"I kissed Santana last night."
Rachel looks down between them for a second, then meets his eyes again.
"It was just a kiss."
He woke up on Santana's floor on Sunday morning covered with a purple flowery quilt with a leopard-print throw pillow under his head. His back hurt, his mouth felt like he'd eaten a bowl of sand as a midnight snack, and all he could think about was how he and Santana had kissed the night before.
He doesn't know why it happened in the first place, but he doesn't have any desire to cheat on Rachel, so one kiss was where it stopped. They didn't talk about it when Santana was driving him back to Puck's so he could get his truck; they both pretended like nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. But just because they didn't talk about it didn't mean that Finn wasn't thinking about it. As soon as he got something to eat and took a shower, he left home again, going straight to Rachel's.
"I don't understand," Rachel says quietly.
Finn tells her what happened the way that he remembers it, and even though he was a little drunk, he thinks he's pretty accurate.
"So you kissed each other."
He can't read her voice. "I think so. But I didn't like, want to do it, Rach. I didn't plan it. It just happened, and it was just one kiss, and that was all." He's talking too fast, he knows it, but he can't make himself shut up. "Please don't be mad. It didn't mean anything, so please, just...don't be mad."
He knows that he's asking a lot of her. The last time they went through something like this - when she kissed Puck - he broke up with her without a second thought. He knows that her kissing Puck was different than him kissing Santana, for a lot of reasons, but he also knows that different doesn't necessarily mean that it's better. Sure, Rachel has been encouraging his friendship with Santana, but it's not like there isn't still history between the three of them that he's just dragged back out into the open.
"Why are you telling me this, Finn?" she asks when she's been quiet for so long that he's just about to beg her to say something, even if she does tell him to go to hell.
He knows that he didn't have to tell her. He's pretty sure that the friendship that he has with Santana now would keep her from using this against him, even though that's exactly what she did before. He trusts her, and she's a different person now altogether. Santana probably would have kept this to herself forever if he'd asked.
"Because secrets always fuck us up," he answers honestly, wincing a little when he realizes that he slipped and swore in front of her. She hates that. "They always come back and screw everything up, and this isn't worth ruining everything we have over."
Rachel nods and looks down at her hand, picking at a loose thread on her bedspread. "I'm not mad," she finally says, and Finn exhales a breath that he didn't even realize he was holding.
He leans over and presses his lips to her temple. "Nothing like that will ever happen again," he promises, locking eyes with her. He means it; he doesn't want to cheat on her, and what happened with Santana was a one-time-only deal.
Rachel looks at him thoughtfully, then squares her shoulders, swallowing hard. "I love you, and I know that you love me. If I ask you a question, will you promise to answer it honestly?"
"Yeah," he answers without hesitating.
"Do you have feelings for Santana? Beyond friendship, I mean."
It seems like an easy question to answer, because he loves Rachel. But she's looking at him very seriously right now, and he sometimes thinks that someone can love more than one person at a time - he's been there before, sort of - so he takes a second to really think about it.
In the last few months, Santana has gone from someone who he mostly avoided to someone that he really likes spending time with; he can tell when she's upset about something, and when she is, he wants to do whatever he can to make her feel better. Under all of the fight and the snark, she's a girl who's been ignored and had her heart stepped on. And the thing is, now that he understands a little of who she really is, deep down, he likes the front she puts up even more. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but there's something he likes about being able to tell the difference between who Santana is and who she wants people to believe she is.
"Maybe," he finally admits, surprised by his own answer. He really doesn't know when it happened, but...maybe he does have feelings for Santana. "Rachel, I don't-"
"Do you think we're going to be together forever?" she interrupts. He looks at her with wide eyes.
"Rachel." They haven't talked about this, not yet. Rachel is going to New York, period. He's applied to a couple of schools in the city, but he's also put in applications at OSU and U of M just in case. For Finn, it's enough that they're together right now, and he doesn't want to waste any of the time that they do have worrying or thinking about what might happen after that.
"We have to be realistic," she says quietly. "Graduation - or at least the end of summer - could be the end of us."
He hates this conversation even more than he thought he would when he was driving over here and thought that she was going to be upset with him for cheating on her with Santana. This - talking about their relationship ending because they're going to different places in life - is somehow worse.
"If we are operating with an expiration date, it doesn't make sense for you to ignore your feelings for someone else, if you have them."
"I love you," he insists, sure that this is her way of breaking up with him.
"I know." Her voice has that soft, reassuring quality that she gets sometimes when she can tell that he isn't feeling so sure of himself. It usually makes him feel amazing, but it's not working the same way now. "You can love one person and still care for another. Maybe you could fall in love with Santana, too."
"Are you breaking up with me?"
"No." She's adamant, shaking her head and grabbing his hand. There are tears in her eyes. "I'm..." She takes a deep breath. "I'm giving you permission. To figure out how you feel about her."
He understands the words that she's saying, but he doesn't understand what she's telling him. "Are you telling me to cheat on you?" he asks carefully.
She smiles wryly. "It isn't cheating if I tell you that you can," she whispers.
They talk about it again on Monday after school, when things aren't so fresh and Finn isn't fighting a lingering hangover.
"I'm not telling you to just have sex with her," Rachel says carefully. She's perched on the edge of his bed, and she hasn't ever looked more uncomfortable sitting there. (He hasn't seen her look this uncomfortable in front of him since the first time that they hung out alone together in his room, back at the house he and his mom were in before she and Burt got married and they moved to the new place. She's never been this uncomfortable in this room.)
He avoided Santana all day at school. Seriously, he talked to her during the class they have together, because he sits next to her, and he said hey at lunch, but otherwise, he stayed as far away as he could. He can't even look at her without thinking not-so-friendly thoughts. Since he has no intention of cheating on Rachel, that's really not okay.
"I don't understand," he tells her for what must be the tenth time in two days.
She takes a deep breath and is quiet for a minute, thinking. "When you kissed," she finally says, "it wasn't just because you wanted to kiss her, right?"
He doesn't know why they kissed; he doesn't even know who kissed who. Which, actually, makes what Rachel is saying completely true. It isn't like he looked at Santana and thought about what he was going to do before he did it. It just happened.
"I mean, yeah, I guess."
"So if you had sex with her, it wouldn't just be because you thought it would be good or whatever," Rachel says. "It would be more than that, even if you don't know yet what it would be."
She makes sense, sort of, but he still just blinks at her. "So you want me to go up to Santana and tell her that we should do it?"
Rachel laughs, shaking her head a little. "Maybe we should table the discussion for now," she says after a moment. "It's very complicated."
Um, yeah. Finn has no idea what's going on, honestly. He kissed Santana, but Rachel isn't mad. In fact, it seems like she's telling him that he can (should?) kiss Santana some more, because maybe their relationship isn't going to last and he shouldn't waste a chance to be with someone else.
Huh. Maybe he does know what's going on, even if he doesn't totally understand it.
He leans over and kisses her forehead because it feels like the right thing to do.
"Do one thing for me?" she asks, waiting for his nod before she continues. "Just...don't tell me. I don't want to know about what happens between the two of you as long as you're being safe."
He can't imagine what would happen between him and Santana, but he just nods and wraps his arms around her when she leans in for a hug.
For a while, nothing changes.
Rachel is his girlfriend, and he loves her. They go out on dates and spend time together doing nothing, and they have sex whenever they manage to get some time alone together without parents or Kurt or whoever interrupting. He's pretty sure he couldn't love her more if he tried. She's supportive and encouraging, and the best part is knowing that she loves him just as much as he loves her.
Santana is his friend, and he loves her too, though it's not the same. They hang out, too, at school and at parties and sometimes just the two of them, when Rachel is busy and neither of them has any other plans. The more time they spend together and the more he gets to really know her, the more he likes her. She's hilarious, for one thing, and you can always count on her to tell the truth, even if it's not so nice. But there's this part of her that she usually keeps hidden from everyone else, a quiet, kind of vulnerable girl that she's let Finn see a couple of times, and he likes that side of her just as much as he likes the snarky bitch. (Well, he likes the snarky bitch when she isn't being a bitch to him, but nowadays, her barbs are almost always directed at someone else, and they tend to be more teasing and funny than horribly cruel.)
He spends Valentine's Day with Rachel this year, which is a million times better than being at home sick in bed like last year, thinking about the girl he wants to be with and how she's really with someone else. They have school that day, and student council is selling these heart-shaped lollipops that Finn has to buy when Brittany corners him at his locker before first hour. He gives one to Rachel, who smiles and kisses his cheek before heading off to French, and one to Santana, who gives him a, "Thanks, Hudson," while she tears the wrapper off and spins in her chair in computer applications.
(That night, he takes Rachel to this restaurant in Westerville that she loves because they make some black bean thing that he actually has to admit doesn't suck when she insists that he try it. It's too cold to park somewhere, and each of their parents are at home, so they have to settle for some mostly-innocent kisses in her bedroom, but that's okay.)
When things do start to change, it's definitely Finn's fault.
Kurt and Finn get into it one day over something that starts out fucking stupid and ends up with them yelling at one another about their dead parents while Finn's mom stands in the kitchen doorway with her hand over her mouth, and then Burt's standing in between them shouting that they both need to shut up, which Finn has only heard him say once before, so he knows it's completely serious.
Still, he's mad enough that he doesn't care. His mom just nods when he looks at her and says that he needs to get the hell out of the house, which makes him love her even more than he already does.
He forces himself not to squeal the tires when he pulls out of the driveway, but that's more because it's hard on his truck than because it's rude and everyone in the house will hear. He does choose his loudest, angriest playlist when he's sitting at a stoplight, the one that starts with Pantera and goes from there, and turns it up loud enough that it makes his ears hurt.
He thinks he's just going to drive around aimlessly, but he finds himself sitting in Santana's driveway, looking at the back of her black two-door and wondering how, exactly, he got here.
She comes out of the house before he gets out of the truck, her arms wrapped around herself and the sweats she's wearing tucked into the top of a pair of those super ugly boots that every girl seems to own. He hops out of the truck before she even gets to the end of the sidewalk; she's just wearing a thermal shirt, and it's way too cold for her to be outside without a coat.
"What are you doing here?" she asks when he gets to her.
He keeps walking up towards her door, basically forcing her to follow with him. "I don't know," he answers honestly. "Kurt and I got into this huge fight, and I was just driving around and ended up here."
She nods and pushes the front door open, leaning down to slip her bare feet out of her boots when he's pushing it closed behind him. "My parents went to visit my grandma, but I lied and said we had a glee rehearsal tomorrow," she tells him, shifting her weight from foot to foot while he hangs his coat in the closet like he knows he's supposed to. "They won't be back till tomorrow, so we could hang out. And if you don't want to go home, you can stay here," she offers with a shrug.
He knows that Rachel has plans to have dinner with Shelby tonight, and he was just thinking that he was going to see if Puck wanted to hang out, so he can't think of a good reason to say no.
He texts his mom to let her know where he is (he knows that she worries, and she really, really doesn't need to) and accepts the beer that Santana offers, though he doesn't have any intention of getting drunk here tonight. Things tend to go badly when he's angry and drunk.
They go up to her room because Santana says something about cleaning out her vanity. Finn ends up sitting on her bed with a purple sequined throw pillow in his lap while she sits at her vanity table and watches his reflection in the mirror while she sorts through whatever she has in the drawers, throwing things into the little wastebasket sitting beside her every couple of minutes.
"Did Kurt start it this time or did you stick your clodhopper of a foot in your mouth?" she asks after a couple of minutes.
Finn resists the urge to throw the pillow at the back of her head solely because she's a girl and that makes it wrong. "I don't even know, but he brought up my dad, and I said something about how at least he got to know his mom before she died. It was kind of a clusterfuck." He shrugs one shoulder. "It's not the kind of stuff you're supposed to say to family."
"So, you were both only children for like, seventeen years, and now you're both just supposed to act like brothers?"
"Mom and Burt might like it if we did, but they know that isn't going to happen," he says. "Like, I love Kurt, and it's totally brotherly, but Puck feels more like my brother than Kurt does, you know?" She meets his eyes in the mirror. "Like, Puck has been my bro forever, and even though I kind of hated him for a while, he'll always be my bro. Kurt's the guy I used to pick on who set up our parents because he had a crush on me." Santana snorts out a laugh, which makes Finn smile in spite of himself. "It's not the easiest thing in the world."
Santana drops what he thinks is a tube of lip gloss into the wastebasket, stands up, and comes to sit next to him on the bed. "Everybody at school acts like you're brothers."
Finn rolls his eyes. "I know."
"That sucks." She inspects her fingernails for a moment - they're painted a color that may be purple or black, though he can't be sure - before looking at him again. "I'm pretty sure that I'd kill someone if I was related to Kurt. Probably Kurt."
Finn smirks. "He's not that bad."
"No, he's not," she agrees easily, nodding. "Except for when he's awful. There's like, no happy medium with that kid, and most of the time he sucks."
It isn't funny, really, but he finds himself laughing anyhow, and Santana's giggling beside him, which just sets him off more, and it doesn't make any sense, but he can't stop laughing, even when his stomach starts to hurt and it's getting hard to catch his breath.
"You know," he says after he's caught his breath, "I didn't know why I came over here, really, but I think this was it." She raises her eyebrows. "You made this a funny thing instead of wanting to talk it over or whatever."
Like Rachel would have, he thinks.
"Well, I'm awesome at holding grudges, and I'm all for other people doing it, but it sucks to do that with someone you live with," she points out. "You might as well just...chalk it up to Kurt being Kurt and let it go."
"That's actually really good advice."
"Yeah, well, I'm awesome at giving advice, too," she teases.
He doesn't know why, exactly, that's the thing that makes him lean forward and kiss her, but he does.
She squeaks against his lips, but the sound dies when he catches her bottom lip between his, and then she's sinking into the kiss, her hand coming up to fist in the front of his polo shirt.
Her fingers are curled there into the fabric when she tears her lips from his and sucks in a breath. "Finn, what are you doing?"
He's a fucking idiot, because the only thing that he can think to say is, "Rachel said it's okay."
Santana takes her hand off him and slips off the bed to look at him. "What?"
"Fuck," he mutters. "I told Rachel that we kissed when we were drunk that night after Puck's party, and she told me to like, do whatever felt right with you." He can't read her expression at all, so he just keeps talking. "That, right now, felt right, so I did it."
"Rachel told you to cheat on her, Finn? Do you know how fucking stupid you sound right now, trying to pull this shit?" Her voice is laced with sarcasm and derision and something else that he can't name, and yeah, he knows how stupid he sounds, but it's true.
"It's true," he insists. "And it isn't cheating because she told me to do it."
"Crazy eyes, kitten calendar Rachel Berry agreed to be in an open relationship."
"Don't," he warns gently, shaking his head. Her voice has that mean Santana edge to it that hasn't been directed at him in months, and he doesn't like hearing it now.
"You really expect me to believe this, Finn?"
He moves to stand in front of her. "It's true." She looks up at him with those dark, doubtful eyes that are making his stomach knot up. "She said that she doesn't know if we're still going to be together after this year, like if I don't go to New York, and she thinks that I should like, keep my options open or something."
He can tell by the expression on her face that she can't decide if she wants to be offended or if she wants to believe him at all, and he doesn't know if it's because he's explaining it poorly or because this whole thing really is crazy.
"I don't know if you're insane for thinking I'm going to believe you, or if this is actually true and Rachel is insane," she says after a few agonizing seconds.
"It's the truth, Santana."
She seems to consider this for a moment, watching him, then takes a deep breath. "I think you should go," she finally tells him. "I don't know what to do with any of this."
He spends too much time driving around town sort of aimlessly after he leaves Santana's, thinking about what just happened. He should have just left well enough alone. His relationship with Rachel is as strong as it's ever been, and he loves her. He likes the friendship he has with Santana too, and he may have just completely ruined it.
He goes home when the sun starts to set and he's decided that this has to be the worst day he's had in a long time.
"Santana and I talked yesterday."
You know what really fucking hurts? Snorting hot coffee up through your nose because your girlfriend tells you that she had a conversation with the girl you kissed twice who she's told you to "do what feels right" with when you're taking a drink.
He'd called Rachel on Saturday night and gave her kind of a rundown of what had happened. If she'd thought it was weird that he'd gone to Santana's when he was mad at Kurt, or if she was upset about it, she kept it to herself, because she'd just speculated that maybe he hadn't chosen the right words and said that she was sure that everything would be cleared up soon enough. Like, she gave him the kind of conversation that he would have had with Puck (well, Sam, since Rachel would never swear as much as Puck) instead of the conversation that he expected to be having with his girlfriend. It had been kind of weird and kind of awesome all at once, at least partially because Rachel has this insane ability to make him believe that everything really will be okay.
What he hadn't realized was that she meant that she was going to talk to Santana herself in an effort to make things okay.
Her face is a cross between concerned and grossed out when he takes the tissues that she offers him, holding his half-full coffee while he wipes at his nose and tries to get his eyes to stop watering. Seriously, coffee in your sinuses? It hurts.
"Are you all right?" Rachel asks when he tosses the tissues into a trash can in the corner of the hallway. He nods and takes his coffee cup when she holds it out, dropping it into the trash can, too. He's had all the coffee he can handle for the day. "Anyhow," she goes on when he's fallen into step beside her and they're moving down the hall. "I called her to try to clear up any misunderstanding the two of you may have had on Saturday."
He watches her dial her combination into her locker and pull the door open. "That's kind of weird, Rachel."
She gives him a sympathetic look. "Yes, well, I think we're all three on the same page now, though this is really between the two of you." She pulls a couple of books out of her locker before closing the door, and he's pretty sure that she means for this to be the end of the conversation. Except she hasn't told him anything.
"Wait." He stares at her for a moment. "So what did you even talk about?"
"I mostly just confirmed your story," Rachel answers, shrugging one shoulder delicately. "She thought that maybe you were making things up in some elaborate ruse to coerce her into helping you be unfaithful to me, though she admitted that such a thing would be more than unlikely coming from you. She and I talked about exactly what you and I talked about: The two of you being open to experiencing whatever emotions may be happening between you."
"Oh," he says eloquently.
She stands on her toes and kisses him quickly. "I have to get to government. We'll talk later."
He totally bombs a quiz in Spanish because he's distracted by all of this stuff with Santana and Rachel. But like...what even with all of this?
He'd pretty much decided to drop the Santana thing even though Rachel told him to go for it. He didn't want to mess things up between any of the three of them, not when things were so good. Now though...
He has zero idea what's going on right now, but by the time he heads to the computer applications class he and Santana share, he's made a decision.
He's going to have to pretend that nothing has changed between any of the three of them in the last few weeks. It's the only way that he's going to manage to keep his sanity and not spend all of his time waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"Can we just pretend that nothing's changed?" he blurts when Santana comes in and takes her seat behind her computer.
She sets her notebook down on the table to the left of her keyboard and gives him a weird look. "You mean the fact that your awesomely crazy girlfriend is encouraging you to explore the possibilities with me?" she asks, using this tone of voice that lets him know that 'explore the possibilities' is something that Rachel said.
"Yeah."
She just looks at him, considering, for long enough that he starts to feel uncomfortable sitting there in this computer chair. "I don't think we can do that," she finally says, her voice almost too quiet.
His heart sinks, because he knew that this was going to fuck everything up, and for once, getting the confirmation that he was right really sucks.
She licks her lips and starts talking again before he can start filling the silence with nonsense. "What happened on Saturday..." She glances towards the front of the room for some reason before meeting his eyes again. "I liked it, okay? But it sucked because I thought it was going to be a thing with Rachel all over again, and I'm done with that shit. But if she's okay with it," she tilts her head thoughtfully, "maybe we should try being friends who kiss."
So Santana is Finn's friend who he kisses.
Rachel is Finn's girlfriend who he loves.
They know about each other, and they like each other, and he doesn't know how long it can last, but no one is jealous or bitchy or hurt by any of the stuff that goes on.
It's either the best deal ever or like, a nuclear bomb just waiting to annihilate everyone and everything.
They had exactly one conversation about it, all three of them standing in the parking lot between Finn's truck and Santana's car, parked next to each other because that's where he always parks and Santana and Puck have been fighting over the space next to his for whatever reason since Santana and Finn got their licenses sophomore year.
"I don't think any of us wants to deal with any sort of rumors regarding this arrangement," Rachel said plainly, slipping her bare hands into her coat pockets against the chill. "I think that it only makes sense to keep things quiet."
Finn kind of expected Santana to be pissed off about that, to think that Rachel wanted her to be a dirty little secret or whatever, but she nodded her head, her ponytail bobbing. "Definitely." She met Finn's eyes. "We'll keep it behind closed doors."
He thinks he nodded. He might have been having an out-of-body experience, so he's not entirely sure.
But honestly, other than being more physical with Santana, nothing changes. He spends just as much time with each of them as he did before, though now he realizes just how much time he was actually spending with Santana already. They mostly hang out at her house because he doesn't want to have to explain what's going on with the girls to his mom or Kurt, and because he always ends up wanting to kiss her when they're out in public together, and he knows that's a bad idea. It'll just start a bunch of rumors and make drama that they're trying to avoid.
He knows that it's weird, but it really does work for them.
Just a couple of weeks after they have their little "rules" conversation, Rachel and her dads go to New York for a long weekend to look at some colleges and go to a show (she's been talking about The Book of Mormon, and he thinks that a musical written by the South Park guys is bound to be awesome). They leave on Thursday afternoon, and being at school on Friday without her there is really weird. He knows for sure that she hasn't missed a single day of high school to date because she told him, but he hadn't realized just how quiet it would seem without her around.
Santana laughs when he tells her that when they're walking to lunch. "Because she never shuts up." She rolls her eyes when he makes a face. "Look, I don't want to staple her lips together every time she opens her mouth any more, but that girl talks all the fucking time."
Finn doesn't say anything, but sometimes Rachel actually does stop talking, and not just when she's upset or trying to prove a point. It doesn't happen often because Rachel claims that she has too much nervous energy for it, but sometimes they manage to just lie together and do nothing. They don't play music or watch a movie or talk or anything, He loves Rachel because she is who she is, but the quiet thing is something that he likes because he knows that not everyone is lucky enough to get to see her like that.
He goes to Santana's that night after Friday night dinner with his family. Her mom lets him in and sends him up to Santana's room with a smile. Over the last several weeks, Finn has realized that not only are Santana's parents kind of clueless about a lot of the things that go on with their daughter, they don't really have any rules that would prevent the sort of things that his mom's open door rule is designed to discourage.
(He wonders, sometimes, what story Santana has given her parents, what they think Finn and Santana's relationship is. He tries not to think about it too much.)
She's sprawled out on her bed reading a book when he walks into her room, wearing a pair of those silky pajama pants that she has in about a dozen different colors (these are slate gray) with a black tank top. Her hair is loose, though the ends are still all curly from the ponytail she had to wear it in all day at school, and he can tell that she's completely engrossed in what she's reading. He gets the door all the way closed before she even realizes that he's there. She smiles when she does. "Hey."
He toes off his shoes and leaves them next to her vanity before getting onto the bed beside her. "What are you reading?"
She slips her bookmark - a length of black satin ribbon - between the pages and sets the book aside. "It's about a girl who relives her last day alive over and over trying to make things happen the way they're supposed to."
"That sucks." Her lips curve upwards, but it isn't really a smile. "Does she die in the end?"
Santana shrugs. "I haven't gotten there yet."
They end up watching episodes of Las Vegas on DVD, which is actually better than Finn expects. The girls are hot, even if the redhead needs to lay off the plastic surgery, and the guy in charge is freaking Sonny Coroleon.
"I could do that," Santana comments when the credits roll on an episode. "Be a casino hostess for high rollers."
Finn doesn't know a lot about Vegas, but between this show and like, The Hangover, he thinks Santana could definitely fit in there if it was where she wanted to be. "You'd be awesome in Vegas."
She just looks at him for a second, appraisingly, then leans over to kiss him gently.
This is exactly how things usually start with Santana. They're just hanging out, and then one of them kisses the other and they just keep going. Tonight feels different though, because every time Finn tries to deepen the kiss, she pulls back a little, keeping it light and teasing the hell out of him. She smiles and nips at his bottom lip with her teeth when he says her name, so he curves his hand around the back of her neck to keep her where he wants her when he leans over to kiss her again. He can feel her body relax when he slips his tongue past her lips to tease hers, and she practically melts against him when he lies back against her pillows, tugging her along.
Finn had always thought of Santana's kisses as sort of dirty and deep, almost like they're something that she needs to get out of the way before she gets to what she really wants, but he either remembered wrong or something has just changed since he was kissing her before (yeah, it has) because it's different now. Her kisses are still a little dirty, but they're slower now, like she's letting herself enjoy a kiss for the sake of a kiss.
Honestly, he doesn't know why he's thinking so much when she's draping her leg over his hip a little and her fingers are toying with the hair just above his ear, something she always does that makes him a little crazy.
The moan she lets out when he pushes her onto her back is so sexy he can hardly stand it, so he takes a second just to look at her, all bruised lips and dark eyes with her hair fanned out across the pillow. He always knew that Santana was hot, but right now the fact that she's just really beautiful is what strikes him.
"Finn," she kind of whines, shifting her hips so that the side of her thigh brushes against his.
"You're beautiful, you know that?" His brain isn't really doing a lot of the work right now, so it's not like he planned to say it, but it's definitely true, and if the way she slips her hand into the back of his hair and pulls him down to kiss him is any indication, she likes the way it sounds.
He needs to feel more of her, so he pushes his hand beneath the side of her tank top, his fingertips playing over her ribs before moving around to her back. When she sucks gently at his lower lip, he flattens his palm against her skin and pulls her body closer to his. She tears her mouth from his to make an incredible sound, so he skims his lips up her jaw to her ear, nipping at the lobe. Her hands push up under the hem of his shirt, and then her fingertips are digging into the small of his back, which is hotter than he can even explain. He whispers her name, his breath washing over her ear warmly, which sets off kind of a chain reaction that he'll be able to point to later when he tries to figure out what set the whole thing in motion.
Her fingernails bite into the skin of his back. "Oh, god," she sort of whimpers, and then she's tugging his shirt up over his head, pushing him away so she can get rid of her own.
Finn's seen Santana topless before, but he still has to take another second to look at her. She's breathing hard, and though her breath catches a little when he brings his hand to her breast. Her nipple is already hard against his palm, and she arches into his touch when he trails his fingertip over the peak. She pushes her hand into the back of his hair when he lowers his head to kiss along her chest, moving his lips over the swell of her breast until her fingers tighten and he can tell that she's really impatient for him to give her more. She cries out softly when he closes his lips over her nipple, her back arching again when he sucks before scraping his teeth gently over her skin.
Everything goes kind of fuzzy when Santana starts unbuckling his belt, deliberately brushing her hand over his cock through the fabric as she works.
They've had sex before, sure, but this time is completely different. He isn't half-afraid of her any more, and this time, he really wants to be with her instead of doing it to prove a point to someone else. She comes when he's inside her this time, which she didn't do that first time (though she'd guided his hand between her thighs then and he'd touched her till she let go), her neck arching back and his name falling from her lips as she tightens around him, pulling him over the edge with her.
She takes a sip from the bottle of water on her bedside table after, handing it to him once she's finished. Finn's waiting for the comment, for her to reference the last time and compare him to virgin him, but it never comes. Instead, she kisses him gently before telling him to get dressed again in case her parents come home early, and she disappears to the kitchen only to reappear five minutes later with a giant bowl of popcorn and two Dr. Peppers, telling him to start the next episode.
Rachel asks him if he had a good weekend when she gets back to school on Tuesday morning. He tells her that he did. She doesn't ask for details, and he doesn't volunteer any, happy instead to listen to her tell him all about the musical she saw and how amazing it's going to be to live in the dorms at NYU when she gets there.
"Dude, what's going on with you and Santana?" Puck asks one day when they're sitting in Spanish.
Finn blinks once. "Nothing?" He and Santana are both really careful to act like they really are just friends when they're at school or around Kurt at his house, saving the more-than-friendly stuff for when they're alone, so Finn doesn't understand what Puck's talking about.
"Don't bullshit me," Puck insists. "Something's going on, and as my bro, you're like, required to tell me what's up."
Finn puts on what he hopes is a good what the fuck face. "We're friends, man. Everyone knows that."
"Santana doesn't look at her friends like that, dude." Puck rolls his eyes. "Finn. Come on."
"Do you really think I would cheat on Rachel?" Finn asks seriously. Talking like this would probably make him feel like shit if he actually was cheating on Rachel, but that's not what's going on with Santana at all. "And with Santana of all people?"
"You'd be a fucking moron if you did," Puck says with something like agreement in his voice. "That girl..." He trails off, shaking his head. "Look, Santana stopped fucking around with me a while ago, and you're like, the only dude I see her hanging out with, and the only chick she hangs out with is Quinn, so I know she's not hitting that." Finn bites back a snicker. "The way she looks at you though. Those aren't Santana's 'we're just friends' eyes," he says seriously.
"Puck," Finn says seriously, leaning toward his friend. "I am not cheating on Rachel with Santana."
Puck holds up his hands in surrender. "If you say so, dude."
Rachel looks thoughtful when he mentions the conversation later at her house.
"I don't think either of you have been acting any differently than you were before, but Puck has known both of you longer, and he certainly knows a different side of Santana than I do," she concedes. "Maybe he sees something that none of us realize is there."
"I'm not cheating on you though." It feels really important to point that out right now, even though he knows that she knows.
She gets up from her desk and comes over to where he's sitting on her bed, pulling the skirt of her dress up a little so she can straddle his lap. "I know that," she murmurs reassuringly just before she kisses him. She brushes the tips of her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck in the way that almost always gives him goosebumps because it feels so fucking good.
"I love you," he murmurs when she drops her lips to the side of his neck.
She pulls away to look at him, biting the corner of her lip. Her eyes are all dark and just a little shiny, and he feels the familiar twist low in his stomach. "I love you, too."
She says it again just before she lowers herself over him, and he really isn't sure which time he likes better.
The first time the problem comes up, Finn thinks he probably should have seen it coming.
He's sitting between Rachel and Santana at lunch, which isn't nearly as weird as he'd expected it to be the first time it happened. He'd always worried that Santana would be the one who got tired of pretending like they were just friends (as opposed to friends who have sex) at school, but she never does or even says anything at school that would make anyone think anything weird is going on.
"I got the rest of season two from Netflix yesterday," Santana says after Finn finishes talking to Mike about their assignment in government. "You wanna come over tonight and watch with me?"
Finn has watched exactly four episodes of Las Vegas in their entirety, even though they've gone through a season and a half. Generally they make it through half an episode before one of them has to kiss the other, which always leads to more than kissing. (Finn is really, really grateful that Santana's parents don't seem to care about what goes on in her room. He feels a little guilty too, because he knows now that Santana told them that he has a girlfriend, so they don't have any reason to think he and Santana are doing anything inappropriate in her room in the first place. Their lax rules mean that he actually has more opportunities to have sex with Santana than he does with Rachel, which is another of those things that he should probably feel more guilty about than he already does.)
"Rachel and I are going to see that new movie with Olivia Wilde," he tells her. It kind of sucks because as much as he likes spending time with Rachel, his only interest in this movie is the fact that Olivia Wilde is hot. Otherwise, yeah. He'd totally rather 'watch Las Vegas' with Santana.
"Okay," she says neutrally. "Whenever. Olivia Wilde is really fucking hot, though."
"You're welcome to join us," Rachel pipes up, startling Finn. He hadn't realized that she was listening to him and Santana.
Finn knows that this isn't too weird to anyone who might be listening, because the three of them have had this peaceful thing going on for a while, but that doesn't mean that they all three hang out together outside of school. That prospect, actually, really freaks him out, because as much as Rachel acts pretty much the same outside of school with him (she's a little more affectionate, sure, and they have sex, but the way they talk to each other is the same), Santana acts really, really different. She can't act the same way at school as she does when it's just the two of them. The idea of being alone somewhere with both of them? Not okay.
"No, thanks," Santana answers simply. Finn feels the relief wash all through him even as Santana agrees to play paper football with Puck and Rachel asks Finn some question about Regionals wardrobe.
The problem though, becomes really clear when he's getting in the car to pick Rachel up later that night. When he thinks about where he's going and how he's going to be spending his night, he finds himself wishing that he was going to hang out with Santana instead of going to a movie with Rachel. You know, his girlfriend who he's in love with.
It distracts him all night, and he's actually relieved when Rachel tells him that she'd rather go home than park somewhere because she has a tickle in her throat that she doesn't want to become a full-blown cold this close to Regionals. (The way she says it does make him smile though, like she wouldn't still freak out about having a cold even if they were months away from a competition. He knows her, so he knows better.)
He drives around for just a little while after he's dropped Rachel off, listening to whatever comes on the radio and thinking, and by the time he gets home, he's decided that he's making too much of things. Wanting to hang out with Santana when he already has plans with Rachel doesn't mean anything other than that sex sounds like more fun than watching a movie with a hot girl. He's pretty sure if the situation had been reversed, he'd feel exactly the same.
Winning at Regionals is kind of anti-climactic after the drama of the last two years, first losing to Jesse St. James and Vocal Adrenaline and then going up against Kurt and Blaine and The Warblers. Aural Intensity is still trying to cheat, but it doesn't matter, because New Directions is just better than they're ever going to be. Finn doesn't even catch the name of the other choir (he assumes it's just as stupid and/or borderline inappropriate as every other show choir name), but they're even worse than Aural Intensity, and New Directions wins easily.
Rachel sits with Mr. Schue on the bus ride back to Lima, insisting on seeing the scoring pages from the judges so she can start making plans for the things they need to work on. The guy has apparently decided to stop fighting Rachel on this kind of stuff, because he just hands the pages over and talks about possible solutions to the few problems the judges have pointed out.
(Finn figures that means more booty camp crap, and whatever. It really did help with his dancing, and after this year, he's never going to get the opportunity to do anything like this again. Now isn't the time to start bitching about people pointing out what a terrible dancer he is.)
They're barely out on the highway when Santana comes and flops down in the seat beside Finn's. "You know," she says, "I like Rachel now, but listening to her argue with Schue over the best way to start preparing for Nationals now that we know about how weak we are dancing as a group is still really fucking annoying."
Finn just smiles, because even though he understands why most people are annoyed by Rachel, he really doesn't feel the same way.
"You guys are coming to my place, right?"
They all signed 'we won't drink' pledges for Mr. Schue at the beginning of the year like the ones they had last year, but Santana sent a mass text to everyone about a party at her place as soon as they'd gotten back to their dressing room after the results were announced. She's insisting that it's a one-time thing, and even Rachel agrees that it's a good idea to take advantage of a chance to blow off some steam, so they're all going.
"As far as I know, everybody's coming."
Santana lets out a little hum and slouches down a little, lifting her feet off the floor to press her shins against the back of the seat in front of her and crossing her arms over her chest. The seat is small enough that they're pressed together, side-to-side. "You know, I really do like winning," she muses, grinning up at him when he chuckles.
They fall asleep together like that, lulled by the motion of the bus and the quiet hum of their teammates talking.
The first thing he sees when he wakes up is Rachel, leaning over the back of the seat in front of him, smiling and saying Santana's name quietly. "We're home," she says when she realizes that Finn is awake. She nods towards Santana. "Help me wake her?"
He nudges Santana's arm gently with his elbow, rubbing his other hand over his face in an effort to rub away some of the sleepiness. "San," he mutters, nudging her again. She glares at him the second her eyes open, which just makes him grin. It figures that she'd hate being woken up. "We're home."
Her expression softens a little and she takes a deep breath before putting her legs down and uncrossing her arms. She doesn't say anything before she gets up, going to get her stuff, Finn figures.
Rachel is looking at him oddly when he looks back up at her. "I'll have to stop at home," she says after a moment, "but I agreed to get ready for Santana's party with Kurt and Blaine at your house."
"Okay," he agrees, easing himself out of the cramped seat and stretching his arms over his head before grabbing his bag from the opposite sit and following Rachel off the bus.
(Everyone sleeps at Santana's that night so they don't have to worry about designated drivers, and if either Rachel or Santana thinks it's weird that he sleeps in a guest room with Rachel while Quinn crashes with Santana in hers, neither of them says anything about it to him.
Finn does think it's a little weird, though he can't exactly put his finger on why.)
When Finn answers his phone and hears Santana's tearful voice asking him if he can pick her up during spring break, it's like a flashback to all those months ago when all of the stuff between them really got started. It's raining, just like it was then, but it's just a little after nine o'clock on Tuesday night, so he figures that this isn't about her being drunk.
"Where are you?" he asks, grabbing for a hoodie before heading out of his room.
"The hospital."
Finn freezes in the hallway outside his room. "What?"
She lets out a shaky breath. "My mom and I were in an accident. I'm fine, and she's going to be fine, but they want to keep her overnight because she hit her head and the airbag bruised her ribs. My dad can't take me because he was on call, and he's still dealing with the asshole who was in the other car."
Fuck. "I'll be there in like, ten minutes, okay?"
He stops in the living room to tell his mom and Burt what's going on. "Oh, honey," Mom says after he finishes. "Let her know we're thinking of her."
He nods. "I'm going to stay with her till her dad gets home, okay?"
"Sure. Call us and let us know how she's doing, okay?"
Santana's sitting in a chair behind the reception desk when Finn walks into the emergency room, her eyes red-rimmed and hair messy and a little damp. She stands when she sees him, coming around from behind the desk to wrap her arms around him. "Are you really okay?" he asks, rubbing his hand up and down her back.
She pulls away, nodding and sniffling a little. "I'm fine. Let's go."
"Don't you need to tell your dad you're going?"
She shakes her head. "He just came to tell me that he's sewing up the forehead of the dumbass who slid though the stoplight and hit us, so he'll be busy for like, an hour. We can just leave."
He's trying not to act like he's hovering over her or whatever, but he can't help noticing the way that she winces when she pulls the seatbelt across her body in the truck and how she's shaking like a leaf when he stops at the stoplight at the end of the street. He doesn't say anything, but he does reach over and turn the heat up to full blast even though it isn't actually that cold outside. Santana shoots him a look. "I think it's adrenaline. The shaking," she says when he raises his eyebrows. "I'm not cold."
He shrugs. "I am." Unless she straight up tells him to turn it down, he's going to leave it going.
She looks at him knowingly, but she doesn't say anything else.
They have to go through the gate and around the back of the house so Santana can let them in through the back door with a spare key that she pulls down from the top of a window frame because she doesn't have her own , and they leave their wet shoes sitting just inside the glass doors that lead out onto the back patio.
"You don't have to stay, Finn," she tells him when he's following her up the stairs to her room.
He believes her when she says that she doesn't have any real injuries - he doesn't think Dr. Lopez would have let her leave the hospital if she did - but he can tell by the way that she's moving that she's sore. He waits until they're in her room to say, "I'm not going anywhere, San."
She pushes the dresser drawer she was digging through shut and sighs. "Fine. I'm going to shower off the hospital smell."
Finn waits until he hears the water running in the bathroom before heading downstairs to the kitchen. He doesn't know if she's eaten dinner (he's figuring she hasn't), but putting something in her stomach now can't hurt. He calls his mom to catch her up while he toasts a slice of the whole grain bread that he finds and spreads it with some of the Nutella he finds in the pantry, then grabs a bottle of water and carries them both upstairs.
Santana rolls her eyes when he walks into her room. She's sitting in the middle of her bed in one of Puck's old McKinley football tee shirts (Finn can see the number twenty scrawled on the left sleeve in permanent marker, something they all did at football camp every year) and a pair of plaid pajama pants. Her hair is in a messy ponytail, and she's rubbing lotion onto her arms, eying the toast in his hand with disdain. "I'm not eating that."
"Have you eaten anything?" Finn asks evenly. She glares, but he ignores the look and sets the toast on its napkin beside her. "C'mon, San."
She sighs, but she doesn't bother rolling her eyes before she picks up the toast and takes a little bite off the corner.
Finn gets onto the bed beside her when she grabs the remote for her TV and starts flipping through channels, settling pretty quickly on a show that's a girl talking with a bunch of gay dudes about sex and stuff. A few years ago Finn probably would have thought it was weird, but he's worked past most of the weird thanks to Kurt and Blaine (and Santana, a little) so that now it's mostly just interesting.
Santana works through the toast really slowly, and they've watched almost an entire episode of this show before she finishes it. "You can go if you need to," she says softly, taking the bottle of water when he holds it out. "I'll be fine until my dad gets home."
"Santana." She really doesn't seem to get it. "I'm not going anywhere."
She makes fun of him when he gets under the covers with her in his jeans, just taking off his belt, but there's no way that he's going to be in bed with Santana in his boxers when her dad comes home.
"Thank you," she whispers after she's turned out the light.
Finn doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to thank him. Instead, he moves closer to her under the covers, pressing his chest against her back because she's shivering again, his hand coming to rest on the outside of her thigh over her pajama pants. She's told him more than once that she's not a cuddler, so he expects her to tell him to quit crowding, but instead she lets out a breath and moves her head a little on the pillow.
The first time Finn thinks about having Rachel and Santana together, it's in a dream, so it's not even like it's the sort of thing that he can control.
He's had dreams about both of them before, of course. It happens. But he's never had a dream when they were both there at the same time.
(Once he had a dream where Santana turned into Rachel, which was kind of weird, but he can't control that either, so he didn't worry too much about it.)
The details start to go fuzzy as soon as he wakes up, but he remembers seeing them kiss each other, and then Santana was kissing his lips while Rachel was wrapping hers around his dick, and at one point he was definitely fucking Santana, though he's not sure how he got there.
He's late to first hour that morning because he'd said fuck it and jerked off in the shower instead of just standing under an icy spray. Honestly though, when a dude has a threesome dream, getting a tardy is totally worth it.
