A/N: suggested mood music: total eclipse of the heart – glee version. Turn around, bright eyes, & review this chapter ;) (sub a/n: I hope this doesn't suck. I'm hung over, and I didn't feel like checking to see if it was relevant…I think it is, though. Crossing my fingers…)

Title: Fleeting Moments
Author: sparklinglemonade
Rating: M
Summary: Noah Puckerman isn't a good person – he's an ass, a studly sex-shark – but when it comes to Quinn Fabray he tends to have his moments.
Genre: Angst/Drama
Chapter: Thirty Four

Relief

He feels relief wash over him when she calls him the next morning – and a wave of panic when he realizes she's crying again, and she's drunk. It's not like he hasn't heard her drunk lately, he has (a lot), but the night before had been so different…so weird and amazingly normal at the same time.

True, she'd shown up at his job crying, and true, he had no idea why she'd been crying, but it had strangely felt like a real thing they were doing – it felt like they were figuring something out together, or at least that he was really helping her with something…so the call disappoints him. It feels like a step backwards, like whatever happened last night doesn't exist in the real-life daytime world.

"Hey," he says, "what's wrong?" His overwhelming concern is only overshadowed by the fact that crying Quinn, no matter how many times he sees her, is not his forte.

"Pick me up tonight," she says, "after you get out of work." It's not a question, so he doesn't answer, because he knows that she knows that if she says to pick her up then he will. He attempts to figure out what she could possibly want with him all day, and when he gets out of Sheets 'n' Things at nine he drives to her house in record time. She's waiting outside with a water bottle in red Cheerio emblazoned shorts and a thin, black spaghetti strap top, and hops in his car cheerfully. "Hey," she greets, and he stares at her.

"Are you bipolar?" he blurts, then backtracks as a look of horror stretches across her delicate features, "it's not that I really think you're bipolar, it's just…look at you. You're happy, and you called me this morning in tears. You're weird," he finishes, and she snorts at him.

"I'm weird? How long did it take you to get here from Sheets 'n' Things, Puck? Twenty seconds?" She laughs, and he smells the tiniest bit of vodka on her breath. He ignores it.

"Thirty-Five, thanks," he laughs, and smiles at her, "and hi, by the way."

"What a gentleman," she chuckles.

"So," he says, starting the engine, "where to?" She dangles a pair of keys in front of his face, and then snatches them back into her palm.

"William McKinley High School, please," she asks in a fake accent, and he laughs, and then puts the car in drive. Once they reach the school building she hops out, then leads him around the building itself and down to the football field. She unlocks the gate barricading it, and then lets him in from the other side (the side with the bleachers and access to the bathrooms).

They settle on a patch of grass in the middle of the football field, right on the center WMHS emblem between the fifty yard lines. She sips from her water bottle, and he stares at the sky, pretending to pick out constellations he doesn't know and pointing to them. She corrects him, laughing, and after a while they fall into a comfortable silence. "Why'd you bring me here?" he asks, after a long while has passed. Her water bottle is empty, and his eyes are losing for longer and longer periods of time.

"I wanted to see you," she says, and he shakes his head.

"Why'd you really bring me here?" He asks, and she sighs.

"I wanted to see you somewhere you were comfortable," she answers, her voice slurring slightly, "and where else would that be? You're a footballer, aren't you? And you love it here, even though you never talk about it. You love tackling poor innocents even though you'd never say something like that. You love being a macho man around here so I figured I'd make you bring me here and see how you were…how you are."

He smiles at her, then ruffles her hair, "well," he pretends to drawl, "ain't you just sweet as sugar?" She laughs, and they watch the moon as it moves across the sky.