A/N: So… sorry for the delay in updates. I've been sidetracked. That does not mean I'm done. And this is still my story with the most hits/reviews/alerts/favorites so I will keep returning to it. I have bunches of ideas and just not quite enough time to get them all down on paper. This one is a little shorter, about half the length of the others—and no smut. Sorry guys. Next time, I promise. All is explained within, though.

Lizzie (Paceismyhero), this is one hundred percent your fault. I hope it lives up to your vision and entertains you. TjCrowfoot- thank you for the Skype handholding and the betaing and the awesomeness. I can't tell you how much I enjoy our chatting.

Disclaimer: See the other many of these I have typed.

Get It Outta the House

"I'm boooooored," Puck said, tossing himself back on Rachel's bed unceremoniously. "Can we please find something to do?"

She looked over at him with a smirk on her face but didn't speak. She'd been forced into having surgery to remove her tonsils as soon as the Nationals competition was over. The fact that they had come in third had only served to up the drama leading up to her surgery, but with the ensuing mandatory silent period she had actually calmed considerably.

He had never, ever stopped to think about just how unnerving it could be when she was actually quiet. It had left him with too much time to think. The last seven days had been long and boring. She was shuffling through audition videos she had filmed prior to her surgery, trying to decide what to attach to college applications.

"Are you hungry?" He asked. This earned a shake of the head. She had barely eaten enough to keep anything alive and he was totally bugged by it but when he'd said something about it all he'd earned was a fucking scowl. "C'mon. You need to eat something."

"I had applesauce for breakfast," she rasped out. Her voice was progressing and was just above a whisper, but her face still kind of twisted a little bit if she tried to talk any louder. She kept pointing to the spot in the packet her doctor had given her that said she would start to feel better after a week to ten days, and then using her fingers to point out it was day seven and he should just back off because she was in the home stretch. Backing off was not one of his strengths, though, and he forged ahead even as she scowled this time.

"That's not breakfast," he protested. "That's barely a snack for, like, five year olds. Even Becca won't eat that crap unless there's something else with it." He shook his head. "All right, find some shoes. I have a plan."

"I'm busy," she protested. No matter how fired up the look on her face was, the lack of punch in the words didn't convince him and he chuckled.

"You're not too busy for me," he said sharply. He hoisted himself up off her bed and moved to her closet as he tossed the next words out over his shoulder. "Besides, if you don't get me out of the house right now, bad things are going to happen." He emerged with her favorite flip-flops and tossed them at her feet. She scowled as he smirked. "You guys have a fire extinguisher?"

She rolled her eyes as she wiggled her toes and moved her feet into the sandals. "Noah…" she sighed as she stood up.

"You still sound like crap, B. Are you sure you're feeling okay?" His voice dropped to a more tender tone as he pulled her next to him and brushed her bangs out of the way so he could kiss her forehead.

"I feel fine. My throat just hurts," she said, her voice giving out and dropping down to a whisper. He didn't miss the way she'd leaned into the embrace and he really didn't miss the way she was clinging to his shirt. But by God, her dads were home and they were sticklers for the open door rule. They had been home more than normal following her surgery, never allowing Noah to have an 'alone' shift making sure she was cared for. It was almost cute how they hovered, but he could tell she was getting tired of it.

"Just wish we'd had more fun getting it there."

Her face didn't agree.

He released her and they went downstairs, walking quickly. Once they rounded the bottom of the stairs to go through the kitchen and out the door, they were met with two blinking glances of surprise. "I'm making her eat something. We'll be back in a while," Noah said. He didn't stop as he offered the words and he was still latched onto her hand and kept them moving quickly. She had barely enough time to shrug at her dads as he pulled her out the door.

Once they were settled with some smoothies on a blanket at the park, he tossed a notepad her way. He knew it would be a surprise that he kept the legal pad and pen in his car, but…he was just full of weird shit like that. Besides, it had been his invoicing system for the pool business and he just hadn't moved it.

"We're gonna play a little game," he said as she looked at him with questions in her eyes. She raised the Styrofoam cup up to her mouth and wrapped her lips around the straw. He had to actually look away before he continued. "You ever heard of Fuck/Marry/Kill?"

She shook her head without removing the straw from her mouth. He could tell by her shoulders that the cold from the drink was making her feel way better and he thought maybe she would doze off if they relaxed long enough. The three humidifiers in her room had helped but he knew by the texts received at random times of the night that she still wasn't sleeping great.

"All right, well, what we do is I give you three names. And you tell me,out of those three, who you would fuck, who you would marry, and who you would kill."

He could see the retort building up when her eyes narrowed and he knew proposing this game while she couldn't talk had been in his best interest. Really, he liked it as a drinking game because it could be so randomly hilarious, and was always so easy to tell girls he would marry them because then he would get to fuck them, but whatever—he didn't roll like that anymore.

"So first one…" he leaned back on his hands, knowing the way his triceps hardened when he did that was like eye candy for her, and closed his eyes a bit as he thought about it. He chuckled. "All right, I got it. Schue, Sandy Ryerson, or Principal Figgins."

Her eyes widened in total horror and she finally put the cup down. She shook her head slowly and then the look on her face asked him if she really had to answer. He tilted his head and choked back his laughter. "I'll make it worth your while. Later, like when you feel better and we're doing that again."

She rolled her eyes and picked up the pen and paper. She leaned forward as she scribbled something on it, letting her hair slide forward to provide some privacy. She tossed the pad back over to him and he picked it up, kind of curious what her answer would be. Honestly, he hadn't given her many choices and it had been on purpose. The purpose being his entertainment.

His jaw dropped in horror when he saw what she had written. F- (he knew she would never write the word out)- SR. M-PF. K-MS.

He looked back up to her and saw her watching him with a neutral expression. So that's how this was going to go, eh? Interesting. He snorted and shook his head. He wasn't sure anyone could actually fuck Sandy Ryerson because he was so tightly wound that.. just… nevermind. He visibly shuddered and her carefully cultivated expression turned into a smile.

"I'm telling Schue about this," was the only retort he could offer. She shook her head and reached out for the notepad back. This was going to be interesting. She took her time, alternating between sipping and scribbling for a few minutes before she tossed the notepad back.

And ruined his fucking life.

Kurt Hummel; Jacob Ben-Israel; Finn Hudson

She was the first one to bring Finn into it. He was kind of surprised. Things were still awkward, even after nine months of he and Rachel being together and Rachel fighting every step of the way to maintain her friendship with Finn. Finn didn't understand what Puck and Rachel were doing together (fuck, not that Puck understood it half the time either, but he was actually pretty happy with the way things were going so far) and Rachel didn't understand why Finn and Puck couldn't just go back to being friends. All told, Finn was a sensitive issue for them and probably always would be.

He figured the way he could "let" Rachel hang out with Hudson would probably be considered growth or some shit. He hadn't been given the choice, exactly, or he would've told her where to stick that thought. She liked to tell him she thought he was turning into a progressive male and a supportive, trusting boyfriend. Whatever the fuck that meant.

He tapped the pen on the paper before he went with just writing his choice under each name. He was going to burn this shit when they got home. In the end, he rather uncreatively went in the exact order she'd written them. Fuck Kurt, Marry Jacob, and Kill Finn.

She looked up at him with a scowl.

"What? You want me to defend myself?" He asked. She nodded. He sighed. "Fine. Fucking Kurt would be the closest option to fucking you since, you know gay and guy aside, you two are the same goddamn person. Second, if I married Jacob my mom would get off my fucking case about marrying a Jew. And you don't have to fuck the person you marry. I guess. And I would Kill Finn because…I don't know. Like on a video game or something and because after the other two, it was the only option left."

She smiled and shook her head, but at least her smile reached her eyes. He was going to put this game in the win column. And also the "stays just between us" column. He secretly fucking loved that column.

Truth be told, though, he didn't want the conversation to be all that serious because he just didn't do serious most of the time. This was just supposed to be a fun summer afternoon, chilling with his girl. He had to turn it around. But now that she had given him three guys, he wasn't going to make it easy on her.

She had tucked her hands over the paper and was watching him, waiting for him. "So… how 'bout Barbra Streisand, Patty LuPone, and Idina Menzel?"

She looked vaguely amused as he rattled off the last one. He kind of wanted to just hack his own balls off and hand them to her, considering that's exactly what he'd just done. He'd admitted that he paid attention when she talked about this shit and he knew who her favorites were. More importantly, and he sure as shit wasn't telling her this, he had debated whether to add Bernadette Peters. (Yes, he knew who that was too. Kill him. Maybe he should add himself to the list of options and hope for murder.)

Rachel wrote quickly and threw the paper at him before she picked up her drink. He had been drinking while she wrote and barely moved the cup out of the way to take a look. He really should've thought it through because he choked a little bit on the image of…

F – Patty M—Barbra K—Idina.

Like, seriously. Patty LuPone may have been a little older, but she wasn't bad looking. In fact, Rachel didn't look a lot unlike her and if there was one thing he'd never had a problem with, it was older women.

And now he was having fantasies about his sexy girlfriend and….and a Broadway star? Like, a fucking nightclub lounge act? Not having sex while Rachel was recovering was seriously fucking with him and he needed to play a game of crank the shank. Again.

Shut up. Totally not fair to take a guy in his sexual prime, give him hot sex on the regular and then fucking take it away but make him rub up against the same hot girl anyway. Let's just say he had some plans for the Fourth of July weekend, okay?

He had to get this into safer territory.

"Wha'dya have against Idina Menzel?"

He tossed the pad back to her as he asked, but she spoke. And it made him want to cry a little bit because, even though he could tell by the volume her throat wasn't hurting as badly, it still sounded painful.

"Shelby looks way too much like her," she scraped out.

He frowned but his tone was appreciative at least. "Hey, that sounded almost halfway like you!"

She smiled widely and bent her head down over the paper. He tried to ignore the stabbing in his chest that always came with her sudden mentions of Shelby. Neither of them had really, really talked about the related subjects of Shelby or Beth outside of that one day last summer. He wasn't sure they ever would but it was okay, because he knew neither of them wanted to. Rachel was just always better at shrugging it off than he was—but not because it hurt any less.

It was hard to feel anything once he saw the names she had written. Totally unfair table turning. While she got to suggest hot girl-on-girl, he got Neil Diamond, Billy Joel, David Lee Roth.

Wait—she knew who David Lee Roth was? Maybe she listened to him sometimes, too. Maybe he'd only given her one nut so far.

He scribbled the letters beneath the names again, not paying attention to what he wrote other than he didn't want to kill Neil Diamond. That was just beyond wrong. It broke the small amount of moral code he would admit to. As he wrote the letters though, he looked back up at her and he didn't want to be unserious any more. Just for a second.

Last summer had done a major number on him. He knew it was the same for her. She had chosen him over Finn, had tried to close the door on Shelby and tried to deal with all the bullshit Jesse put her through. She'd had a busy summer then. He'd been trying to get over giving up his daughter for fuck's sake.

And through it all, Rachel was the only person who had made him feel any better about life. Now she was down for the count in some ways, and he knew that even she played it off like her thoughts hadn't lingered on Shelby, he was sure they had. As much as he needed her reassurance when he thought about Beth and Quinn and all that bullshit, he knew she needed his, too.

So he wrote the words carefully, not wanting to say them out loud.

Noah Finn Puck

He threw the notepad back to her and then lay down on the blanket. Rachel had told him once that it was like he had a split personality. She admired Noah, but she could barely tolerate Puck. She never called him by the shortened version of his last name. He knew he'd taken a chance scrawling Hudson's name in there, but it wasn't like she could yell at him at the present. So maybe this was his only chance to just make dead sure that she was okay with the choices she'd made last summer when she was all messed up.

He heard her moving, her skin rubbing against the blanket, and then she lay down next to him with her head on his chest. She put the notepad in the hand opposite where she was laying and then just snuggled in. He let his fingertips trace her bare shoulder and just enjoyed the quiet moment for a second before he lifted the notebook and squinted to see what was written on the yellow paper, brightened by sunlight and hard to see.

Underneath Finn's name she had written fuck. Like, the whole word. He frowned and tried not to get mad. But it was a really hard thing and it's not like he was actually capable of noble effort.

His eyes dashed off to the side, just left of Finn's name. Underneath Noah, it said Marry.

He had never, ever thought about his future in concrete terms like that. He'd been so angry when Quinn told him she didn't want to raise a baby with him. He'd been angry for a long time watching her write him off as a Lima loser, a bad parent, and the kind of guy who would knock her up and then leave her high and dry. Quinn had sold him short, sold herself short, and sold them short. She hadn't considered him the marrying kind.

Now that he'd seen it dismissed in writing, even with the stupidity of the game, he felt the exact opposite. Rachel would marry him. Rachel took this that seriously. Of course she did—she took everything seriously. But knowing that leaked over to him was actually a pretty badass sort of feeling. It was almost as strong as all the other crap that he felt that let him know he would be totally happy marrying her, too. If life worked out, he knew they could be like this forever and it would be fanfuckingtastic. It would be everything.

Underneath Puck was written kill. He fought the chuckle—he'd seen that one coming.

She felt his chest shaking with the laugh he was trying to hide and she turned her head to look up at him. "What's so funny?"

He smiled widely and let the notebook fall, along with his hand, back down to his side. "I guess I shoulda figured, B. I mean… you hate when I'm an asshole and you've already fucked Puck anyway…"

Even the sudden loss of air when she smacked him—hard—in the hard won abs… well, it was better than the stabbing feeling. And not nearly as good as the thought that he might be able to marry a Jew without falling back on her previous suggestion.