During the following months, my great white horse stopped galloping and slowed to a very depressed walk. Rachel was happy with Daniel. That was the stark and sad truth of it all. She sometimes brought up (jokingly) how I had said I was gay at the mall. I dodged those occasions with all the elegance of Julie Andrews at her best. Rachel would have been proud of me if she'd really known – and it was so strange to keep so much from the girl I was accustomed to telling everything to! But she couldn't know, could she? She wouldn't want to know. I didn't want to make her life complicated like that.

"What's wrong?" Franky asked me one day. I'd gradually accepted him as some kind of friend, albeit one that I should be incredibly wary of. He caught me playing the piano in one of the rooms at the University Theatre. I had been trying to sing quietly, but somehow he'd followed my muffled little voice all the way to where I sat. "You've kind of lost your smile these last few months. It physically hurts to see you this sad."

"I'm not sad," I said defiantly, never mind that I had felt like there was a tsunami behind my eyes all week, including that very moment then and there. "It's just my time of the month. That's all."

"Yeah right." He was leaning against the piano, watching me with those deceptively gentle eyes of his. I had seen the way girls flocked around him, looking for any excuse to play with his hair or get him to strum on his guitar for them. That guitar was in a case slung over his back while we talked. He saw me looking at it, so took it off his shoulders and laid it across the top of the piano. Then he went to sit by my feet. "Tell me," he said. "Tell me what's wrong, Quinn."

"Nothing's wrong," I tried to insist, but he cut me off by reaching for my hands. When he did that, a moment of doubt crossed over my pre-existing judgement of him. Maybe he wasn't that bad, I told myself. Maybe all those girls were fawning over him for a good reason. At the same time, I wondered if I was really actually fully gay to not feel anything when he stared up at me with those sweet blue eyes of his. He was the type of guy I would have fallen for instantly back in high school – the good-looking, popular, slightly dumb…had I really changed that much?

"I'm not an idiot, you know," he was saying. "I know you don't trust me. And hey, I don't blame you. I must have seemed like a creep to begin with, and maybe I still do…but I want you to know that you can tell me anything, Quinn. I'll be your punching-bag when you need one. I know what it's like to have so much to say, but have nobody there to hear any of it. It sucks. And I don't want you to feel like that's the only option open to you."

"Well, what other option is there?" I demanded petulantly, glowering at him. "You wouldn't understand."

"Won't I?" Franky challenged. "Let me guess. It's a girl."

My head snapped up and I stared at him, right in those eyes that had laid many a silly damsel across her bedroom floor, weeping. There was actual, genuine, frustrated pain in his eyes as he stared right back at me; a pain that I felt for someone else. Someone dear and near and who you all know very well – someone who wasn't him. Just seeing that pain in his eyes told me that he would understand. He would understand very well.

"How did you know?" I asked quietly, not even having the energy to retract my hands from his grip. To his credit, he managed to smile without looking too bitter.

"You must think it's not very obvious, but when you're with her, you never look at anything else. Never even seem to think of anything other than her."

"I…don't think I do."

"That's the kind of love you read about, but never think you'll actually feel, right? But when you look into her eyes – when you really look – all she does is…see right through you." He accompanied the last sentence with a gesture, releasing one of my hands to illustrate a breeze sweeping over his head. I lowered my eyes, trying to keep that tsunami back, but as the seconds trickled by, it was becoming harder and harder to do.

"So what is there to do?" I asked hoarsely. "If it's all so hopeless?"

"I never said it was hopeless, did I? Hey." He cupped my face gently, forcing me to look at him. "In the end…you've just gotta keep trying. A love like that, man…you don't let it go just for nothing. You don't do that."

The tears had begun to spill down my cheeks, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. A shield seemed to have dropped over his eyes when he looked up at me again. The pain was gone. They had turned strangely blank, strangely defensive and just…strange. They reminded me why I felt so uncomfortable around him, when he had been so genuine only a few moments before.

"When I came in here, you were singing," he said, standing up. I already knew what he was about to say when he reached for his guitar. "Would you do me the honour, Quinn Fabray, of singing with me?"

I just smiled at him, expecting him to start playing a song I didn't even know. I could hardly sing along then, could I? But to my surprise, the moment his fingers hit the guitar, I recognised the tune. It was If Only, by Fiction Plane. One of my favourite songs, and one of the songs that broke my heart the most in all the world. I started singing, determined to impress but also keen to unleash all the bottled-up pain and misery inside of me. Franky had lied – he didn't sing with me. He simply watched as I let my soul dance alongside his guitar strings, and in that moment, no matter what he would do in the future, we connected.

"…if only, if only," I finished, my voice trailing off alongside Franky's guitar. Our eyes met, and I knew that he hadn't chosen that song just for me. He'd chosen it for himself as well. Wordlessly, I slipped off of the piano stool and stood on tip-toes to kiss him on the cheek.

"Thank you," I whispered. Then I brushed past him, thinking it best to leave him as he was, because I knew I could never reciprocate those feelings he so obviously had for me. Not so long as Rachel Berry lived and breathed in this world. I glanced back once but he hadn't really moved. He still stood with his back to me, leaning slightly on the piano, head bowed.

And he embodied everything I had ever felt in my life.