I felt her warm breath against my neck just as she began to nibble my ear. Her soft hand fondled me beneath my Hello Kitty pajama bottoms as my heart beat furiously in my chest. She pulled away from my ear and asked me for the fifth time to say her name. I held off defiantly with a firm no. She giggled at my rebellion and I whimpered as she slipped two fingers inside me.
"Say my name. Say I love you Quinn." She instructed me. Her voice still playful and light.
"No." I said softly.
She began to move her fingers back and forth inside me. Slowly at first then with more intensity. My head was suddenly swimming. I didn't know which way was up. My body was a ball of nerves. Every flick of her wrist was like an explosion to my insides.
"Say my name." She repeated.
I relented, my strength and will power gone. "Quinn." I forced out between breaths.
"Say it again." She repeated, her fingers still teasing me with rhythmic thrusts.
"Quinn." I called out. My excitement was getting the better of me because I called out her name at an almost yell.
"Yeah, that's so sexy. I like it when you scream for me. Say I love you Quinn."
I obeyed her order like I always did. Something about what she did to me made it impossible for me to withstand her demands. I'd never felt this way before. The intensity was off the charts and I closed my eyes tight and prayed that we could stay this way forever.
(Later)
It was getting late and Quinn was still asleep. It was close to eight thirty and when she'd come over she told me she had to be home by nine before her mother returned from her aunt's house in Spencerville.
I dreaded waking her up. She was so peaceful. She wasn't snoring but I could follow her breathing as the constant breaths lulled me to a near Zen like state. She hadn't bothered to get dressed after our romantic tryst. I'd covered her with a blanket earlier when one of my dad's knocked on the door and asked if we were okay. I knew without a shadow of a doubt they'd heard us this time. I was sure to get a lecture about my behavior when she left for the night.
After she dropped me off on Saturday morning I didn't hear from her again until today. She hadn't returned any of my calls until this afternoon. When she finally called me back all she said was that she was coming over. Once she showed up she took me by the hand and drug me upstairs to my bedroom. There was no talking but it didn't matter. I had a strong feeling that I knew what she wanted.
There was no explanation for her disappearance for the last twenty four hours. It was like it never happened as far as she was concerned. I spent all of last night wondering what I'd done wrong. Since we'd became an item I'd never gone a day without hearing from her. She texted me every night before bed religiously. Last night's absence scared me. I'd worried all night about her and the state of our relationship. Was she mad at me? Was she lying face down in a ditch somewhere? In the hospital? I had no way of knowing.
It wasn't until I saw her that I figured it out. She wasn't mad at me, she was hiding. Hiding out from her reality. She was trying to avoid the fact that two more people in the world knew the truth about her. Quinn was clearly a scared closet case. She didn't want anyone knowing about her sexual orientation. In her mind anybody knowing the truth was a disaster. The realization that her two best friends at school knew the truth about her, about us, had scared her to death. Instead of talking to me about it she shut me out and shut herself down. Locked herself away from the world and hid like a child cowering under a bedspread hoping the evil closet monsters went away.
Yesterday on our way back to Lima after our impromptu hotel party she'd driven us home in absolute silence. Every attempt I'd made at striking up a conversation was met with a glare. The situation didn't seem that grave to me. Brittany and Santana had spent half the night making out, clearly they wouldn't out her to the rest of the school. To do so would be foolish and Santana Lopez wasn't foolish. She wanted people to know the truth about her about as much as Quinn did. When Quinn dropped me off at home she didn't even say goodbye. She simply drove away.
"Quinn. Quinn honey it's time for you to get up. It's eight thirty." I said giving her a quick shake.
She mumbled incoherently and began to pout.
"Quinn. Wake up."
Her pouting intensified and when I reached out and stroked her cheek she began to cry. Not the whimper of a child dreading getting out of bed after a long weekend. She cried real tears. Tears that I knew she'd have never let me see if she were awake.
I sat on my side of the bed in shock. Did people do this? Cry in their sleep? Why was she crying? A nightmare? Quinn never showed me her emotions. Well none of them but anger and lust. Vulnerability, pain, joy? These emotions seemed to be sorely lacking from her everyday arsenal.
I reached out for her and gently gave her another shove. "Quinn honey wake up."
She practically jumped out of bed. The movement was so fast it startled me. Her eyes were red and wide, face morphed in a frozen fixture of confusion. She looked around the room as if she were waking up from a coma.
"What?" She asked. I could see in her face that she was confused. She looked lost.
I climbed out of bed closing the distance between us quickly. I wrapped her in a tight embrace and pulled her close to me. "You were having a nightmare." I told her.
She let me hold the hug for a second before she pushed me away sending me rear end first back onto the bed.
"Get off me. Just leave me alone." She scrambled around the room for her clothes. She threw her white sleeveless dress on and slipped into her black flats and bolted from the room, snatching her purse off the nightstand on her way out.
I wanted to chase her, find out what her problem was but I was still in my underwear. I heard footsteps making their way up the stairs and rushed over to my door slamming it hard and locking it. I had to get dressed. My dads catching me in my underwear wouldn't be easy to explain.
"Rachel." My dad Hiram called out to me. "Rachel your father and I would like to speak to you please."
Oh lord, here it comes. "Just one second daddy." I said as I scrambled around the room for my pajama's. Quinn had pulled them off me and discarded them across the room on the floor. In the distance I heard her car door slam shut and her engine fire to life.
"We'll be waiting for you downstairs." My father said.
Great. Perfect end to the perfect night.
(Five minutes later)
The second I sat down at the dining room table I knew my goose was cooked. My fathers were both sitting impatiently waiting for me with anxious faces and their most tense posture. I could see the seriousness of the situation in their silent glares. They looked like they were about to defuse a bomb. A quick scan of the table in front of me relayed a few disgustingly inappropriate pamphlets. Daddy's little girl is getting it on with girls! And. I'm a shower peeper, does that make me a lesbian?
I wanted to scream. They had gone to speak to Mrs. Pillsbury after all. Lord, couldn't they have found somebody outside the school to speak to? The last thing I needed was that flake of a school counselor asking me questions. As soon as Quinn got wind of this she'd go ballistic.
"Daddy. Dad." I volunteered bravely. I couldn't hide. If I tried to hide and lie they'd no doubt deem me too immature to make my own decisions.
"Sweetheart first thing we need to say is that we don't want you to feel like we're coming down on you because we aren't. We love you and we want to see you safe and comfortable inside your home." My father Leroy said.
I took an internal deep breath and waited for the other shoe to drop. There was always a but with parents. The first thing was always soft and reassuring, the second intrusive and controlling.
"We aren't going to ask specifics but seeing as how you and Quinn are starting to get serious we think it's time to set up some ground rules." My father Hiram said. He looked completely uncomfortable and out of his safe zone. Growing up he'd spoiled me rotten in the arts and despite my growing female stature he refused to accept the fact that I was no longer his little girl. I was now a woman.
"Daddy Quinn and I are friends." I said. It was the only thing I could think to say about us. If I told them she was my girlfriend they'd expect us to do girlfriend things. The one thing I knew about Quinn was that she didn't do girlfriend things. At least not with me. She didn't come over and watch movies with me. We didn't go out to dinner on the weekends or catch movies on Saturday afternoons. Trying to explain the dynamics of our situation to them would prove too painful and confusing.
"Rachel. We're not blind." Hiram said.
"Or deaf." Leroy added.
I could feel my face turning red. How totally humiliating. Did they actually hear me moaning out my girlfriends name in ecstasy? I wanted to crawl under my bed and die.
"Daddy, I can totally understand how what's going on may be misconstrued as inappropriate. But I'll have you know that Quinn and I are simply very good friends. Over the course of the past few months we've grown really close. Our friendship is in fact vital for my development as a healthy young woman."
There you go Rachel, play the girl card. One of the perks of being raised by two men was that they weren't always clear on what was normal girl behavior and 'strange' girl behavior. I'd gotten away with murder simply by claiming PMS and cramps in the past. My poor fathers were genetically predisposed not to doubt me. Men hardly ever did. They were raised to take a woman at her word when she claimed to have female issues related to menstruation.
Leroy began to shake his head. "Rachel honey once again we aren't going to go into specifics. We want to honor your privacy. However we want you to read these." He shoved the pamphlets across the table to me. "And from now on we're asking for an open door policy when Quinn visit's the house."
I expected as much. There was no way they were going to let the two of us get intimate in my bedroom without trying to stop it. I'd have lost respect for them if they hadn't tried. On the other hand just because they were right doesn't mean I was going to fold without a fight.
"This is fundamentally unfair. Since when did this house become a dictatorship? Theoretically if you were right about me and her then my home is one of the few places I can entertain without fear of violence and ridicule. You two, my parents, should understand this more than anyone."
"Sweetheart we aren't saying Quinn can't visit. She's welcome here now more than ever. We'd just like to lay some ground rules down. Intimacy and physical relationships are extremely taxing emotionally, and we think you may be a little too young to engage in these types of decisions." Hiram told me.
How utterly insane. "That's just crazy talk." I told them. "You're going completely overboard here. I have half a mind to run away to escape this Stalinist oppression."
"Rachel your behavior and temper tantrum are proving our point."
I crossed my arms in defeat. "Fine. If you want me to prove it to you I will. I take exception to these insulting insinuations about my maturity. Not only that I abhor these rules, but in the spirit of being a good daughter I will follow them. Once I've proven my responsibility after a respectable amount of time I'd like to revisit this conversation."
They looked at one another and had one of their classic silent debates before they both nodded in unison. "Okay. Six months."
Six months? That may as well be a lifetime. With no other play but to agree I decided to play along. What else could I do? I had no idea how I was going to explain this to Quinn. She didn't like change. When she came over and I told her we had to sit in my room with the door open she'd go nuts. This was going to be a pain in my rear.
(Monday at School)
The second I got to school Monday morning I knew something was wrong. People were staring at me. Nobody stared at me. I wasn't the kind of student who elicited stares from my peers. Sure they sometimes called me names, and there had once been the occasional slushie thrown in my face but I was never the source of gossip and whispers.
Tina was waiting for me at my locker again and judging by the look on her face I could tell she was all set to fill me in on what I missed.
I didn't understand what was going on. Had the other students somehow found out about me and Quinn? How would they have done that? Tina didn't look disgusted. That was a plus. Maybe things wouldn't be too hard. If she stuck by my side, I could manage. One supportive friend was better than nothing I suppose.
"Rachel why didn't you tell me?" Tina asked as I spun my lock and opened my locker.
My breath caught in my chest. Here we go. "What was I supposed to say Tina? She told me not to tell."
Tina shook her head. "I hate that girl so much. She told you not to tell but she blabbered it all over Facebook last night."
What! She talked about it on Facebook? What in the world was she thinking? Did she have some kind of brain transplant? Surely this couldn't be my closeted lover Quinn Fabray. Something had to have come over her.
"What exactly did she say?" I asked cautiously.
Tina stared at a couple of football jocks as they walked by whispering, no doubt about me. One of the boys was the subject of her latest obsession. A tall thin Asian boy named Mike Chang. According to Tina they were destined to be soul mates because they were both Asian and shared the same last name. My internet research had revealed Chang was an extremely common last name. The equivalent of Jones or Smith in America. I kept this to myself so as not to crush her hopes of hooking up with a boy totally out of her league. Who was I to discourage her? I was dating the head cheerleader, albeit it was secretly it still counted.
When the boys passed us Tina regained her composure and refocused her best friend efforts to console me. "She told everybody that they tried to get you to admit to being a lesbian on Friday."
Oh, well I guess that did make more sense than Quinn coming clean and telling the world the truth about us. As much as I hoped she would one day I knew it was a pipe dream. Opening herself up to ridicule wasn't in her DNA. Opening me up to ridicule was totally fine it seemed.
That darn Santana. "I can't believe it. I saw through her little charade right away." I said lightly. "This is hardly the type of thing kids should concern themselves with. As if I'd be stupid enough to fall for such high school shenanigans."
Tina was staring at me slack jawed. Okay, actually denying it would be helpful. I decided ambiguity would be my friend. I didn't want to hide, at least not from Tina. She was my friend, or at least she was supposed to be. I wasn't going to lie to her about a fundamental truth about myself. I liked girls and wasn't ashamed of that fact. I may not be ready to shout it from the rooftop of Lima City Hall but it wasn't going to go away. It was a part of me. Tina could take this as her first hint. Yes Tina Cohen-Chang I am a lesbian. Deal with it!
"I don't know what you ever did to Quinn anyway." Tina said clearly ignoring my mental declaration and subtle hint. She was as blind as a bat. "Did you run over her dog or something? Why does she hate you so much?"
Wait what? Back the truck up? Did she just say Quinn did this? Quinn, I knew was capable of many things. She was randomly mean to me for a variety of reasons. In the grand scheme of things this wasn't even that bad. Of course she'd spread the rumor, she'd actually been the one to come up with the plan in the first place. Unfortunately I wasn't at all surprised it was her and not Santana who was spreading the story.
"Who knows Tina. Remember in Glee club when she tried to push me down the stairs. She's emotionally unstable." I said.
It felt naughty bad mouthing Quinn. I loved her to pieces but somewhere underneath it all I thought she may actually be a bit unstable. Her moods flip flopped on a dime and she made no effort to show anyone any empathy. My friend Kurt Hummel, the school's only openly gay kid, had once reasoned she had something he called 'Gay Rage' which was amplified by her all around soullessness. I asked him what 'Gay Rage' was and he explained it was when gay's were unusually cruel to the objects of their same sex sexual attraction. According to Kurt it usually presented itself as homophobia.
"I would imagine with her bonehead boyfriend she wouldn't have enough time on her hands to bother you." Tina said.
The words made my jaw go slack. Boyfriend? What boyfriend?
"Quinn has a boyfriend?" I asked, doing my best to hide the hitch in my voice as I did. If Tina heard it she didn't let on.
"Yeah, Finn Hudson." She said.
Finn Hudson, the same Finn Hudson she threatened to kill for leaking the location of our supposed to be romantic rendezvous spot. This couldn't be right. This had to be a mistake. Quinn was clearly gay. If she wasn't she was a darn good actress. What would she be doing with some boy? And Finn of all people? He was handsome in a high school boy sort of way. Kind of a dolt. Santana even calls him Frankenteen which I think is hilarious. Even if she wasn't gay I doubted he'd be her type.
"Oh." Was all I could say without giving myself away.
I decided I wasn't going to believe it. It wasn't true. How could it be? Quinn wouldn't do this to me. She'd done a lot of things but she'd never cheated on me. The likelihood she'd out of the blue start now seemed small. It was probably more high school nonsense.
I collected my things spent another minute or two casually talking to Tina then head off to class. My first period class was across the school. Usually I took the long way around so as not to run into Quinn and her circle of minions. She told me seeing me first thing in the morning made her uncomfortable and asked me to make myself scarce. Out of love I agreed.
The cheerleaders and Jocks usually camped out in the science hallway before school. I decided to satisfy my curiosity by cutting through. I didn't expect her to speak to me, that would be asking a lot, but I did hope to at least see her. Seeing her and Finn together but not together would be enough to remind me why I subjected myself to such abuse. I was her one and only. She'd said so on many occasions. She'd even gone so far as to claim me as her property, which was completely offensive in a cute way.
I took a deep breath as I stepped into the hallway. I saw the usual kids lurking. Dave Karofsky, Tina's dreamboat Mike Chang. Azimo Adams, Noah Puckerman. I spotted Santana and Brittany standing by a bank of lockers applying makeup to their already flawless faces.
Brittany saw me first. I watched her eyes widen with what I could only guess was uncomfortable shock and watched her arm reach out to grab Santana. She leaned into the Latina and whispered something softly that caused Santana's head to whip around like a boomerang.
Santana turned to me locked eyes for what seemed like an eternity then I watched as a smile crept across her face. I could actually see her eyes brighten and begin to dance with excitement. Brittany who was standing next to her tried to take a step away but Santana grabbed her by the wrist and shook her head.
All this happened in a matter of seconds and I tucked my head and continued down my path. I could feel Santana's eyes on me and in the distance I heard Brittany speak.
"I could have made it San." The blonde said. She sounded sad.
"That is not our problem Britt. We have our own problems. Number one being getting out of here before Fabray sees us."
I heard lockers slam and the sound of quick footsteps retreating down the hall. I gathered my courage and leveled my eyes to the crowd. Standing not twenty feet away I saw her. I found her looking much like I expected her to look, distracted and lost in her head. But what I didn't expect to see was some meathead jock's arms wrapped around her. Finn Hudson, captain of the football team and stereotypical high school celebrity was standing with his meaty paws wrapped around my girlfriend. Even worse she seemed not to mind. They looked comfortable that way.
It was true. How long had this been going on? She was messing around. With a boy. I felt like I was going to be sick to my stomach. It took me a second before I realized I wasn't walking. I was standing in the middle of the hallway, completely out of place staring at the two most popular kids in school. It didn't take long for somebody to notice.
"What are you doing Berry move it or lose it? Don't think because we're both two hot Jews I won't shove you in a locker for a few minutes on principle." Noah Puckerman teased. Once he found out I was Jewish he'd started being semi nice to me. Of course he threatened to do any number of mean things to me but he never actually followed through with any of them.
I turned to lock eyes with him realized I was standing in the middle of a game of hallway football and quickly pinned myself against a locker so he could jog by. A football flew inches in front of my face and I traced it's trajectory back to Dave Karofsky.
"Dude, that almost hit her in the face." Puckerman said. His voice wasn't angry but I knew him speaking up about it meant Dave's actions were unacceptable to him. Boys were a lot more up front about things than girls. Boys yelled and screamed and punched and settled everything in an afternoon while girls back talked and plotted against one another for months. Unfortunately his loyalty was lost on me.
In the distance I heard the voice and knew it was Quinn. "Let me go." She said harshly.
I looked up just in time to see her pushing herself away from Finn who despite the angry dismissal didn't seem to mind the treatment. In fact he was so engrossed in a conversation with another boy he didn't even notice it.
I watched her stalk me, eyes zeroed in like a scud missile. I didn't know what to do so I turned around and walked away as quickly as I could. When I turned the corner safely out of her vision I ran. I didn't stop running until I got to my car. I climbed in the backseat, laid down and for what felt like the hundredth time since we'd started dating, I cried.
It was at that moment that I made the decision. I deserved better. I couldn't do this anymore. I didn't want to be with her anymore. The relationship made me feel bad and I was tired of feeling bad. I dug out my phone and typed a message that scared the crap out of me.
I want to break up. I pressed send and turned the power to my phone off. I closed my eyes content to pull myself together and start my day over. Solo.