's been an equally unimpressive one. Like the time she decided to research the little square indentations in waffles. That one led to her buying a bunch of frozen waffles before she decided that she wanted to make her own, so she bought a waffle iron and made these maple-brown-butter waffles that make him want to eat himself sick and spread her out on the kitchen counter all at the same time. Or the time when she decided to research photography, when it was almost too easy to convince her that the best photographers took nudes, and then to convince her to model for him. (He still has those, and no, no one else will ever get to see them. Really, it's too bad for everyone else.) But then there was the time when she got into researching the raw food movement, which was so, so much worse than listening to Rachel Berry mention her veganism every time they all tried to go out somewhere together. He has legitimately never seen Britt bitchier than she was when she was only eating raw food, and sure, it made her skin pretty (he can admit it), but everything else sucked, which is exactly what he told her after she'd given in and gone with him for a cheeseburger after two weeks of only lettuce and nuts.
"I've been researching Hanukkah," she answers, twisting her fingers in a lock of her hair.
Puck couldn't keep the smile off his face if he wanted to. "That's awesome, baby."
"I love Christmas, you know, so I thought that maybe Hanukkah was like, Jewish Christmas. It isn't though." She looks sad when she says that, a look that he wants to kiss off her face. She starts talking again before he gets a chance to lean over and do that. "But I think you should teach me how to do the dreidel thing, and we can decorate your apartment for Hanukkah like we decorated my place for Christmas."
Yeah, the day after Halloween, Brittany started hauling red and green storage containers out of the hall closet at the apartment she technically shares with a girl named Paulette, though Paulette has a boyfriend she spends nearly every night with. Puck and Brittany have been dating for almost a year, and he could count on two hands the number of times he's seen Paulette awake at her own apartment. Anyhow, Puck was volunteered to do the things that Brittany likes the least, like assembling the three different fake trees and stringing them all with lights while Britt directed and bopped around hanging wreaths and bunches of mistletoe and plugging in fiber optic snowmen that now sit on every flat surface in her apartment. It looks like Hobby Lobby threw up on the place, but she loves it, so whatever.
"There really aren't Hanukkah decorations," he tells her gently. There are some, yeah, and he's sure that she'll find him and they'll end up here, but Puck didn't grow up decorating for Hanukkah, and he doesn't really want to start now. He puts up a menorah every year and goes through the whole ritual, but he doesn't make a big deal of it. It's enough for him to have the candles burning in the window.
Brittany frowns. "I'll figure out something else then. I'll do more research."
Puck does kiss her then. She grins, nips at his chin a little (weird, maybe, but also weirdly hot), and then lays back down with her head in his lap so she can watch the science nerds fawn over the hot blonde on the TV.
He's walking across campus heading to his last final of the semester when his phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He only has a couple of minutes before he gets to his building, but when he sees that it's Brittany, he answers.
"You already have a menorah, don't you?" It's the first thing she says when he answers, and it makes him smile in spite of the little bit of nervousness he feels.
"Yeah, baby. I already have a menorah." It isn't anything fancy - though he's seen some pretty elaborate ones in his time - but he does have one. For all but those eight days a year when it sits in his bedroom window (which faces the front of his building, conveniently), it lives in the box it came in up on the shelf in his closet behind the stack of blankets and quilts that his mom keeps adding to.
"Hmm. All right. Good luck on your test, sweetheart!"
She hangs up before he has a chance to say anything else, leaving him shaking his head as he shoves his phone back into his pocket. He doesn't know what she's planning, but he doesn't really have time to think about it right now.
"Why aren't there any Hanukkah movies?"
Puck looks up from his computer. "There are some Hanukkah movies."
She rolls her eyes, though she doesn't look away from the TV, where she's flipping through channels. "There's like, a Rugrats special and an Adam Sandler cartoon," she counters. "But there are a million Christmas movies."
He's pretty sure that there aren't a lot of Hanukkah movies because it's just not a super important holiday, no matter what people try to make of it. It just happens to be around the same time of year as this other totally overblown holiday. It doesn't mean that they have anything in common. He doesn't have any idea what to say to her right now, so Puck doesn't say anything.
"It just makes it harder to research," she says after a minute, just before she finds an episode of Iron Chef (the one from Japan, where the ingredients are always weird things like sea urchin or seaweed flakes or squid ink) and settles in to watch, adding her own commentary along with the English translator dude and cracking Puck up. The conversation about Hanukkah movies is apparently forgotten.
Sliding your key into the lock and finding that the door is already unlocked? Not the most exciting thing in the world to come home to when you know that your roommate is out of town and you locked the door before you went to work.
Puck takes three seconds to stand there and wish that he had some kind of weapon instead of a whole lot of nothing, then pushes open the door and braces himself for the worst.
The living room looks exactly like it did when he left for work this morning, with his nearly-empty coffee mug sitting on the end table next to the couch. It's beside the little table top Christmas tree he got for Brittany, decorated with the purple and silver ornaments she chose.
It's possible, Puck knows, that one of the maintenance guys was in here today and just failed to lock the door behind himself on his way out, even though that's never happened before. Or maybe Grant came back from his parents' place for some reason. Or maybe he's just crazy and he didn't lock the door when he left this morning.
Except he knows that he locked the door. He remembers because his douchey neighbor walked by while Puck's key was in his lock, and Puck made fun of his ugly coat in his head.
But it doesn't matter whether or not he locked the door when he left this morning, because he can hear someone moving down the hall.
A long-handled ice scraper is the first thing Puck lays his hands on when he opens the front closet, so that's what he carries with him when he starts heading towards the sound He's listening hard, trying to figure out exactly where in the apartment it's coming from.
He realizes pretty quickly that it's definitely coming from his bedroom, not the bathroom or Grant's room, which somehow makes the whole thing seem worse. He has this image in his head of some huge dude in a ski mask like, rifling through his dresser drawers, stupid as that is, because why would a guy in a ski mask be robbing two college dudes? Still, he can feel the adrenaline starting to do its thing, his heart pounding fast and his fingers clenching the ice scraper reflexively as he creeps towards his own bedroom. The door is pushed halfway shut, and there's light coming from inside the room, and this whole thing is just really not okay.
He takes a breath as quietly as he can and adjusts his grip on the ice scraper before raising it like it's a more effective weapon than it is and kicking the bedroom door open.
He nearly brains Brittany before he realizes that it's Brittany standing there looking all disappointed.
"You're early," she says sadly.
Puck blows out a breath, tossing the ice scraper into the corner. He realizes how fucking hot he is, between the fact that he's still wearing his coat and the way that he worked himself up over the person in his house who turned out to be fucking Brittany. "How did you get in here?" he asks, unzipping his coat.
"I asked the creepy maintenance guy to let me in." She's just standing there beside the bed, twisting a lock of hair around her finger like she does when she's nervous about something. It's not something she does often, so he definitely notices.
He also notices the craft store bag sitting on his bed, and the fact that the only light in the room is the lamp on his bedside table. "Britt. What's going on?"
She sighs heavily and grabs the bag, dropping it on the floor. "It was supposed to be a surprise." He just raises his eyebrows at her. "If it doesn't work, it's your fault for coming home early," she warns, moving to turn off the lamp before kneeling next to the bedside table.
A moment later, light fills the room.
Puck doesn't know how long Brittany's been in his place, but she's obviously been busy. There are twinkle lights everywhere, what must be dozens of strings of them framing the windows and the doorways into his closet and out into the hall, draped over the top of the dresser and across the back of the chair in the corner, and wound around the slats in the headboard of his bed. The room is far from dark, with all these lights, but it's still soft somehow and, he can admit, really pretty. He likes the way that it's highlighting the little pout on Brittany's lips.
"I wasn't done," she says softly, her toe nudging at another strand of lights that's bunched up at her feet.
He steps closer to her, carefully so he doesn't step on any of the bulbs, and puts his hands on her hips. "What is all this?"
She brings her hand up to toy with one of the buttons on his shirt nervously, her eyes trained on it instead of on his face. "I wanted to do something special for Hanukkah." She looks up and meets his eyes. "So I turned your room into a festival of lights."
Puck smiles. "Yeah?" She nods, and this girl, honestly. "I love it."
"Really?"
"Other than the fact that you scared the fuck out of me, it's awesome," he answers, teasing her just a little. He tugs her a little closer when she smiles. She looks really pretty in this light, almost like her skin is glowing. "I love it," he repeats, bringing his hand up to cup her cheek before he kisses her.
She pulls away after a second, leaning her forehead against his and looking down between them as she continues to fiddle with one of the buttons on his shirt for a second before slipping it through its hole and letting her fingers move down to the next one. "I wasn't done," she says again, undoing the next button.
"What else were you going to do?" he asks, letting his hands push up under the sides of her sweater to touch her skin, warm beneath his fingertips.
She meets his eyes, then takes half a step backwards, biting her lip and lifting her arms over her head. Puck takes the hint and tugs her sweater up over her head, making her hair crackle with static and revealing a pale blue lace bra. "I was gonna put lights on me," she murmurs, looking down to watch his hands as he unbuttons her jeans. "And I had candles."
"Don't need 'em," Puck tells her, watching as she wiggles out of her jeans. He will never, ever get tired of seeing those legs. The way this light is hitting her skin makes her look even more beautiful than she already is. Plus, who else in the world would do something like this, break into her boyfriend's apartment to decorate for a holiday just because she can? "You're really pretty, baby."
She smiles before she kisses him, murmuring a thanks against his lips and pushing his shirt (when did she finish unbuttoning it?) off his shoulders as she pulls him back onto the bed with her.
When Puck sees the way that light plays across her body when she moves over him, the way it highlights her face when she comes, he decides that he's going to leave them up long after Hanukkah ends.
"Tomorrow is the first day of Hanukkah, right?"
"Yeah."
Brittany's head is resting on Puck's bare stomach as she lays sideways across his bed, her legs stretched out so that her feet are resting against the edge of his dresser. He's tugging his fingers through her messy hair and watching while she drapes one of the spare strands of lights over her naked body. It isn't going to be too long before watching isn't enough.
She turns her head to look at him. "Will you teach me how to do Hanukkah?"
He grins, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her palm. "Sure, baby."