Bunches of thanks to everyone who reviewed last chapter :)
And also thanks to my beta Scarlett88.
I don't know if she still reads this story, but I want to dedicate this chapter to my Pooh Bear (you know who you are). I could never be mad at you and I miss you more than words can describe.
And without further ado, here is your chapter 16! Enjoy and remember to review after you're done!
Chapter Sixteen
Beth was cold, so cold. She was naked and cold and crying. She opened her mouth to scream for help, but nothing would come out. It was like her vocal cord was paralyzed. Suddenly she felt as if spiders were crawling all over her skin. She opened her eyes to find Jim lying on top of her, his naked, hairy body tickling her skin. She felt as if her throat was closing and it was getting harder to breath. No, this couldn't be happening; all this was supposed to be over. She tried to scream again but still nothing would come out. Why was this happening to her? Just when she thought she couldn't take it anymore, she began to shake as if there was an earthquake.
"Beth…Beth wake up," Shelby said as she shook her screaming daughter awake. Beth opened her eyes quickly. When she saw it was her mom she let out a sob and grabbed onto her for dear life.
A tear escaped Shelby's eye as she gently rocked her daughter back and forth, not knowing what to do. She didn't know how to make her daughter's nightmares go away, and she had never felt so helpless in her life.
"Don't let him hurt me anymore, mama," Beth cried.
Shelby pushed Beth's sweaty hair back from her forehead and kissed her. "You know I'll never let him near you again," she promised.
"Where's…Puck," Beth choked out.
"I don't know baby he didn't come home last night," she answered honestly.
It didn't take too long to rock to teenager back to sleep. Shelby didn't dare leave the room, but instead slept with her daughter wrapped protectively in her arms.
X-X-X-X-X
The first thing Quinn noticed when she woke up was the pain in her neck. The next thing she noticed was that she was cold; she then looked down and noticed she had no clothes on. She began to panic, and when she looked around her she saw she was in a car. She felt something against her shift, and when she looked down she saw tan skin. She began to internally freak out.
"Puck!" she yelled as she shook him awake.
He sat up very fast. "What is it?"
"What happened last night?" she asked. "We didn't…"
Puck looked at her and nervously nodded his head.
Quinn began to shake. She couldn't handle this; how could she have let this happen? She was officially no better than her cheating husband. Before Quinn knew it she was sobbing.
Puck didn't really know what to do. He tried to rub comforting circles on her back, but she jumped away from him. "Don't…don't touch me."
"Quinn…" he began, but she interrupted him.
"How could this have happened?" she cried. "I'm such a bad person."
"Quinn, you're not a bad person," he said. "This isn't the same as your husband. You two were already over when it happened."
Quinn was about to answer, but before she could Puck's phone began to ring. He found it on the floor in the pocket of his jeans. "It's Shelby," he told Quinn before answering the phone. "Hello."
"Puck, I was wondering if you'd be home soon?" Shelby said. "We have a meeting with the lawyer, and Beth has to tell her everything that happened and she really wants you there."
"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," he promised before saying good-bye and hanging up the phone.
Quinn, who momentarily forgot her situation because she was worried for Beth, quirked her eyebrows at him. He explained the situation to her.
"I want to go," Quinn said. "I want to be there for her."
"Okay," Puck shrugged.
Both adults scrambled to find their clothes and put them on. Puck walked over to Beth's car and backed out as Quinn followed. On the drive back to Shelby's house, Quinn was kind of glad for the Beth distraction so she didn't have to think about the fact that she had slept with Puck, in her car, in the parking lot of a bar, while she was still married. It was a good thing Quinn had years and years of experience at pretending to be happy because she knew that's what Beth needed right now. She would smile and be there for Beth, even though the inside of her was being torn.
All the thoughts were pushed to the back of her mind, though, as she pulled into the driveway and saw Beth sitting on the porch swing, listening to her iPod. Beth looked up at the cars and when she saw the two people who got out she jumped off the swing excitedly and ran to greet her birthparents.
"Quinn what are you doing here? I thought you went back home to Cincinnati," Beth questioned.
"I couldn't leave you when you needed me most," Quinn smiled.
Beth smiled back, hers almost a mirror image of her mother's.
Shelby met them all outside, and they hopped into her SUV and headed to the lawyer's office. Puck and Quinn were sitting in the back together. Puck kept trying to get her gaze, but she would not look him in the eyes. This was her way of telling him she wasn't going to think about what happened the night before, but he just wasn't getting the hint.
Instead of worrying about it, though, she focused her energy on Beth who was shaking with nerves in the front seat. Quinn knew Beth didn't want to relive all this, and she didn't want Beth to either, but she knew it was in Beth's best interest to have Jim behind bars. She reached through the side of the seat and gently squeezed Beth's shoulder to tell her she was there. Beth turned around and tried to smile at her, but she wasn't in a smiling mood anymore.
Soon they pulled up to the law office and waited in the lobby for the lawyer to be ready. Soon a skinny girl in her mid-twenties walked up to them. "Mrs. Roberts will see you now."
Everyone nodded and stood up before following the young secretary to a door. She knocked lightly before opening it and letting the group of people in.
They walked into the room. There was a large table in the middle with six chairs around it. Mrs. Roberts was sitting at the head of the table reading a file. She looked up from her papers to smile and greet her guests, motioning for them to sit. They did so, and Mrs. Roberts looked at them with a gentle, warm smile. She was about the same age of Shelby, around her mid-forties. She had fiery red hair that came to her shoulders. Her eyes were blue and inviting, and she wasn't the kind of lawyer Beth thought of when she thought about lawyers. She seemed friendly and caring, not uptight and cold.
"Hello to everyone. My name is Charlotte Roberts and I will be your lawyer for the duration of this trial. I'm guessing you're Beth?" she said looking to the teenage girl. She nodded. "Great. And you all are related to her?"
Shelby smiled. "Yes, I'm her mother, and my name is Shelby. These two," she pointed to Puck and Quinn," are Beth's birth parents who recently came back into her life, and they wanted to be here for her."
"That's great," Charlotte smiled. "The more support you have, the better."
"Now," she continued. "I read through your file and I know the general details, but the only way we're going to win this is if I know everything that happened. I know it's going to be hard to tell, but I promise it will all help in the end. I would never make you go through this if I didn't think it would make a difference, but it does. Why don't you start from the beginning?"
Beth nodded, a little hesitant. It took her a minute or two to bring all these memories she had pushed deep down back up, but finally she started. "It all started when I was nine, and my mom went to New York for the weekend. Mom and Jim hadn't been married long, and it was my first night completely alone with him. I liked it at first because he let me watch scary movies and stay up late. But then I finally went to my bedroom to sleep, and I was scared there was going to be monsters in my room, so I made Jim stand at the door while I changed into my pajamas. But before I had the chance to put my pajamas on, he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth. He…he pushed me onto the bed and I was so paralyzed with fear I…I couldn't move. I didn't really know what was happening because I was so young, but I knew it was bad and it hurt so badly. After he…after he raped me, he told me if I told my mom he would kill me. And I believed him. My mom continued to go out of town once a month for the next seven years and it happened every time."
At this point Beth was in tears, as was everyone else in the room, except Charlotte. She had been in this line of work for so long, nothing surprised her anymore.
Shelby, though, felt like she was going to throw up. She felt like the room was getting smaller and squeezing her on either side. It was hard to breath and all she wanted to do was leave, but she couldn't. She couldn't abandon her daughter when she needed her most. All this was already her fault.
"Is there anything else I need to know?" Charlotte asked.
"Well there was this one time," Beth began. "It was a year ago, and I told myself it wasn't going to happen again, that I was going to fight back. So, I did. He took me to the bedroom, but I flailed my arms and legs, trying to kick him somewhere, anywhere. He didn't like this at all. When he got me into the bedroom he pushed me hard into the door. He pinned me against it, and I tried to kick him but he was too strong." She let out a sob and took a couple of calming breaths before continuing. "He turned me around and kicked me onto the bed. After that I didn't fight back. I could barely move my back for a week. I told my mom I fell on it at Glee rehearsal but I lied. I always lied."
Shelby cried harder now. It killed her that Beth still thought all this was her fault. But before she had the chance to say anything Puck stood up. "I'm sorry I can't listen to this anymore," he said before pushing the chair back and walking quickly out of the room. He felt like he could kill. He had never felt so much anger in his life and he didn't know what to do with it. He couldn't even take it out on Jim if he wanted to since the bastard was in jail. All he could do was sit in one of the chairs outside the door and try to take deep breaths to calm him down and try not to think about what was being said on the other side of the wall.
After Beth finished telling Charlotte everything, the woman went through the legal proceedings and gave her a general timeline of what would happen next, and what she would need to do. She warned Beth that this was not the last time she was going to have to tell her story, and that this trial could last a long time.
Although Beth wanted nothing more than to never talk about it again she agreed to continue with the trial because she wanted Jim behind bars; she wanted to feel safe.
After the meeting was over Shelby decided Beth needed to go to school for the rest of the school day because she had already missed too much. Beth didn't want to, but she understood why so she didn't put up much of a fight. Besides she hadn't missed Glee, so it wouldn't be too bad.
Shelby had to go back to work to check on rehearsals. Quinn, who was still avoiding Puck, told him she had to get back to Cincinnati to pick her kids up from school.
"Are we ever going to talk about what happened?" he wondered.
"Eventually," Quinn answered. "I just can't handle it right now."
Puck nodded and resisted the urge to kiss her as she got into her car and drove away. He felt awful, knowing what happened the night before could have permanently ruined his chances with her. He felt so helpless about everything going on in his life, and he hated it.
X-X-X-X-X
Secretly, Quinn was not planning on going straight home. She was planning her own little detour. She called Joe and asked him to pick the kids up from school one more time, explaining she would be home by dinnertime.
When she arrived at her destination she could feel butterflies begin to form in her stomach. She didn't know if what she was about to do was the right thing or not, but her heart was telling her it was something that had to be done.
She entered the cold, stone jailhouse and shivered as she stepped inside. It was how she always pictured a jail to be; plain and colorless. She went up to the counter where an old, black lady was watching her miniature TV and not paying a bit of attention to her work.
Quinn cleared her throat to get the ladies attention. "Oh, sorry honey," the lady apologized. "Sometimes I get way into these soaps. How can I help you?" Quinn gave her a slight smile to tell her it was okay. "I'm here to visit Jim Sullivan," she said.
The woman nodded. "Okay, I'm going to need you to sign these papers first."
Quinn did as the woman told before she was led through a series of very high security rooms. She then arrived at the visitation room. It was a lot like in the movies; there was glass separating them and phones they could pick up to talk to one another. Jim wasn't there yet when she arrived, so she sat patiently and waited, going over what she planned to say in her head.
Finally she saw the door on the other side open and a man she guessed was Jim walking towards her. He was a bigger man but that was more from muscle than from fat. He had brown shaggy hair, and gray facial hair that had clearly not been shaved since he arrived. He was wearing the cliché orange jump suit. He sat down at the counter and picked up the phone; Quinn did the same.
"Who are you?" was the first thing he asked.
"My name is Quinn Fabray. I am Beth's birth mother," she answered simply.
His eyes grew wide. "And what are you doing here?"
"I came to ask, no to beg, that you plead guilty at the arraignment," Quinn said, her voice desperate.
"Why the hell would I do that?" Jim questioned.
"Because you know what you did was wrong," Quinn started. "You know what you did to Beth was terrible and toxic and as much as you hate being in here you know you deserve it. Just think about everything you have already put her through. You know you're not going to win the trial, so why make Beth relive those horrible memories over and over?"
Quinn looked into his brown eyes and saw they were regretful. "Are you offering me a deal?"
Quinn shook her head. "I'm not the lawyer, I couldn't even if I wanted to, which I don't. I'm here to tell you this could be a start to making things right. You'll never be able to fix the childhood you stole from Beth, but you can do this to make sure the next years of her life are not as terrible. You've already stolen seven years of her life, please, don't take any more."
Quinn saw a tear run down Jim's cheek. "I never meant for any of this to happen," he cried. "I wasn't always this kind of person; I don't know how I got this way."
"Once a monster, always a monster," Quinn said. She wasn't going to let him play the victim.
He looked up at her and stared her in the eyes. "Fine, I'll do it."
"You will?" Quinn was a bit surprised. She hadn't actually thought she would get him to change his mind, especially so soon.
He nodded. "You're right, I can't do this to her anymore."
"Well good, I'm glad to see you have some sliver of a heart deep down inside," she said. Before he had the chance to say anything else she hung up the phone and stood. She gave him one last glance before motioning to the guard she was done. He escorted her out of the building and she walked towards her car.
She had a long drive back to Cinci and a lot to think about. The words she had said continued to ring in her ears. Once a monster, always a monster, she had told him. Maybe that's why she had slept with Puck the night before. She had cheated on Finn all those years ago, and the cycle of cheating for her just continued. Maybe she was doomed to be alone forever as punishment for the crimes. Once a cheater, always a cheater, she should have said.
She knew Joe cheated on her first, but that didn't make her feel any better. She had never believed that two wrongs made a right. And yet there was something about the night before that did feel right. She hadn't felt the way she did last night in a long, long time. She didn't know if she had ever felt it with Joe. Sure, she had loved Joe there was no denying that. But maybe there were different degrees of love. She knows the love she has for Puck surpasses everyone, except for her kids. But she knows love isn't always enough, and that's what scares her the most.