A/N: Thanks, QuinnAbrams, for your contribution to the middle. Also, here's to hoping this website will recognize the fact that my story has 33 chapters now, not 30. -_-

Sam

There was one thing he didn't mind giving up, even if it did mean giving up free college. He didn't care if he never put on that ridiculous bathing suit again. Julie had the sense to cancel the documentary she'd started on Sam and the competition, once she realized how much he not-so-secretly hated synchronized swimming now.

At least there were a few people who were happy to be there that day, making up for his lack of excitement. His parents had come to watch, bringing with them Amy, Stacey, and Stevie. His cheering section all worn OSU shirts, even the little kids, since Amy had stopped by the bookstore to get them some. Amy still hadn't given up her recent affinity for baggy hoodies that effectively hid her changing body from view.

The competition was scheduled for weekend immediately after spring break. The timing was a bit stressful for the team, as they knew they'd be a little rusty after a week off. The coach had made them all come early, to get one last practice in.

Sam was already more interested, however, in the upcoming weekend and finding out the baby's gender. In fact, he could think of little else, especially after he spotted his beautiful bride-to-be in the crowd with his siblings and parents.

So, this was growing up. Growing up was being more interested in family stuff than silly competitions. Right now, he was interested in speeding time up a little, so that he could marry the love of his life and officially start their life together. He was interested in getting ready to become a dad and learning all he could before welcoming a child into the world.

What he hadn't counted on was a second cheering section and friends who were still very much invested in the Sam Evans of today. His other cheering section consisted of five people seated with Artie. Blaine, Kurt, Tina, Quinn, and Mercedes had all made the trip to see Sam compete, too. They'd effectively surprised him, too. Artie hadn't mentioned that they'd be there.

"Ready, Sam?" The voice was Julie's, as stepped up beside him. She followed his gaze to Artie and the group in the stands. "Oh, those are some of the glee club friends, right?" She squinted. "Isn't that Kitty?"

"No, Quinn," he said, glancing quizzically over his shoulder at Julie. "A lot of people mix them up. Quinn graduated a year before me and Artie. Kitty's still in high school."

"Oh." That was all Julie said about that.

Sam knew more. Apparently, it had started with a 2 AM accidental-like from Kitty on Artie and Julie's picture from the Grand Canyon. It resulted in Julie, in turn, discovering the vast amount of pictures Artie had previously untagged himself in on Kitty's account.

But there was no time to focus on Artie and Julie or Artie or Kitty or really anything that wasn't related to incredibly gay swim dancing in perfect timing with a bunch of chicks. He was just glad Amy didn't find the whole thing completely emasculating. She'd mentioned, during a deep discussion about it while snuggling together on their campout, that she thought he made the sport into something far more sexual than intended.

It was probably why they, in turn, won that day.

And with that done, Sam could effectively break the news to his team that this would be their first and last major competition with their first male teammate.

"Sorry," he was saying, as he glanced up at Amy, who was presently splitting a pair of pom-poms with Stacey and doing a little cheer for him in the stands. "I, uh, I have to put college on hold for awhile. I mean, I might take some community college classes but... yeah. Means no more swimming for me. It would seem that my other little swimmers were even better than I was."

It was Julie who hugged him first. "We'll miss you, Sam," she said, hiding a smile at his little joke. She, too, followed his gaze to Amy in the stands. "But you do have some pretty important business to attend to."

"That I do..." And he wasted no time in working his way around the edge of the pool and into the stands, giving his friends and Artie a wave but approaching his family first.

That included his new family, his future wife and baby. Amy threw her arms around him for a kiss, as Stacey and Stevie attached theirselves to the side of their hug, joining in.

"I wish I could stay," Amy told him, kissing him quickly, as he tried to hold onto the kiss a second longer than she. It was getting so that he could hardly stand to be away from her. He was counting down the weeks til they could be together, which happened to coincide with their wedding date now.

"You can't?" Sam frowned.

"Your mom and I have some wedding planning stuff to do in Lima tomorrow," she explained, with one more quick kiss. "So I have to go on home with them. But I'll see you next weekend. I can't wait."

"This is the most massive dorm room I have ever seen!" Tina marveled as the McKinley crew entered Sam and Artie's humble abode after following the boys back to their building, post-synchronized swimming competition. "My room at Brown is a fraction of this size!"

Sam and Artie were planning to give their friends a tour of the campus, and where else could their first stop have been except their own stomping grounds?

"Yeah, well, I have a lot of stuff," Artie laughed, gesturing at all his equipment, his work out mats, his seated eliptical, and now even a standing frame, on loan from his PT. "And everything has to be spread out enough so that I can maneuver around without breaking a finger."

"And I don't have a lot of stuff," Sam added, climbing up onto his lofted bed, which had his desk tucked underneath. "So this arrangement worked out kind of perfectly."

While Tina was right about Sam and Artie's room being exponentially bigger than the average freshman dorm room, it still wasn't big enough to comfortably fit the seven friends, plus a wheelchair. For that reason, after letting their pals check out their shared bedroom, Sam and Artie led the others down the hall into the common room to hang out, where there was enough room on the couches for everyone.

"So, Evans, any updates on your baby? How's the baby mama doin'?" Mercedes asked, unable to even wait a moment before directing the flow of conversation that way, still unable to believe that her eighteen-year-old ex was going to be a father.

"I'd really prefer it if you didn't refer to my sister as Sam's 'baby mama'," Artie commented, looking a little nauseous at the thought.

Though it had taken him a while to warm up to the idea of becoming an uncle so soon, Artie had come around to approving of Sam and Amy's relationship, and, for that, Sam was definitely grateful. However, he could tell that the subject was still a little bit sore for the other guy when it was brought up by their friends.

"Oh, uh, they're both doing well," Sam assured her. "We go in for another ultrasound on Friday to find out if we're having a girl or a boy."

"And we can't forget what else is coming up…" Quinn said playfully, nudging Artie and causing the guy next to her to blush. "Artie over here turns the big 2-0! Doing anything special for that?"

"Probably just hanging out with Sam and our buddies," Artie confessed. "I mean, it falls on Tuesday, so we'll probably just order a pizza and play Halo."

"Speaking of those goons," Sam said, holding up his phone to show Artie that the screen was lit up with a message. "Garrett just invited us to their place. Should we ask if they want to come with us for dinner?"

Sam liked the idea of his high school squad and his college squad mixing together for the night, and he was right in assuming that Artie would be on board too.

"Yeah! Invite those three," Artie directed, pulling out his own cellphone to check the time. "We should probably get going soon. Everywhere worth going closeby gets packed pretty early on the weekends."

After sending a quick text to Garrett and receiving the affirmative response that he, Brent, and Lee would meet them at the restaurant, Sam and Artie led their friends on the trek across campus towards their favorite burger joint, making sure to point out their class buildings and the student center on the way.

It wasn't long before they were able to step out of the chilly late March air and into the restaurant, where the boys' OSU friends were waiting for them. After sitting down at the long table, Sam was eager to introduce everybody.

"Lima peeps, this is Brent, Lee, and Garrett. They're who we hang around with when we aren't swimming or in class. And guys, these are our friends from high school," Sam made sure to point each of them out individually, and was maybe a little too thorough in his introductions.

"This is Kurt and this is Blaine, better known as Klaine," he said, pointing out the couple. "The only official gay power couple at our high school. I think they left a legacy. There's now an openly gay jock on the football team and the glee club, so clearly, they paved the way."

"You missed my days as a gay jock," Kurt added, in mock indignation. "My short-lived stint as kicker was over with long before you transferred to McKinley. Anyway, point is, I did it first."

"This is my ex-girlfriend, Mercedes," Sam continued, putting his arm around the girl to his right. "She's gonna be a big, big star. She's currently recording background vocals on Ariana Grande's next album."

"Who?" Brent asked.

"Ariana Grande was on that Disney show you pretend not to watch," Lee told him. Brent promptly forced the smaller guy into a headlock.

Mercedes hid a smile. "She's really nice, in person," she said. "And she doesn't sound like her character on that show. That's just a silly voice she does. Actually, she's a little powerhouse. If the album does well, and it should, we'll be touring again next year."

"And we're all coming to see that, when you do," Artie added, beaming proudly at Mercedes.

"This is my other ex-girlfriend, Quinn," Sam went on, indicating the girl to his left. "She goes to Yale now."

"Sam didn't get me pregnant," she added, smirking at him. "Someone else took care of that before he showed up."

"And this is Tina," Sam concluded.

"He didn't date me, but this one time, we snuck into the school at night and made out," Tina bragged, providing her own details. "I go to Brown. I have a boyfriend."

"And you're sure that he's not...?"

"I'm sure, Blaine, thank you." Tina sneered in the direction of the other member of their former trio, or quartet, depending on if they'd remembered to include Artie that week.

One could always count on Lee to be the first to recover from the overload of information. He directed his next (extremely blunt and a little misogynistic) comment to Artie.

"And what about you, Art? Which of these three lovely ladies have you gotten your hands on?"

"Just Tina," Artie confessed, blushing again. It was way too easy to embarrass him.

"You say that like it was easy to get your hands on all of this," Tina said, redirecting her sneer at Artie. "Uh, FYI, it was not."

"No, I agree," Artie said, quickly, giving her a teasing grin and a playful nudge. Naturally, the best friends were seated side by side. "She had me in the friend zone for years, it's true..."

"Speaking of the friend zone, where's Julie tonight?" Brent wanted to know.

"Having dinner with her family," Artie supplied. "They came for a visit, you know, to see her competition. And I'm not in the friend zone, just because I'm not with her tonight. They hardly ever get to come to Ohio."

"So, it didn't bother you that they brought along that good-looking guy with the dreadlocks and the cute dimpled smile?" Tina interjected, causing all eyes to land on Artie for a reaction.

"They used to be on the diving team together in high school," Artie explained, defensively. "So, no. I'm sure he just realized it was a pretty big deal and wanted to see his old friend compete."

Sam hadn't even noticed that Artie's girlfriend's family had brought along some other guy. He'd been pretty preoccupied before the competition earlier, what with thinking about how he couldn't blow the long streak of championships, no matter how much he'd come to hate his sport.

"Plenty of people hang out with their high school exes, and it's not a threat to their current relationship," Sam added, indicating the two ladies on either side of him presently as proof of the fact.

"Anyway," Artie continued, after nodding in agreement with what Sam said. "I met that guy over spring break when I went to Arizona. He's just some flirty dude who dated both of her best friends in high school. I was more threatened by the jilted ex-prom date guy than him."

"Denial is not just a river in Europe, Artie," Lee said, helpfully.

"The Nile is in Africa, genius."

"We-ell, all this playful banter about people I hardly know is making me hungry," Garrett said, cutting off the bickering by promptly passing menus around the table. "Hurry up and let's order, everyone, and you have to try the jalapeño poppers."

"Hey, Artie?" Sam asked, much, much later that night, when everyone else was finally on the road back home and they were lying there in their beds, slightly buzzed from the party with their three amigos and all of their favorites from high school.

"Hm?"

"Julie said something strange right before we got in the pool earlier," he told him. "She thought that Quinn was Kitty. I quickly set her straight. But then it got me thinking, why would she be all worried about you and Kitty?"

"I think part of her knows I never got over her," Artie reasoned. "I mean, when I first met Julie, when you first introduced us, I told her then I wasn't ready to go out because I wasn't over Kitty yet."

Sam nodded. "You know, as someone who has had a lot of exes..."

"A lot? You dated or made out with every single girl who came to watch you swim tonight," Artie teased him. "Sorry, I interrupted, what were you saying?"

"Just that you learn something from each relationship," he continued. "For instance, Mercedes taught me to respect myself. And my crush on Penny the nurse led to my interest in female faculty members and older women."

"All leading you to my sister, what were the odds?" Artie could say these things now, and neither of them had to feel weird any longer. Well, for the most part.

"With a little alcohol, better than you know," Sam said, before thinking better of it. "She was completely sober, so I don't know what her excuse was..."

"Aha!" Artie said straight up, like he'd been shot out of a canon, startling Sam. "So it was the night I'd passed out after Rachel's party." And then, as quickly as he'd sat up, he lay back again and covered his face with his pillow. "Ugh, why?"

"I would have worn a condom, but I assumed she was on the pill..." He stopped talking when Artie's pillow bounced off his face. "You, uh, want me to go get that for you?"