The rest of the week passed quietly for Quinn. She left the house only for follow-up visits with the doctors—who declared that she was "healing beautifully", to which Quinn snarled a threat in response and was halfway off the examination table to hit him before Rachel and one of her fathers could hold the blonde back—and spent the vast majority of her time either curled up on the couch watching movies with Rachel or alone in her room, reading book after book in an effort to occupy her mind and avoid sleep.
Whenever she did fall asleep alone, it took tears that soaked her pillow and her hair and the edges of the blanket for her to succumb to unconsciousness; she could only fall asleep with dry eyes if someone stayed with her. Most often, it was Rachel's familiar shoulder she nestled into, the lingering smell of cinnamon and jasmine and vanilla from her perfume that Quinn grew accustomed to breathing in as she fell asleep, the soft sound of Rachel's voice murmuring unintelligible words of comfort that calmed Quinn down the fastest every time she woke up from a nightmare of a small house with a garden and a dog and Puck and their daughter living happily ever after. Her sister had stayed with her a few nights, but it was Rachel that was always miraculously there within minutes of Quinn breaking down every time, quiet and gentle and unhurried, so very different from the Rachel Berry who enunciated every syllable and demanded the spotlight at all times.
By Saturday, Quinn felt well enough to leave the house, determined to put on a brave front, and set about convincing Rachel that they should go out to lunch. She pasted a smile on her face—it was small, as she was still so very far from being remotely okay with anything, but it wasn't as forced as she expected it to be—and set down her book, looking over to where Rachel sat struggling with a pre-cal study guide.
"Let's go out," she said after a long moment of watching her friend.
"Let's what?" Rachel said, looking up with her brow furrowed, as if Quinn had suggested they join the circus.
Quinn raised one eyebrow at her, the gesture comforting and familiar, and her tiny smile widened the smallest bit. "Let's go out to lunch," she said. "I want to get out of the house."
"Quinn, you've barely eaten all week, and now you want to go out for the specific purpose of buying food, which you will probably not eat even a tenth of?"
"Yes," Quinn said resolutely. As if to prove her point, she threw the blanket off of her legs and stood from the bed, stretching as far as she could without prompting a ripping pain in her abdomen. "I've been inside all week, and it's spring. I want to go out."
"I don't know," Rachel said. Quinn wasn't sure if she had ever heard Rachel sound quite so dubious, and grimaced at her.
"Well, I'm going," she said. "You can come or not." She moved over to the closet, flipping through her clothes to find something suitable to wear. Her fingers brushed against her favorite pair of jeans, unworn since October and the early stages of her pregnancy, and she hesitated only briefly before tossing them onto the bed behind her.
"You can't drive," Rachel said from behind her.
"Beg your pardon?" Quinn said. "I'm a better driver than you, miss always-ten-under-the-speed-limit."
"It's a speed limit, Quinn," Rachel said automatically. "It just means you aren't supposed to go any faster than that, not that you should go at least that fast."
"Whatever you say, granny," Quinn shot back. She located a t-shirt from the one season she had played indoor soccer, long ago in the fifth grade, and grabbed it as well. The old shirt was worn and faded, the collar fraying, and she had only ever worn it around the house or when she went running, but it was comfortable and comforting, a token from when things were simpler.
Quinn turned around, unsurprised to see Rachel standing just behind her, hands on her hips. "So, are you going to come?"
"Well, I guess I have to," Rachel said. "You can't drive. You're still on painkillers."
Quinn shrugged. "No, I'm not," she said, her voice a little bit softer, a little less forcedly flippant. Her smile slipped.
Rachel's eyebrows rose. "The doctor said at least two weeks."
"I'm fine," Quinn said. She forced the smile back up, stepping around Rachel and peeling off her sweatshirt, glad her back was to Rachel so the other girl couldn't see the grimace of pain when she lifted her arms over her head.
"Quinn," Rachel said slowly.
Quinn shook her head, back still to Rachel as she tugged her t-shirt on. "Don't, Rach," she said softly before turning around. "Let it go."
"The doctor said you would be in pain for a while, is all," Rachel said. "It's why he gave you the pills. I just don't want you to be in pain."
"Of course I'm in pain," Quinn snapped, her eyes flashing. "But I'd rather feel like someone kicked me in the stomach than think about why it hurts." Her eyes softened slightly, shoulders slumping. "I take a painkiller, and my stomach doesn't hurt anymore, and then I don't have anything to focus on. I either get loopy and feel stupid happy, which is just disgusting right now, or all I can think about is—"
Her breath caught in her throat, and one of Quinn's hands rose inadvertently to cover her mouth, as if to block the sobs that wanted to break through. Her eyes stung, and she opened them wide, determined to make it at least two hours in one day without crying. Rachel watched her silently, looking so lost that Quinn felt a stab of guilt of an entirely different variety lancing through her chest.
"Just let it go, okay?" she said quietly. "Please. I'm asking you, as a favor for a friend, to let me deal with this my way."
Rachel nodded silently. She stared at Quinn, her jaw clenching and unclenching as she seemed to struggle for the words she wanted. "Okay," she said finally. "Okay." She forced a smile of her own, and Quinn didn't miss for a second that it never quite reached her eyes. "Let me go change and we'll go."
"Okay," Quinn whispered. She watched Rachel walk out of the room, shoulders slumped, and bit her lip.
Half an hour later, they were seated at a Mexican restaurant, Rachel watching in awe as Quinn systematically worked her way through the basket of tortilla chips and bowl of salsa between them. Quinn had always loved Mexican food, having had a penchant for all things spicy since she was a small child, and had loathed the fact that during her pregnancy, just the smells wafting out of a Mexican restaurant had been enough to send her reeling towards a bathroom to vomit.
"I had no idea," Rachel muttered. "You eat like Finn."
"Hey!" Quinn said indignantly. She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin daintily and took a sip of her water. "That's patently untrue. That boy doesn't eat, he shovels. I do not eat like that."
Rachel snorted. "You just ate an entire basket of chips by yourself in under ten minutes."
"I did not!" Quinn said. Rachel raised her eyebrows and pointed to the basket on the table, empty now save for a few chip remnants. Quinn flushed brightly. "Okay, so maybe I was hungry."
Rachel crossed her arms, sitting back smugly. "Victory is sweet," she sang.
"Oh, don't start," Quinn mumbled, glaring across the table at her but wholly unable to keep a smile from spreading across her lips. Rachel merely smirked, shaking her head, and then glanced down at her watch.
"Somewhere to be, sasquatch?" Quinn said teasingly. "Or am I boring you?"
"No, not at all," Rachel said. "I greatly enjoy watching you inhale chips so quickly that I don't get a single one of them." She smirked as Quinn's flush deepened the slightest bit. Her eyes flicked over Quinn's shoulder, and her smirk grew into a grin. Quinn glanced over her shoulder, and her eyebrows rose in surprise, mouth dropping open slightly, when she spotted the entirety of the glee club walking towards their table. Amidst cheerful greetings from the group, Finn and Mike quickly pushed four more tables on either side of the one Rachel and Quinn sat at, and they all plopped down to join them for lunch.
"Hi," Quinn said uncertainly. "What are you guys…?"
"It's the end of the break, girl," Mercedes said dismissively. "We're celebrating our last days of freedom. As a team."
"Yeah," Artie chimed in from where he had staked out a place next to Quinn. "Besides, who doesn't like Mexican food?"
"Certainly not Quinn," Rachel said. "Especially not the chips."
Quinn glared at her, throwing a balled-up napkin across the table. She smirked as it flew between them and smacked Rachel dead in the face. Santana laughed, her chuckle somewhere between demeaning and friendly and Brittany giggled brightly, hugging Quinn awkwardly from her seat next to the blonde; Mercedes snorted behind her menu, and Matt complimented her throwing abilities. From across the table, in his seat next to Rachel, Puck winked at her before elbowing Rachel and putting his arm around her shoulders in a deceptively casual manner; Quinn could see the shadows in his eyes that matched her own, that they both struggled to hide. Kurt, on Rachel's other side, rolled his eyes at Puck's antics and plucked at Rachel's sweater sleeve disdainfully, announcing the necessity of a shopping trip and a makeover that involved neither plaid nor argyle.
Quinn felt her smile growing, the pain in her stomach—it had been far more persistent than she had wanted to admit to Rachel, especially since she had stopped taking the vicodin two days earlier—fading from the forefront of her mind. She bit her lip and forced her attention onto the fact that she was out to lunch with her friends, that there was no judgment or expectation, that she could relax and just be with them, instead of on the nagging pain in her abdomen or the lingering guilt and despair she had felt overwhelm her since she woke up in the hospital. She pushed away her thoughts and daydreams of her daughter and instead listened to Artie's stories and Mercedes' anecdotes and Puck's smartass comments.
It was okay, she told herself, to push away thoughts of the child who was never born in favor of the friends who were there in her stead, just for an afternoon. Her daughter would have understood.