Snacks and Stolen Kisses
Mrs. Hudson may not look like a Mom of the Year, but with every passing day she spends in her care, Quinn more and more wants to credit her as such. Sure, she took the first day off from work to get Quinn settled, but after that, she's rarely there—she comes home at eight-thirty and brings Lean Cuisines from Kroger for a late dinner, catches up, does the laundry, and turns in for the night. Although Mrs. Hudson may not be around all that often—not nearly as often as her own stay-at-home mother was, she tries not to remember—she's engaged with them at the end of the day, honest and loving and real. And at this point, Quinn will take a few hours of nurture over omnipresent pretense any day.
She's heard rumors, most of them true, about how she got kicked out and moved in with her boyfriend. God, she's just grateful to say that she has a boyfriend, and Finn at that, not just anyone. Not even since he doesn't know and she doesn't deserve him—no, she'll save that for late nights—but since she thought she had lost everyone, but he was still there. He's always there: leaning up against her locker, tucking her in at night after his mother turns out the lights. She knows there's something up with Rachel, sees it in the way Finn smiles and she pines at glee practice, but no matter. That's one hour out of twenty-four, and who needs longing gazes when the day is theirs to share?
And of course he's there, Finn as he is, bringing her snacks and stolen kisses in the middle of the night. Quinn feels closer to him because of this house, this crumbling old shack from the 1970s that Mrs. Hudson struggles to keep up—she can talk to him now; she doesn't just want to grope him anymore, at least now that it's been a few weeks. They came close to having sex at first, she admits it; that empty house all to themselves after school was a temptation, and besides, it's not like she could get pregnant again. Everyone assumes they'd done it to conceive, so what would the harm be to their reputations? It never came to fruition, though, since it didn't feel right to Quinn to have him inside her, not when she's carrying Puck's daughter.
Puck. And it isn't just him, she knows: there's Kurt's not-so-secret affections and Finn's whatever-it-is with Rachel. She's nothing more than a liar, she scolds herself, a filthy little liar who will lose him in the end—but oh, it's nice forgetting. Finn's house is a home, small and old and personal—enough so that she can forget, maybe for thirty seconds, that she's having Puck's baby and he's got gay kid and the thing chasing after him; that it's anything other than TV dinners and sleeping on the couch and him and her and their family. And maybe, she wishes in vain, just maybe, living here long enough will make it feel real.
Him.
Them.
Us.