Author's Note: I won't ramble for long because I know you are all dying for this chapter. Must give a quick shout out to Jann for helping me polish the ending, and then another "YOU ROCK" to everyone reading and reviewing. Also, I am actually going to hit 500 reviews (likely) ahead of schedule, which freakin' blows my mind. More to come on what I plan to do about that later, though. For now, please read and review! Thanks!
Puck knocked on the door again, this time harder now that he knew he wasn't disturbing her sleep. He hadn't really cared before, obviously seeing as how he was standing in front of the door to her childhood home; he'd navigated the small town outside of Cincinnati completely in the dark and he'd be damned if he wasn't going to be rewarded for that effort. Not to mention all the effort it took him to get on a plane that was basically taking off when he arrived at the airport in New York as well as the emotional effort it took not just to convince Kurt to tell him where Rachel was but that of which he used to convince himself that he could do this.
"Come on, Berry. I heard you." He pounded on the door again with the heel of his hand. "Open up."
Rachel used both her hands to cover her mouth, as if she could halt the noise she'd made almost two minutes ago or the one a minute later. Her eyes again moved to her fathers, who had stopped together behind the couch in the living room, wide smiles on both of their faces. They eagerly nodded their heads toward the door, clear in their request for her to face the music so to speak and talk to Puck. After all, opportunity was literally knocking.
"What are you doing here?" She asked, her voice a mix of shock and harshness. She ignored her fathers' disapproving frowns at the latter, though, instead focused on the extreme case of déjà vu she felt. If Finn had been in the room instead of her fathers, it would have been eerily similar.
"I came to see you."
Except, this time, Puck wasn't drunk. He wasn't really making sense, either, but he wasn't a rambling mess like last time. "How did you even know where to find me?"
Puck sagged his head, leaning more of his weight on his two arms braced on the doorframe. Clearly they were going to have this conversation with the door between them. It seemed fitting, actually – almost metaphoric. He'd been the one to shut the door on everything and now it was her who had the decision about whether she'd open it again or not. If she did, he wouldn't hesitate to burst through it. And press her against it … but that was more of a literal interpretation.
"I think your friend Kurt has the hots for me."
Rachel rolled her eyes, not necessarily dismissing the idea but too focused on how her best friend had obviously ratted her out. Now she wanted to see her phone just to see if he'd given her any warning that Puck was on his way to her house. Knowing Kurt and his inability to consider the consequences when it came to grand romantic gestures, he was probably waiting by his phone to hear the outcome of his meddling from her. Traitor.
"I ain't leavin' until we talk about this."
The way he said this made her stomach sink. He knew. And Kurt might have given up her location, but she knew him well enough to know he wouldn't have told Puck anything about the baby. For a gossip queen he was actually pretty good about keeping secrets as long as you explained to him how important it was to keep certain things quiet – and bribed him. He accepted both chocolate and future entitlement to privy information equally.
"So much for doctor/patient confidentiality," she mumbled loud enough for him to hear.
"No such thing as nurse/patient confidentiality, babe."
Rachel scoffed, finding her fathers eyes across the room again. They were each smiling until she looked at them more pointedly. They then shrugged, entering their official review as attorneys in favor of the defendant. She frowned, not knowing Santana well but prepared to give the Latina a long talking-to the next time they crossed paths.
"'Sides, this ain't the first time I had to frantically do that kind of math." He shrugged. "We fucked so much I'm legit surprised you just got one in there."
Rachel's eyes widened, her breath hitching while her head snapped up to look straight ahead to avoid her fathers' stare from the side. She gripped the doorknob tightly and turned around, scrambling to unlock the door before Puck said anything else completely horrifying. She swung the door open, immediately taking a step back when Puck crossed the threshold quickly. His face was a lot calmer than hers, at least until he saw her fathers in his periphery and stopped dead in his tracks.
"Oh." He clenched his fists at his sides, figuring that was par for course. "Hey."
"Hello," Leroy managed, a smirk playing on his lips. "I'm Rachel's father Leroy and this is her dad Hiram."
Puck nodded, figuring the fake formality of crossing the room and shaking their hands went out the window somewhere between his previous two sentences. Some first impression. Puck went from being gay to being a sleazebag in about twenty seconds. He flicked a glance at Rachel only to see her still clutching the door handle like a lifeline, her eyes wide and her cheeks tinged red with embarrassment.
"We were just heading up to bed," Leroy stated, silently checking with his daughter to see if she wanted him to escort the young man out or if she wanted to be left alone. She was still stuck in a deer-in-headlights expression, but considering everything he figured it was the latter.
Hiram made a spectacle of appearing tired, yawning loudly and stretching his arms wide to his sides. It was completely unnecessary given the hour and their age – of course they would be tired – but the group seemed to appreciate the gesture. "Well, goodnight."
Rachel accepted each of their soft kisses on her cheeks when they passed on their way up the stairs. She waited until she heard the footsteps lead all the way to their bedroom, knowing much like Kurt that Hiram had an ear for gossip. When she heard the door shut, she finally looked up at Puck, letting a small smile slip that she could feel looked more like a grimace. Slowly she shut the door, gesturing with her other hand toward the living room in invitation for him to sit.
He didn't move.
"How long were you gonna keep it from me?"
She flinched at his words, shaking her head immediately in response. "I wasn't keeping it from you."
"You let me think it was the ogre's."
She wringed her hands in front of her, her eyes watching the motion intently just to ignore his intense stare. He was close enough that she could reach out and touch him, and again that urge consumed her so strongly that it was nearly impossible to ignore. She could feel the heat radiating off his body and all she wanted was to feel it pressed up against her. His touch stirred so many emotions inside her – comfort, security, desire – and she wasn't sure how she managed to live so long without it.
"I never slept with Finn."
"How the fuck was I supposed to know that?" Again he filed that information under the fuck yeah! category, but it wasn't enough to end the conversation. "Last I saw, he was glidin' through your place like he owned it. Like he lived there or some shit."
"We were friends. We are friends." She furrowed her brows, resting her hands on her hips. "He knew my apartment because when he was there he didn't only care about the bedroom. He cared about me."
Puck scoffed at her explanation, mirroring her defensive stance. Unless Finn was gay like his brother, then he cared about the bedroom he just hadn't gotten the chance to prove it. And for her to insinuate that Puck didn't care about her, well that really pissed him off. Would he have been there if he didn't care? No.
"But you're right," she breathed out, her hands falling to her sides. "I should have told you sooner. Granted, I only realized last night and had it confirmed this morning, but … you had every right to know." She shifted her feet uncomfortably, her head down as she mumbled, "I just don't want you to feel obligated to me."
The tears threatened to fall and she again decided to blame the hormones. It had nothing to do with the fact that the man who she'd unknowingly given her heart to was standing right in front of her, poised to either cradle the vulnerable organ safely or toss it to the ground like a piece of trash. It was a powerful form of control that Rachel was helpless against, and she wasn't even sure if he knew he possessed it.
"You made your expectations perfectly clear. It was me … I …. you don't owe me anything, Noah." She managed to look up at him for approximately three seconds, her gaze falling back down nervously. "It was my fault."
He wasn't sure exactly what she was talking about, whether she meant the unexpected pregnancy or the unexpected feelings. It takes two to tango, as they say, and he'd certainly given her just cause to think things between them were more than what they'd started out to be. His signals were mixed at best; even now he was fighting with himself on how much to reveal to her. He'd only just started learning how to walk the fine line between pussy and sensitive and sometimes the line was blurry even up close.
"I already have everything figured out, and you're more than happy to be as involved as you want to be, but …" she trailed off, biting her lip and focusing now on her feet. "I only want you to do what you're comfortable with. No catch."
"You mean no trap?" He growled.
She winced at his tone, shaking her head in response. "I'm not suggesting you are anything like your father, Noah, but you'll have to forgive me for assuming this wasn't what you signed up for when we first … met."
He managed to smirk, amused by her tact even in a private and utterly fucked up conversation. And he knew he couldn't fault her thought process. He'd pretty much proven her fears when he'd bailed on her in the first place. But that's not why he was here. Her being pregnant wasn't why he wanted to be with her. He actually couldn't even put into words why her particularly brand of crazy seemed to drive him wild, but it did.
"I sure as shit ain't my dad," he repeated her words in his own way, then pressed on to the somewhat sloppy thought he'd come up with during the haze of the flight and car ride to her house. "I'm not the beast and I ain't the prince, either." He took a step toward her, knocking her chin up gently with his index finger while his other hand curled around her hip so she couldn't go anywhere. "I'm the guy you thought I was."
Puck blew out a heavy breath, his heart racing as the words spilled out. "With you, I'm Noah. And … it's someone I've never been to anyone else and someone I didn't really knew existed until you forced him out of me and …"
Whatever else he was going to say was cut off by Rachel's resulting embrace, her lips crashing against his. It wasn't logical and there were a million reasons to argue that it was impulsive and undeserving, but she didn't care. The emotional side of her had been in knots for the past two months and it all unraveled as Puck finally opened up to her. She couldn't take a single second longer of his hands on her without her initiating some sort of contact of her own. She opened her mouth invitingly, moaning softly when he thrust his tongue into the moist cavern.
If that was how she reacted to a little bit of emotional truth, then Puck was legit going to consider being a lot more honest in the future. His fingers sunk deeply into the soft skin of the side of her lower back, his other hand tangled in the tousled strands of her long chestnut hair. He pulled on the ends to force her head back, moving his lips from her mouth down her neck. He nipped at the sensitive skin of her collarbone and then over to the other side of her neck, probing her pulse point with his tongue before coming back to her mouth again.
Rachel's hands were lost underneath the undershirt hidden below his dress shirt, Puck not even sure when she'd untucked the garment but not really caring. Her touch was like fire and ice at the same time, somehow causing him to shiver and burn from the inside simultaneously. She urged him closer, Puck stepping between her legs and pushing her back against the wall. Her shoulder bumped into a picture frame at the bottom of the stairwell, the decoration wobbling a little on the hardware before falling from the wall and landing on the ground with a crack.
Even though she heard the glass break and knew they should clean it up, logic again went out the window when Puck scooped her off the ground and pressed her harder into the wall. Her legs wrapped around his waist and her hands came to settle on his neck, her thumbs brushing against his cheeks while he continued to kiss her jaw and neck as she tried to catch her breath. Her room was upstairs and even though it wasn't the same situation, Rachel was reminded of the feeling she had when her and Puck were visiting his family. She felt like a teenager all over again, trying to sneak some alone time with her boyfriend without her dads hearing.
"Guest room," she stated breathlessly, using her back to push off the wall so he'd know the general direction. It wasn't the most thought out plan; she'd hoped with the layout of the rooms that the extra floor would provide some more privacy, but after all the fumbling and banging against walls they did on the way she'd be surprised if the neighbors were still asleep. The broken picture frame was one thing, but she was pretty sure they knocked over a vase in the hallway before they finally stumbled inside the guest bedroom.
Puck plopped Rachel down onto the soft mattress of the bed, shrugging off his dress shirt and then tossing his undershirt across the room before covering her body with his own. He'd spent too long not touching her and kissing her, so he now knew better than to waste even a moment. He settled between her legs, bracing himself on his forearms and capturing her lips once again with his. Rachel bit his lip to tug his mouth open, sliding her tongue languidly across his once he complied with her wishes. She explored the expanse of his torso with slow, methodical strokes, then moved to the contours of his back in the same patient fashion. It was like she was trying to memorize the feel of him, and while it felt extremely good he pulled back and waited until her eyes fluttered open and focused on him.
"I ain't goin' anywhere, B."
She blinked rapidly, the clouds of lust breaking just enough that he could see the pain hiding behind the chocolate orbs. Her breathing was labored and her lips were swollen, but he could see past it all and see how vulnerable she was. She bit the corner of her lip and finally lifted her eyes open all the way, staring back at him with an equal amount of intensity.
"Promise?"
Rachel hated being that girl. She wasn't needy and she certainly could take care of herself. She'd been doing it for the past ten-plus years and she'd never needed a man to fix anything about her life. But she didn't necessarily want Puck to fix anything. She just wanted him be there with her through it. Then maybe they could fix it all together.
Puck moved his hand from tracing absent patterns on the bare skin of her thigh to lift up and caress her face. He moved a few wayward strands of her hair away from her face, one finger brushing over her forehead before curling around her ear. With the hair secure, there was nothing obstructing his view of her deep brown eyes, and he found himself getting lost in them like he never had before. It seemed like a total chick thing, but her soulful expression paired with her soft words really struck a chord with him. Right then, there were no dueling forces, no pride getting in the way, no arrogance or self-preservation.
The only thing that mattered was her.
"Promise," he whispered huskily, leaning back down to kiss her slowly. His one hand trailed down her bare arm, fingering the hem of her loose tank top only long enough to get enough of a grip that he could lift it off her torso and toss it to the floor. He immediately suctioned his lips to the newly exposed skin, sucking on the subtle mounds of her breasts while his hand moved down her lithe frame. His tongue swirled around her nipples and then trailed lower, dipping into her bellybutton before he pulled back, taking her tiny pajama shorts along with him.
Rachel breathed out shakily, watching his every move with half-closed eyes. She worried her lip between her teeth while he scooted off the bed, unbuckling his belt and undoing the button and zipper of his slacks. As the garment fell to the ground, Rachel sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, kneeling on the mattress in front of him. She pressed her lips to Puck's chest, alternating between licking and nipping at the warm, muscular skin. His hands tangled in her hair again while hers moved to the waistband of his underwear, pulling them down enough that they, too, pooled at his feet.
Her hands immediately teased his prominent erection, her thumb swiping over the sensitive tip as the other fingers curled around the shaft. She pumped her hand a few times with purpose, squeezing him a little harder than intended when she felt his hand cup her most private area. His lips attached themselves to her left shoulder, a groan echoing in the room when he slid a finger across her slick heat. She was fairly certain it was from him, but she couldn't say for sure after he softly bit the area where her neck and shoulder met and then pushed her back to the mattress, the earlier urgency back in his movements.
"I have a condom," he said, his voice rough.
Rachel knew why he'd said it. He wasn't worried about getting her pregnant; he was a doctor, after all. But they had been apart for two months and even though she'd admitted to not reaching such an intimate level with Finn, he hadn't given her the same assurance. Considering his past, he could have had as many as sixty new partners, and that was assuming he had the decency to limit himself to one a day. But, for whatever reason, Rachel knew he hadn't done that. She trusted him, which may or may not have been another example of how logic wasn't always used or needed in matters of the heart.
"We don't need one."
Puck smirked, placing a hot kiss on her lips as he settled deeper between her legs. "That's what you said last time."
Her giggle reverberated through his body as he sunk inside of her. The laughter was replaced by a breathy gasp, the hands that had been tickling his sides pressing flat into his skin, tense for a moment as she adjusted to the feel of him filling her. It took a lot of self-control and way more willpower than should be necessary considering his age and experience, but he refused to move until her eyes opened back up. She searched him thoughtfully, her eyes darting across his face for a subtle indication that something was wrong.
She wouldn't find it, though. Not this time.
"I love you."
Rachel's eyes widened in half disbelief and half adoration, water building up behind her eyeballs. Back in Lima when he'd quietly confessed his slight admiration for her, it had felt forced. Not by her, per say, but just difficult for him to say. He'd avoided eye contact to begin with and then basically ignored the whole thing directly after. Now, though, he was looking right at her – almost through her, like he was looking past her and into her soul. His voice didn't quiver or break. He sounded sure, genuine. Real.
So Noah.
"I love you, too," she whispered, her hands sliding across his shoulders and up his neck to cradle his jaw and pull him into a searing kiss. It propelled him forward enough that he sank deeper into her and she couldn't help the slow moan that escaped. She felt his grin against her lips and managed to roll her eyes even as they were closed. His arrogance quickly took over, torturing her with calculated movements and soft, encouraging words spoken right against her ear. Honestly, she loved Noah, but there were definitely some benefits to Puck.
He could feel his resolve breaking with each additional thrust, her quiet whimpers and clutching hands pushing him closer and closer to the edge. It had been way too long since he'd been with her like this, and he had been so legit fucked up that he hadn't even tried to take care of himself in the interim. Now all the sexual energy was coursing through his veins and even though he never wanted this moment to end he knew it couldn't last forever. She was rolling her hips into his in a perfect rhythm and the only thing he could do was reach between them and tease her clit to hopefully bring her just as close to the grand finale as he was.
Rachel withered underneath him, her eyes closing tight as the powerful rush of emotions catapulted through her system. The sex was enough, but the thoughts that came along with it were too much. On the one hand she felt like they were in high school, but on the other hand she'd never felt more grown up than at that moment. Her and Puck weren't just fooling around or filling a need. It wasn't a casual relationship with no strings attached.
They were in love and were going to be parents.
It was enough to take her breath away, but the oxygen rushed out of her a second later when he rocked his hips into hers a little more deliberately. Her back arched up, pressing against his chest in such a tantalizing way that it was the last straw. Puck covered her mouth with his own, quieting her loud cry of ecstasy and kissing her passionately as he rode her orgasm into his own. He grunted into one final powerful thrust before collapsing on top of her, Rachel holding him tightly to her just in case he even thought about leaving.
She really, really hoped he wasn't thinking about leaving.
