Chapter 4: Maybe You Could Take Me In
"Santana, I'd been meaning to ask you," said Adam suddenly, "how did it go with Aziza the other night? She's bartended a few of our cast parties by now, great girl from what I can tell."
Rachel turned back from her position on Kurt's other arm to glance at Santana, who was sitting on a bench in the Marriott's open-air foyer with Blaine, taking in the salty sea spray and the soft strains of island music floating through the hall.
"Oh, she's great," said Santana with a grin, "definitely good with her hands, and I'm not just talking about mixing a mean drink."
Kurt rolled his eyes to the blue sky visible through the rafters of the building, while Adam persisted, "So you're still seeing her then?"
"Calm yourself, Aarons, one night's romp and you're already planning the wedding?"
"I'm just saying, first-date sex can still be a valid precursor to an extremely fulfilling relationship," Adam continued earnestly. ("Oh my god," Kurt mumbled into Rachel's shoulder, sounding torn between amusement and horror; she ruffled his hair affectionately, giving Blaine a nearly imperceptible wink over the top of his head). "I'm certainly not suggesting you should ever feel compelled to settle down, but you'd be surprised at how quickly you'll find yourself ready for a deeper commitment when you meet the right person –"
"Ah, and here I was thinking you had my nuptials in mind," Santana smirked, looking thoroughly entertained.
"Adam, that's enough, honey," Kurt interjected, quickly cutting off the exchange, "let's save that conversation for another day – or, you know, another year – ah, hello, we'd like to check in and pick up our room keys, reservations for two double rooms and a single room under the name Hummel?"
"Here you are," the woman behind the counter smiled at him, "all of the rooms have views of the ocean."
"Magnificent."
"Okay," said Adam, "we'll take these two for our room, babe, so that leaves the other double and the single –"
He and Kurt stared at each other in a ten-second wordless exchange; then they both grinned, and Adam tipped all of the remaining keys into Rachel's hand. "All yours, darling, you sort out the rest of the rooms."
"I'm not deciding this," she hissed, but Kurt patted her on the back and Adam pushed her toward Blaine and Santana. She could hear them giggling softly as they ascended the staircase behind her.
Santana and Blaine were still laughing together on the bench when she reached them, plan in mind. "I don't like to be alone in an unfamiliar place," she said coyly, pressing all the keys but one into Santana's palm, "so I'd like to take the double room, unless you two were set on rooming together."
"Little fatigued after all but living with this one for half of college," Blaine said with a wink, "we'll manage apart, somehow."
"Well then," she said archly, "I'll let you two argue over which one will have the good fortune to cuddle with me on a nightly basis."
"Oh, we will," said Santana, a mischievous tone creeping into her voice. "Hurry along now, Berry, leave this up to us."
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The ocean view was breath-taking. The double bed was nestled right in the window, forming a little alcove, and her first thought was that she'd like to lie there forever on her stomach with her chin in her hands, iPod spinning a playlist of songs whose unifying theme was a sense of peace with the world.
Before she could get started, though, there was a soft knock on the door. She opened it a crack to see Blaine standing there in his Converse shoes and dark wash jeans.
"Hi."
"Hi," she replied, failing to hide a little smile.
He held out his matching key. "Santana and I have mutually agreed that she has more game than I do, by which we mean she's at least two and a half times more likely to sexile a potential roommate than I am. Hence her command of the single room."
"Hmm, I can believe that," she teased, "from what I've seen of Santana's bathing suit selections."
"Leaving aside your implication about my desirability in a bathing suit – which my awesome plaid board shorts and I will put to rest in short order – I'd have to concur."
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Rachel stretched out in her beach chair, smoothing out the soft fabric of the white one-piece bandeau she'd picked out at Nordstrom. She was just adjusting the towel she was lying on to prevent the wooden slats from marking her back when she heard Santana's phone ring twice in the chair next to hers.
"Santana Lopez," the girl responded, brow furrowing. "Neil Advani, did you not get the memo that I'm in – Cristina Estevez asked for me? No, no, I'll take it, you buffoon, patch her through –"
"She accepted a work call within the first six hours of landing here, hand it over, you," Blaine laughed, elbowing Kurt in the side where he was curled up with Adam in the next chair over; his ex-boyfriend glared as he surrendered a ten-dollar bill. Rachel smiled a little, but looked thoughtfully at Santana, watching as her friend stretched long, tanned legs further out into the sun's reach, now conversing animatedly in an erratic mix of English and Spanish. Santana had quietly mentioned Cristina's name to her a few times; the girl was barely sixteen years old and her youngest obstetrics patient at the hospital. While she never said much, Rachel believed that Cristina trusted Santana most of all the residents in the same practice, and that Santana had taken it upon herself to be a source of emotional support for the young girl who had chosen to carry her baby to term. She had confided this speculation to Quinn once, when Quinn had visited New York for a real estate conference a few months ago and surprised her by asking if she might stop by Rachel's apartment to catch up.
"Maybe it's a little self-centered of me," Quinn had said with a wry smile, spearing a layer of the vegan lasagna Rachel had hastily unfrozen for dinner with a fork, "but I wouldn't be surprised if she felt obligated to take a girl like that under her wing, just to make sure she won't be as screwed up as I was."
"I – can see where you're coming from," she had replied earnestly, not knowing quite what else to say – "but we girls were all a little messed up in high school, in our own ways – weren't we? Well – except Tina. Definitely except Tina. And possibly Mercedes –"
"You were the least messed up of all of us."
"Quinn, my best friend swears to this day that I was borderline sociopathic in high school."
"Tina and Mercedes didn't have much of a reason to be messed up in the first place," said Quinn with a half-amused, half-sad little laugh, "but Santana and I could have really screwed you up, would have, really, if you'd been anyone else but you."
It was moments like those – Quinn sitting at her kitchen table staring into her bowl of pasta; Kurt quietly admitting to her, halfway through college, that Quinn had sobbed into his phone for two straight nights freshman year when her roommate at Ohio Wesleyan went missing after two days of classes and she found the word 'manhands' scrawled in the girl's old high school yearbook; Santana lying on a Kauai beach in a supermodel-style, royal purple bikini, complete with push-up halter top and barely-there side-tie bottoms, and letting a pregnant teenage girl pour her heart out to her over the line – that reminded her why she couldn't bring herself to hold grudges if she tried.
Starting to feel a little warm from the sun's rays, she scooted off the beach chair – pulling off the towel underneath her and slipping her feet into sandals – and came face to face with Blaine.
"Hey," he said quietly, looking carefully into her face. He rarely gave her the sweeping once-over when they were in public, clearly out of a sense of decency, but his body in those plaid board shorts he was wearing was making her fight to reciprocate. "I'm venturing out to the water, want to come?"
She didn't really feel like getting wet. "I'm going back inside for a bit, but here – take my towel, you can return it to the room once you're done with it." She draped it lightly over his shoulders and knelt to the sand to pull her cover-up out of her beach bag; she felt his hand graze her upper arm and elbow before he turned out to the edge of the beach.
An hour later, she had him pressed up against the inside door of their room, towel and cover-up lying abandoned on the floor.
"Was trying to be a gentleman," he said in a low voice, breathing hard and uneven as she pressed kisses to his throat and chest, hands wandering along the length of his torso, "…rather than jumping you in that little bathing suit, but you…seem to have had other plans."
"I shouldn't," she admitted, "it's not even five-o'-clock, we're going to break the no-sex-before-eight-PM rule–"
"Screw the rule."
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"Doesn't this place close in fifteen minutes?" Blaine observed, watching Santana push open the door of Trees Lounge.
"Yeah, well if some of us hadn't been engaging in a little afternoon delight we might have made dinner on time, which means that our little stroll through Coconut Marketplace would have started a lot earlier, which means that we could have made it here much earlier than one in the morning."
"Slippery slope," he said lightly, trying to meet Rachel's eye behind Santana's back, but instead catching the gaze of Santana's companion of the moment, a Paris native-turned-local airline stewardess she'd met on the beach. The young woman smiled at him, looking a little bemused. She was sweet but didn't possess any of the sass Santana usually liked in a sexual partner, and Blaine privately suspected that Santana had picked her up partly because her name happened to be Adele.
"Look, they have karaoke tonight!" Rachel had materialized on his other side, and was pointing to a little stage in the corner, where someone was replacing a microphone. Instead of island music, he could hear the last few strains of a Bon Jovi song, and the soft applause of patrons sitting close to the stage.
"That's right," said a bartender next to her, turning to them with a friendly smile. "Normally we've got a nice line-up of local bands, but it's open mic tonight, and we've got a DJ and dancing tomorrow. Either of you care to put your name in? We've just run through the list and we've still got a few minutes before we close up."
"He'll do it," she said at once, attempting to push him to the stage.
"Are you kidding? Rachel Berry is passing up an opportunity to take solo stage?" He looked around to exchange an incredulous look with Santana, but she had gravitated over to the other end of the bar and was already locking lips with Adele, with no apparent hope of surfacing soon.
"Well, I find that taking the Palace Theatre stage six days a week tends to satisfy my performer's instinct," she responded, blithely. "Oh, go on," she laughed, giving him another playful push when he continued to resist. "I haven't seen you perform in years. There was a time you craved the spotlight nearly as much as I did. It almost makes me wonder if you still have it in you, Blaine Warbler."
Well, he was certainly going to take that challenge. "I'll do it. Care to accompany me, in the spirit of proving I can keep up with Broadway's finest?"
"Oh, I'd rather watch, but feel free to serenade me if you have the urge," came the flirtatious reply.
"You're on," he said, winking at her and heading over to seize the microphone, to a light smattering of cheerful applause.
She's blood, flesh and bone
No tucks or silicone
She's touch, smell, sight, taste and sound
He watched her closely in the audience; her eyes were fixed on him, eyebrows slightly raised the way they always used to be back in Glee, before she let herself get caught up in another person's song.
Somehow I can't believe
That anything should happen
Her lips were twitching already, eyes starting to shine a little, and he knew he was about to deliver.
'Cause she's so high...
High above me, she's so lovely
She's so high...
Like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite
Emboldened by the whoops in the audience, he detached the microphone from its stand and descended the stage, directing his words right at Rachel.
First class and fancy free
She's high society
Santana had surfaced from her make-out session, and was now surveying them with a grin on her face.
What could a guy like me
Ever really offer?
Rachel was smiling widely now, swaying her head in time to the music as she mouthed along to the words.
Like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite
She's so high...
High above me
He finished to loud cheers from the audience. Grinning, he handed over the microphone to a staff member, and turned to find Rachel close at his shoulder.
"I must admit you channel Tal Bachman quite nicely," she conceded in a low voice, as if the way her eyes had danced at him throughout the performance hadn't been enough to reveal her enthusiasm. "But I have to ask – was that a serenade or reverse psychology?"
"Whichever one works on you," he said with a grin, and she gave him a light slap on the arm.
"Not a bad show, Anderson," Santana pronounced as she made her way over to them, pulling Adele along with her by the hand, "glad to see you've still got it, although I have to give props to Rachel here for making you sing for your supper. All in favor of livening things up here tomorrow night? DJ and dancing here starting at ten. We'll drag the lovebirds too."
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"So – really, what's the dude like?"
"Nice," he repeated, shifting one of the water bottles he was holding to the other arm so he could adjust his headset and tuck the phone attached to it more securely into his shorts pocket. "If I could think of a more descriptive word I'd have used it by now. Kurt said it unsettled him at first. He's been bracing himself for a blow-up for a year and a half and it never came."
"Well, good for him," he heard Mike Chang laugh through the headset. "They seemed pretty wrapped up in each other in that red carpet interview clip Quinn emailed around."
"This is seriously coming from the guy voted 'Most Likely to Make Out with His Girlfriend in an Inappropriate Setting' in our Glee Superlatives contest? That category was created for Finn and you still won."
"Shut up, Anderson."
He grinned, digging his feet further into the sand as he scanned the edge of the sea. He thought he could just make out a tiny pink-clad figure making its way up the beach. "So how's the co-founder of Dayton's finest up-and-coming dance studio doing?"
"I just said I'm fine," said Mike evasively.
"I was referring to your business partner." He silently counted to ten, rocking back and forth on his heels.
"She's great," said Mike, finally. "Beautiful. Same as usual. How's Santana?"
Blaine rolled his eyes at the brightening sky. It was far too early for Mike's avoidance tactics; unfortunately, he was still jet-lagged. "Same as usual," he echoed, "top of her game. I'm pretty sure she had a ménage à trois with a French-speaking Hawaiian Airlines stewardess and what might have been a traditional hula dancer last night."
"That sounds like someone who's completely over her old high school flame," he heard Mike mutter, not quite disguising the hopeful tinge of his voice.
"Nah-uh. You've got to listen to me on this one, Mike. I spent more time in college with her than I did with anyone else and vice versa, and I am telling you, just because she's got the most active sex life of any medical resident with an 80-hour work week you'll ever meet, doesn't mean she's over Brit by any stretch of the imagination. You'd be surprised at what someone can keep bottled up for ten years."
"Santana broke up with Brit. And even if it was the other way around, doesn't mean she couldn't get over it. Tina broke up with me, I got over her. Kurt broke up with you, and you got over him, or at least that's what you tell me anyway."
"Kurt and I grew apart," he said patiently. "Same with you and Tina. Yeah, we both moped about it for a while, but we were just in denial. Santana broke up with Brit because she realized Brit would never really get past the best-friends-who-have-sex phase, never get to where she wanted it to be, and it killed her to do it. She was in love with Brit, and Brit just loved her. She'd never say it, but I'd bet anything that Santana's still cut up about it."
"So what are you saying, I should just not act on my feelings for –"
"No, idiot. You just need to do Santana the courtesy of telling her if something happens between you two. I'm not going to do it for you."
"Fine," Mike groaned. "Why did I even tell you about this?"
"Asian blood bond, or something."
"Probably won't even need to tell her," Mike added glumly. "There won't be anything to tell."
"Hey, you don't know that," he said, in what he hoped vaguely was a soothing voice; the figure he'd been keeping an eye on from afar was now pounding up the sand toward him, coral pink tank top and light gray shorts and bouncing ponytail clearly visible, and he was starting to lose concentration. "Look, I got to go, man – got to get back to, uh, enjoying the view."
Mike snorted. "Hot guy sprinting up the beach at three-o'-clock position?"
"Yeah," he lied. "Talk soon, good luck with Brit."
"Thanks, catch you later. Say hi to Rachel and Kurt and everyone."
"Hi," Rachel said at once when she caught up to him, more breathless than usual for her level of fitness, "my extensive vocal exercises have enabled deep breathing skills that normally prevent stress to my diaphragm while running, but I seem to have developed a bit of a side stitch situation. Running on such an irregular surface is apparently more difficult than I thought."
"C'mere," he said, frowning with concern, and handed her the water bottles. "Here, face this way," he added, turning her to face the waves crashing in the distance and ducking around behind her. He slipped his arms around her from behind and tucked his chin over her shoulder, leaning down to rub his hands gently over the side of her torso. She rolled her eyes at him, but didn't pull away. After a couple of minutes, once her breathing had become slower and more relaxed, he glanced sideways at her, just in time to catch the soft traces of a smile as she gazed out over the water. "Better?"
"Surprisingly, yes. Thank you," she said, disentangling his arms but giving him a grateful little peck on the cheek. She sat down on the closest beach chair, stretching her legs out onto the intersection between grass and sand for a moment.
"I just got off the phone with Mike Chang," he informed her, sitting down on the chair next to her and lifting her legs into his lap before she could protest. He reached into his shoulder bag for a towel and a bottle of lotion, and began dusting sand off her toes.
"Has he admitted to Brittany that he's falling for her yet?" she said at once, her eyes widening, poking him in the side with her newly clean foot in a way that was kind of adorable.
"Not yet," he said. "And don't you intervene, he doesn't know I've told you. Shea butter lotion?"
"Hmm, passable." He could feel her arching her feet, curling her toes unconsciously as he spread the smooth lotion over her soles. He bit his lip, silently watching her eyes flutter closed as he ran his fingers up her ankles, and wondered if she even knew how intoxicating she could be without a hint of makeup or perfume. Perhaps he should tell her.
"Have you told him" – her eyes were still closed, almost tightly now, the way she emoted in song sometimes – "have you told him about the – well, the erotic aspect of our friendship?"
"No – wait, since when are we voluntarily telling people?" he asked her, feeling a little confused when she frowned slightly. "Kurt aside, assuming you would have gone through with it if he hadn't found out on his own, and that's a special case."
"I didn't say we were," she said quickly, eyes blinking open. "I'm simply observing that Mike has confided in you a secret related to his personal life, whereas it seems you haven't reciprocated the gesture."
"Well, it's different, isn't it?" he said, honestly a little bewildered at the comparison. "I mean, if I felt like I was falling in love with you, I'd probably be bursting for advice from my friends on how to handle our friendship. But that's not really the case here."
"Well, of course it isn't, that would be ridiculous and quite out of character for you, I might add."
There was a pause. Then – "I hope you don't think I'm expressing discomfort about having sexual relations with you without the customary accompaniment of deeper romantic feelings or public acknowledgment," she added, drawing her knees up to her chest, away from him. "I'm very happy to continue protecting you with my silence against more narrow-minded people who would make presumptions about your primary sexual identity if they knew about our situation, and I'd rather my personal life stayed out of the more sordid musical theater tabloids anyway. If you heard an edge to my tone, it was probably because I wouldn't like to think that you prefer to keep this secret from most of our friends because you're embarrassed that you find me physically attractive. If you are, I'd admittedly be a little hurt, although I can understand where you would be coming from. After all, I've never been commonly perceived to possess attributes that would tempt even a straight man, let alone a gay one, which one could argue makes your – physiological response to me slightly perplexing."
"Are you kidding?" he said incredulously, pulling her back to him, drawing her close. "Okay, we have only about twenty minutes until we meet the gang for breakfast, so I'm going to have to do the short and probably censored version, but I'm about to give you a high-level view of the top ten reasons Rachel Berry is sexier than any woman you'll find in New York, Ohio, or the Philippines. You ready for this?"
"Only if you give me the long version after we come back from Trees Lounge tonight," she whispered against his ear, giggling softly as he traced his fingers over the couple centimeters of lightly tanned skin between her tank top and her shorts.
"Oh, I definitely will."
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Hope you enjoyed the surprise (audio) cameo by Mike Chang! As you can imagine, his reveal to Blaine plays into Santana's storyline.
As always, would love reviews/feedback.
Next chapter: The gang goes out on the town, with sexual and emotional tension running high for Kurt and Adam, and Rachel and Blaine.