A/N-Again, so sorry for the delay. I still have a house full of sick people but it looks like everyone will make it now.
This keeps going in a way I hadn't planned. It started as a drabble and has morphed. When I keep trying to jump directly to the Puckleberry goodness of it all, I keep circling around to the back story. Since the main plot is that a pregnant Rachel leaves Puck and doesn't tell him about her pregnancy, I've needed to take them to a place where that would seem like a choice that Rachel would make. This is a short chapter but every time I tried to skip it, I keep coming back to it.
"McKinley High, Junior/Senior Winter Formal, Saturday, February 12, 2011. Tickets: $15 dollars or $25 per couple. Come Join Us For A Winter Wonderland!"
I stood there watching as she stared at the poster and knew by the set of her shoulders that she was trying not to cry. Not there, not in a hallway filled with people. Years of having to control her every public reaction had taught her well. We'd been classmates, become enemies, learned to be teammates and wound up on the other end as friends. Still, I knew that it was because of me and the people who used to be my friends that she felt that she couldn't ever really be herself or let her true feelings show here in the McKinley halls. We'd made it too dangerous. Like pack animals smelling wounded prey, we would have pounced. She turned away from the poster, put on what I called her show face smile and noticed me there.
I saw Puck push himself away from the wall and turn in the other direction, heading out to his car and I saw the moment when she realized it too. Her show face smile faltered but only a second and if you didn't know her well, you'd never know something was wrong. We'd taught her very well and if we were friends for the rest of our lives, I knew that a part of me would always feel guilty for that.
I wanted to kill him.
This was supposed to have been a fun afternoon. Me, Rachel, Santana, Tina and Mercedes (and Kurt) spending the afternoon and our parents' money at the mall. A bunch of girlfriends trying on dresses, giggling and goofing around. Fun. I seethed inside.
The plan had sounded great at the time. Since the "intervention" that Rachel had staged in August, things with all of us had evened out nicely. She'd been right when she said that it needed all of us to work. Puck and I were somewhere between civil and friendly. Artie and I had been dating since summer, Finn and Santana were in an "on" phase of their on again/off again, Mike and Tina were good and Mercedes and Kurt, while neither had their own special someone yet, were a fundamental part of our group. Besides, if any of us thought that Kurt would let us go to the "signifying social event of the start of our years as upperclassmen'' being allowed to dress ourselves, good luck with that.
The only crimp in the plan was that Puck hadn't yet asked Rachel to be his date for the Winter Formal. Truthfully, he hadn't actually asked her to be his anything for any occasion and he'd been avoiding her like the plague for the last few weeks.
None of us understood it. They'd spent most of the summer hanging out. They'd had that one week last year where they dated and even after they'd broken up, there was a connection between them that never really died. She'd become his go-to person after Beth. She listened to him. That's what he told me the one time we ever talked about the two of them. He said she looked at him and saw something that no one else saw. People saw Puck or the school badass or the Lima Loser but she saw Noah. And he saw Rachel. Not Manhands or Diva or Crazy Berry. Just Rachel.
I called it dancing. They danced around this…this whatever it was between them. They'd been doing it for months. Maybe it started before the morning at his house but all of us saw it from that point out. Where you found one, you usually found the other. When school started, Puck picked her up every morning and they drove to school together. After school, if he had football she'd wait on the bleachers doing homework. If she had dance class, he'd drive her, come back for practice and go pick her up afterward and take her home. The same routine continued when football ended and basketball started except she would be waiting on the bleachers in the gym instead of outside.
They didn't date. Not each other or other people. It was the first time that any of us could remember that Puck wasn't man-whoring with anything in a skirt. They weren't having a secret affair. Rachel said they'd never even kissed since their one week of dating last year but somehow you couldn't look at them and call them just friends either.
Things went on like this until about 3 weeks ago. Rachel called me on a Sunday night and asked if she could ride with me to school in the morning. I said yes, of course, but without even thinking about it first I asked where Puck was going to be. I honestly didn't think anything of it. I just assumed he was going somewhere besides school in the morning. We'd all gotten so used to the status quo. She got very quiet on the other end of the phone and said she wasn't sure what his plans were but he had asked her if she could manage to get another ride.
After that, he didn't pick her up again. She either rode with me or Kurt or went back to having her one of her fathers drop her at school in the morning. She didn't hang out during practice anymore and Kurt drove her to her dance classes.
They didn't sit together in Glee and while it had started with him avoiding her, it had lately become Rachel avoiding any situation that she didn't absolutely have to engage in where Puck might be.
We all watched the show face smile come back.
I was going to kill him.
