He doesn't start feeling guilty about this thing he has going on with Rachel until he's in his mom's car on his way to his next appointment with Dr. Berry.

He isn't her boyfriend, which was her idea. She said that she could tell that he wasn't ready for that kind of commitment, and she didn't want to push him too far, too fast, so they should just keep things casual. It's kind of a trip, that this girl is this cool.

What's freaking him out a little though is thinking that he could probably go ahead and be her boyfriend. She's basically the sweetest girl, and she's so fucking sexy that he can barely stand it. It's not just that though. It's that he actually really likes talking to her. He's told her more about himself in the last two weeks than he's told anyone in years. He thinks it's because he can tell that she's really listening instead of just waiting for him to finish talking so she can have her turn.

He's walking around the side of the Berry house when it occurs to him that maybe being a good listener is a family trait.

"I was an asshole to a really sweet girl because of Quinn."

That's what Puck says when Dr. Berry asks him how his finals went, because it's the only thing he's been able to think about all afternoon. If it surprises the doctor, he doesn't show it.

"How do you mean?"

"Quinn didn't like her," he says, deliberately not using Rachel's name. "So I started picking on her. And then everyone else did it. And I'm just now realizing that me being a dick made high school suck for her."

Rachel hasn't said that in so many words, but Puck isn't stupid. He has some idea of what school must be like for her - or what it was like, because he knows that people are leaving her alone now that they know that he's cool with her or whatever - and he knows it wasn't good.

"Would you say that you were trying to prove something to Quinn?"

Puck shrugs. "Maybe."

"How'd that work out for you?" he deadpans, grinning when Puck rolls his eyes. "What was it about her? What made you want her even after she was with Finn, enough that you were willing to betray your friendship with him?"

Puck considers the question. It isn't the first time he's been asked this, but he's never really tried to give someone a serious answer. "She always acted like she was perfect or whatever, but when I got her alone...she wasn't. Like, she acted like this perfect Christian cheerleader girl, but she's kind of a bitch, and she worries about being fat." He stops talking, because none of this is answering the question. "I don't know why," he finally admits. "But I wanted her enough that I didn't even think about Finn."

It's fucking frustrating, not being able to figure out why he wanted her so bad when he's trying to figure it out. It's one thing to ignore your motives for doing shit, but it's really not okay when you don't know them at all.

"It's okay not to know," Dr. Berry says gently after a moment. "That's part of what therapy is for."

Puck rolls his eyes. "I never wanted to figure this shit out."

Dr. Berry actually laughs. "I know, Noah."

When his mom gets his report card and sees how much he's pulled up his grades since he got out of juvie, she gives back the keys to his truck, though she doesn't give him free reign. He has to tell her where he's going before he leaves, always, and parties are totally out of the question. It boils down to letting him drive himself to and from school once winter break ends, but that's good enough for him. It's better than nothing, right?

He goes out on Saturday afternoon to go to the coffee place downtown for a peppermint mocha. It's not coffee, no, but that shit's delicious, and fuck anyone who wants to give him shit about it.

He doesn't expect to walk through the door of the place and see Quinn standing there at the counter.

It's annoying, really, how someone who's such a fucking mess can still be so pretty, but he can't deny that it's true when she's standing there in a white (of course) wool coat with a blue bag on her arm and her hair in the soft curls she always got mad at him for trying to touch. She just blinks her big green eyes at him when he walks up to the counter and places his order.

"I heard that you're trying to defile Manhands," she murmurs meanly when he slides away from the register to let the guy behind him order. She gazes straight ahead.

"Fuck off, Quinn."

"It's cute, really, the loser and the freak," she goes on, acting like she didn't hear him, still not looking at him. "She's just another girl who's too good for you though. She actually will go somewhere, but you're going to be stuck here forever."

The barista calls her name, setting her drink on the counter, but Puck grabs her by her upper arm before she can move, leaning down until he's close enough that her hair tickles his lips when he speaks into her ear. "Are you still crying yourself to sleep every night, or have you managed to forget that you had a baby and gave her away?"

She wrenches her arm away from him, a broken little gasp falling from her lips, and practically runs out of the shop, leaving her drink there on the counter.

Saying what he said makes him just about the worst guy on the planet, he knows, but the mean part of him feels good about it. He never, ever let on that he heard her doing that, crying herself to sleep, even though he can't think of a night when that wasn't what she did. You can't miss someone crying when you're sharing a bed with her. It's a low blow, sure, but at least now he knows that she hasn't completely forgotten about everything that happened last year. And besides, she's the one who started it this time with her comment about Rachel.

(The part of him that tried to make a relationship with her work for the sake of their kid, the part of him that kind of loved her, feels like a rat bastard.)

Puck liked it better when she pretended that he didn't exist.

"We should go do something. Oh! Ice skating!"

He laughs because Rachel says it out of the middle of nowhere when they're talking on the phone one afternoon during winter break. She was just talking about gingerbread houses and whether they should be decorated with traditional candies or whatever else.

"What?"

"Well, neither of us is doing anything," she points out. "We might as well go somewhere and do something together."

"Ice skating?" he asks dubiously. He can really only get behind ice skating when pucks and sticks and hitting people are involved.

"We don't have to go ice skating," she laughs. "We could see a movie or wander around the mall or something else."

Puck glances at the clock on his bedside table and considers whether or not his mom will actually let him go out and do something with Rachel. She knows that the girl was tutoring him, and they met the last time Rachel was over. She was coming in when Abby and his mom were heading out, so it was sort of a 'hello, goodbye' thing, but he knows that Rachel made a good first impression.

The idea of sitting with Rachel is a dark theater is really appealing, too.

They meet at the theater downtown because she suggests it, one of those places where they play movies that are usually already out on DVD but only charge like, two bucks for tickets. Rachel is standing in the lobby with her red wool coat draped over her arm and her hair tumbling over her shoulders in these loose curls that he loves.

Now that he's really looking at her all the time, he wonders how he didn't see her sooner. She isn't hot in the obvious way, like Brittany, or sexy like Santana, or even traditionally beautiful like Quinn, but she's still really, really pretty and like, sneaky hot on top of it. She's one of those girls you don't realize you're mentally undressing until she's totally naked in your mind and you aren't sure how she got that way.

But it's a fucking good image.

(He's had his hands on her a little bit, and he knows that what's going on under her clothes is pretty good. He's a dude; he's gonna think about it.)

"The only thing playing any time soon is the one with Will Ferrell," she says when he walks up to her, "so I already bought tickets. I wasn't sure about your stance on popcorn versus candy, so I haven't gotten anything yet."

She looks sort of offended when he starts laughing instead of saying anything, but he just takes her hand and laces his fingers with hers so he can lead her toward the concession stand. "What's your stance on popcorn versus candy, Rach?"

She shakes her head at him a little, but she's smiling. "I like SweeTarts, and if you let me, I'll eat the whole box myself," she answers.

Puck buys a box of SweeTarts for Rachel and Junior Mints for himself, the candy that his nana always bought for them to share when he was little and she would take him for movies when she babysat. Rachel smiles like he said something sweet when he tells her that, and she loops her arm through his once he's tucked his wallet back into his pocket and they're walking to their theater.

There are only a handful of other people in the theater, which figures since it's a weeknight and they're seeing a movie that they could probably watch on Netflix instant already. Now, put Puck in a nearly-empty theater with most girls, and he's going to see how far he can push them. Like the time he and Santana cut last period freshman year and snuck into a matinee of some stupid movie and he convinced her to go down on him. He's pretty sure the best he could do with Rachel is making out, and he'd have to work her into it.

The movie is already completely stupid just ten minutes in, so Puck slips his box of candy into the coat of his letter jacket and decides that he'll wait until Rachel gives up on her own candy to start running some game on her.

Five minutes later, she leans close to his ear. "This is incredibly stupid," she whispers.

Puck snickers, which sets her off into a fit of giggles, and then neither of them can stop cracking up even though there isn't anything funny happening on the screen and, in this movie, probably never will be.

"Can we go?" Rachel asks after they manage to get themselves under control, her breath fanning out over his ear and making him think of all the other things they could be doing.

He doesn't bother answering her. He figures grabbing her wrist and tugging her out of her seat is answer enough.

She climbs into the passenger seat of his truck when he suggests that they find something else to do instead of just going home. She has her seat belt on before he even gets the truck started, and then she's reaching for the radio when Bruno Mars comes blaring through the speakers. "He's terrible," she tells him seriously, punching the preset buttons until she finds a station playing some classic rock.

Puck just laughs, and his fingers brush over the ends of her hair when he puts his hand on the back of the seat when he turns to back out of the parking space.

There isn't really anywhere to go in Lima, so they end up just driving around, talking about whatever comes up while Rachel works her way through the rest of her box of SweeTarts. ("Please, Noah, take them away." "If you like 'em, eat 'em, baby.") Rachel does most of the talking while Puck guides his truck out of town, cruising along the back roads that he learned driving around Finn and the guys because he was the first one to get his license. He's used to rocking out on these roads and listening to Matt Rutherford giggle like a girl because that's what he does when he's had more than three beers, but listening to Rachel talk is better.

She talks about celebrating Christmas with her daddy's family, saying that she really loves the music even if she is a Jew. ("I don't mind singing about the birth of a savior, even if I don't believe that's what he was.") She tells him that she intends to look for a teacher willing to serve as faculty advisor for a spring musical ("Phantom of the Opera would be ideal, but I doubt it would be approved for McKinley, so I would settle for West Side Story.") because she needs to have a lead role in a musical on her resume if she intends to get into a good performing arts program after high school. She mentions getting roped into running her temple's bake sale, but that she's actually looking forward to spending an afternoon with Tina, the other girl who's doing it.

"I won't be offended if you ask me to stop talking," she finally says. She's shaking the last of the SweeTarts into her hand when he glances over at her. "I tend to run off at the mouth when people let me."

"I like listening to you talk," Puck admits, slowing the truck so he can turn off onto a gravel road. He knows there's a driveway out here that leads to some guy's corn field or whatever where they can park. Even though it's been a while since he's driven around like this, Puck isn't too keen on wasting all of his gas in one night. That shit's not cheap.

"Really?" Rachel asks dubiously. "I'm not annoying you?"

"Rachel, if you were annoying me, I'd take you back to your car," Puck tells her honestly. He would, too. Instead, he finds the driveway he was looking for and turns in, parking the truck and killing the engine, though he keeps the key turned so that the radio plays quietly in the background the way it has been all night. He shrugs when he sees the way Rachel is looking at him, her eyes wide in the glow of the lights on the dash. "We were wasting gas. You don't mind, do you?"

She shakes her head a little. "No. I think it's your turn to talk though," she says, unbuckling her seat belt and turning to face him, pulling one leg up into the seat. He checks to see if her skirt falls to cover her, even though she's wearing tights. It's habit, okay?

"I don't have anything to say."

"I don't believe that for a second, Noah."

"Uh."

"What's the most interesting thing to happen to you since break started?" she prompts, brushing her bangs out of her eyes.

"I ran into Quinn the other day."

It just falls out of his mouth, honestly, and the second it does, he wishes that he hadn't said it.

"Oh." Rachel swallows, then smiles wryly. "How is she?"

"Fucked up," he answers flatly. "My life would be easier if I never had to see her."

With the exception of that one time, they haven't ever talked about Quinn. Puck doesn't like to talk about her, frankly, and it isn't like he has any reason to with Rachel. But since he just opened his stupid mouth, that's apparently about to change.

Rachel is quiet for a minute, then she takes a deep breath and meets his eyes. "Did you love her?"

The only other person who has ever asked Puck if he loved Quinn was Quinn, and the question surprises him now just as much as it did when she asked it. Now though, his perspective on the whole thing is a lot different, with time and distance and all of the shit that he's kind of figured out with Dr. Berry. It probably makes sense, somehow, that this would come up with Rachel. Really, Quinn gets at least a little bit of credit for all the stuff that's happened with Rachel in the last few months; she set all of this in motion two years ago when she told Puck how much she hated "Rachel freaking Berry".

"I thought I did," he says after a moment. "Now I think it was the whole having-my-baby thing. I liked the person she was in my head more than the person she actually was, you know?"

"You idealized her," Rachel says quietly, the corners of her mouth turning up when he nods. "I can relate. I did that with Finn, when we wre still trying to make glee club work. Until he found out that she was pregnant and it all fell apart, I just pretended that she didn't exist and ignored the fact that he shouldn't have been flirting with me at all. It was all built on a fantasy."

It occurs to Puck that if he hadn't gone along with Quinn lying about who the father was, Finn and Rachel could have had a chance to make things work. He remembers seeing the way that Finn looked at her when they were singing together, like she was the only other person in the room; the dude always did have a shitty poker face. It's just another way that he fucked Finn over when he went along with Quinn's lie.

"I think I learned a valuable lesson from all of that though," Rachel goes on, sliding across the bench seat so she's sitting in the middle, close enough that she can put her hand on the back of the seat next to his shoulder. "If someone isn't willing to be with you all the way, they probably don't deserve to have you at all."

The way she says it, it makes it sound like Quinn isn't good enough for him (and Finn isn't good enough for Rachel) instead of the other way around, which is the way that it always felt. It's kind of awesome to know that there's someone who thinks that he's too good for Quinn, because for the last year, everyone's been looking at him like it was all his fault, like he ruined her life and she wasn't responsible for any of what happened between them.

There's something about the Berrys that helps him figure his shit out, and he thinks, not for the first time, that he'd like to come clean and tell her that he's in therapy, which would lead to telling her that her dad is his doctor. The fact that her dad knows about a lot of the awful shit that Puck's done in the past isn't likely to work in his favor if they start officially dating or something, but it is what it is. If his doctor wasn't her dad, he's almost positive that he would have told her about it already.

"You're kind of awesome," he tells her after a minute, mostly because he doesn't know what else to say. Puck's therapy sessions with her dad aren't the right thing to bring up now. It's totally true though, and the sweetest little smile spreads across her lips.

"You aren't so bad yourself," she quips.

She leans into his touch when he curves his hand around the side of her neck, his thumb brushing over her earlobe when he kisses her, just sipping at her lips until she makes an impatient noise and pulls away. "I've been waiting for you to do that," she murmurs, peering up at him from under her eyelashes, her hand slipping under his coat to press against his chest. "Please don't tease me."

"Fuck, baby."

She mewls into his mouth when he kisses her again, her fingers curling into his tee shirt when he nips at her bottom lip, and before long, he's pulling her into his lap and unbuttoning her coat so he can get closer to her. He can't take the coat off though, because it's December in Ohio, and even with the heater running in the truck, it's too cold to start taking off clothes unless they're both going to take off all of them.

They're completely stupid for doing it where they do, but they spend nearly an hour like that, making out and talking a little. (Puck's basically torturing himself, because the way that she curls her tongue around his shoots straight to his cock, and he knows that isn't happening here tonight. It's worth it though.) They don't leave until they have to go so he doesn't miss his curfew.

Rachel sits in the middle seat for the drive back to town. She has her hand on his leg, her fingertips brushing over the seam of his jeans at the inside of his thigh, keeping him half-crazy even though he knows she doesn't know it.

Puck is walking along the path at the side of the Berrys' house, his head ducked in a mostly failed attempt to protect his ears from the icy wind when he hears someone coming up behind him.

"Noah," Dr. Berry says, around the corner and rubbing his hands together briskly. He's wearing a sweater, but no coat, which seems really stupid. "Follow me," he instructs, jerking his head back towards the front of the house and turning without waiting for Puck's answer.

"What's going on?" Puck asks when the doctor leads him up the steps onto the front porch.

"The snow caused a bit of damage to the roof of my office, and now it is cold and wet in there," he answers, wiping his feet on the mat just inside the door and closing it behind Puck while he does the same. "We'll have to meet in here until I can get it fixed."

Dr. Berry leads him through the house to a little room with an upright piano and walls that are lined with bookshelves. Puck looks around while he settles into a yellow armchair, squinting a little in an effort to read the title of the sheet music on the piano.

"So what's new with you this week?" Dr. Berry asks once he's gotten all of his own stuff sorted out and is sitting in a chair that matches the one Puck's in. Just like always, there's a yellow legal pad in his lap and a Bic pen in his hand.

Puck doesn't generally spend time outside of therapy thinking about what happens when he's here. He comes because he has to, not because he wants to, so it's not like he's sitting at home coming up with different things he wants to talk about or discuss or whatever with Dr. Berry. He shows up and answers questions and lets the conversation go wherever it (or Dr. Berry, he guesses) wants to. This week though, he's actually been thinking about something for more than a couple of days.

"I think I realized something," he tells Dr. Berry, who just raises his eyebrows questioningly. "You know how I tried to like, convince Quinn that I wasn't a loser, but it never mattered what I did, I wasn't good enough? And nothing ever changed?" Dr. Berry nods, setting his pen down and watching Puck closely. "So when we were together, it was just because she was pregnant and she was supposed to be with her baby daddy. She was never with me. And that sucks."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, if she didn't to be with the dude that I was, she shouldn't have been with me at all, baby or not, right?"

When he told Dr. Berry he realized something, he meant that Rachel pointed it out to him, but whatever. It counts no matter how he got there.

"So, what does that mean?"

"It means Quinn sucks," Puck answers seriously, watching the way that Dr. Berry struggles not to laugh. "But I don't want to be with someone like that any more, where shit doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean or whatever."

"You want to have a relationship that's more...authentic, maybe?" Dr. Berry suggests.

Puck shrugs. That seems a little heavy for his junior year of high school, but he likes Rachel. "There's this girl, and we started out as barely friends, but I really like her," he admits. "And I think she might like me. And it feels good." It feels better than it ever did with Santana or Quinn or whoever else, really, this thing he's got going on with Rachel.

It's probably weird that he's admitting it to her dad before he tells her, but whatever. This whole thing is a little weird. He hasn't figured out how to tell either Rachel or Dr. Berry about his relationship with the other without it all blowing up somehow.

He'd like to think of something, because the other thing that he's figured out in the last couple of days is that he really likes Rachel, enough to want to see if they could really be together.

Dr. Berry smiles and picks up his pen again. "I think that sounds great."

"I ran into Quinn, too," Puck says before Dr. Berry can ask a question. If he's going to start volunteering information like that, he might as well admit to being a jackass to this girl and try to figure out if he's a complete douchebag for feeling a little bit good about knowing that she probably cried.

Okay, maybe this therapy stuff isn't complete bullshit.

He's shrugging into his coat just inside the front door after his session when he hears Rachel's voice ringing through the house and freezes for a moment before turning in time to see her coming down the stairs.

She falters just a bit when she sees him standing there, but then the corners of her mouth turn up. "Noah. What are you doing here?"

Fuck. "I had an appointment," he answers stupidly. "With your dad."

"Oh." She nods her head, her expression unchanging. "It's good to see you, but I have a voice lesson that I'm going to be late to if I don't leave right now, so..."

"Yeah. Okay. Later."

He stands there awkwardly in her front hallway when she steps out the door, closing it behind her.

This isn't the way that he wanted to tell her about this.

He figures that Rachel finding out that he sees a shrink is going to be what ends this thing they've been doing. Sure, she's forgiven him for all the stuff that he used to do to her, and all the stuff that he knew about and encouraged. But...his shrink is her dad, and he's been seeing the guy for months without mentioning it once to Rachel.

All of that probably wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't started hanging out with her to keep her from telling her dad what an asshole he was to her for the first half of high school.

He really fucked all of this up.

No, you know, making friends with her wasn't the fuck up. That, actually, worked out for the better, because Rachel is awesome. Too awesome. That's what caused the fuck up. If he hadn't gone and started to like, fall for her.

Shit.

He's totally fallen for her.

His timing on this realization totally sucks, too.