She can't sleep that night.
She hasn't been kissed like that in a long time. Sure, she's kissed people before, but she hasn't had the knee-buckling, heart stopping kinds of kisses since college, she thinks.
It's why she's lying in her bed and feeling her head reel instead of trying to fall asleep like she would normally be doing.
She had been pressed up against her counter for a decent amount of time, hands roaming across Finn's chest and his hands grabbing at her all over the place and feeling like she was actually wanted by someone for the first time in a long time. They didn't say much to one another; their hands seeming to do enough of the talking.
There's a small part of her in the pit of her stomach that wants to get out of bed and walk down the hall so she can see Finn again, and spend the night with him on the couch watching South Park until she fell asleep like he always does. She doesn't want to lose him for the moment, because it's totally logical for her to think that if she doesn't keep an eye on him at all times that he's going to disappear, just like that.
And then the logic in her head starts to kick in again and she comes to her senses. She can't just fall asleep with Finn after making out with him in her kitchen and pretend like it's something totally normal.
Besides, Berkley's out there on the couch with him. That should be enough for her.
:.:.:
She manages to sneak out of the house before Finn wakes up the next morning so she can go to work. She doesn't want to talk to him about last night. They had left it in the kitchen without saying much to each other, Rachel awkwardly retreating to her room.
That, and she doesn't want to see him in the morning.
She's afraid that her stomach is going to fill with butterflies and they won't be able to go away by the time she gets to work.
:.:.:
By the time Rachel gets back home after work, she decides that there's no use in trying to hide herself from Finn. Besides, he's usually asleep on the couch when she gets back from work. She thinks it's because of the chemo, and he's told her that being tired is supposed to be one of the side effects of his treatment.
He's not asleep, but he's doing what she's always found him doing at this point – watching TV and eating potato chips or Oreos or some other food she hasn't had in her apartment ever. Most of the time when she comes home and finds him like this, she normally chastises him for not using a coaster or wiping his hands on the couch cushions instead of the napkins that she's told him about countless times.
This time, however, she doesn't want to yell at him for anything. All Rachel wants to do is to be able to sneak back into her apartment without needing to talk to Finn.
She hardly makes it to the kitchen, however, before he stops her dead in her tracks.
"Rachel," he says, head popping up from the couch slightly. Rachel winces as he looks at her, nearly dropping her bags as she stops on her way to the kitchen. "We need to talk."
"Talk?" She stammers, trying to buy as much time as possible. "Why would we need to talk about anything?" She finds a stack of papers on the table by the door and starts going through them nervously, trying to buy as much time as she can. "We don't need to talk about it, because we live together, and we don't need to worry about what's happening between us, or whatever, and-"
"Rachel," he says, stopping her before she goes off on a tangent. "Stop."
She looks away from the papers she's shuffling on the table and looks up at Finn, her breathing ragged and eyes wide. There's not a single part of her that wants to talk to him about this, and she doesn't think that there ever will be, either. It's not like people who get involved with one another need to sit down and work through the logistics of their relationship. She thinks that they should be allowed to simply progress with whatever it is that they have with one another.
The only thing is, she's afraid to even think about that. Whatever they had in her kitchen the night before was just the two of them acting on feelings that she didn't even think were real up until that point, and now they're just left to clean up the mess that their emotions had made.
"Finn," she starts, trying to make her breathing continue at a normal pace. "We can't do this. Not with you, and me, and your…" She doesn't want to say it not only because she thinks it might sound borderline offensive, but because she's afraid to let her mind wander down that path; knowing that it's the inevitable that she'll have to face at some point in her future.
"I think we should just stay friends," she tells him, walking into the kitchen and doing everything in power to ignore him. It's awfully hard to do, but she manages. "Or whatever we were before last night. Alright?"
He follows after her and she can hear him behind her, almost afraid to turn around because she knows that she'll have to tip her head up and look at him and try everything in her power to resist him again, so keeps her back turned to him at all costs. If anything, he'll take it as a sign to walk away from her before they continue to cause any more damage to their already fraying relationship.
"I don't think we can do that," he says, his voice soft. He coughs slightly and Rachel turns around to face him, breaking every rule she's just made for herself only because she's afraid it's because that he's sick, and she doesn't want him to be sick simply because it scares her more than his cancer. "I… I really like you Rachel."
"Well, I would hope you would, considering we've been living together for the past-"
"No," he says, interrupting her. "I mean, I really, really like you."
The way he phrases it makes him sound like their back in middle school and he's professing his feelings to her the way someone whose voice hadn't changed yet and a mouth full of braces would tell her something. Even so, it causes her heart to start to melt and her mouth to hang open slightly, shocked at what she's hearing.
Finn Hudson can't like her. He's the one who ignored her every feeling in high school and didn't seem to care about whether she was feeling good or bad, so why would he start caring now?
Maybe it's a part of his bucket list, she thinks to herself, trying to keep her mind occupied as he continues to look at her. Maybe he just feels bad for me and wants to make everything up before he gets sicker or something. Maybe by saying that he likes me, he thinks that's he'll be able to patch up all of the holes in my heart or something.
"You sound like you're in eighth grade," she teases him, trying to avoid the topic. Rachel pushes past him and walks out of the kitchen to her bedroom, where she pulls her hair out of the ponytail that it's been in for the day and kicks her heels off by the side of her bed. He follows after her and she doesn't want him to, but she turns around at looks at him, knowing that she has to address this somehow.
"Look, I don't want to do this, alright?" She pushes her hair from her eyes and tips her head up so she can look at him, inflating her chest and thinking that she looks much more powerful than she actually is. "You've been living her for the past month or whatever and I've been fine with it, because nothing's happened between us. I mean, besides that time you accidentally saw me naked, I think we've been doing fine, and this – " She pauses, shutting her eyes and sighing. "Last night was just a bump in the road, alright? I was upset and didn't know what I was doing, and-"
She's stopped by Finn grabbing her by the waist and pulling her body into his, lips crashing against her own. Her eyes are wide and she looks at him, wanting to swat at his chest and tell him to stop because this is wrong, or whatever, but she doesn't.
She feels like she's melting into his arms and the thoughts of her pushing herself away from him stop.
"That's just a 'bump in the road?'" He asks her as he pushes her away from him, a stupid smile stuck to his face. Rachel looks at him and feels her stomach flip, not wanting to answer him. She's just going to sound stupid either way.
"Finn, I-"
"Why are you so afraid to do this?" He asks her, walking around her room. Now that she thinks of it, Finn's never had the chance to be inside her bedroom. It was one of the words she had created when he had first moved in and written on the whiteboard attached to her refrigerator, and she trusts that he hasn't broken any of the rules that she initially set up for the both of them to follow. "I mean, yeah, Rachel, what happened last night was totally… unplanned, or whatever, but I wouldn't have done it if I didn't like you."
"You don't like me," she tells him, crossing her arms across her chest. She feels her throat close and she stars choking on a sob and it makes her upset, because this is really one of the worst times for her to start crying. "You've never cared about anything I've ever done, Finn, and you know you haven't."
He looks at her and she nods her head, raising her eyebrows up slightly.
"You and Quinn and Santana and Puck and the rest of them treated me like garbage in high school, and I never got one apology for it," she tells him, her anger bubbling up from her toes and spewing out of her mouth. "And you played this stupid little act like you pretended to care, but I knew that you didn't just because you never did anything about it." She sits down at the foot of her bed and sighs, hanging her head down in her lap. "So if you get to pretend like you're in high school again and say that you like me, I get to remind you about how you treated me in high school." She starts to cry and does everything she can to keep herself from sobbing uncontrollably, knowing that he's going to try and comfort her if she does.
He doesn't, however, and she hears him walking around her room before sitting next to her on the foot of her bed, nudging her in the side to get her attention.
"I found this the other day," he tells her, causing Rachel to open her eyes. She looks down into his lap and sees their yearbook from their junior year, prompting an eye roll from her.
"You've been in my room," she says bitterly, looking away from him. "I thought we agreed that you wouldn't-"
"Will you just listen to me?" He says, causing her to be quiet. Rachel watches as he opens up her yearbook that she's bothered to save on her bookshelf for almost ten years. "I wanted to look through it, because I threw mine away, and I found what I wrote to you in it that year." She looks at him and sighs, glancing over at the book that he has open on his lap.
There's a picture of her and Finn standing with one another at one of the performances of the musical, because she's wearing her costume and makeup from the show and is holding a big bouquet of flowers in one hand. She can see that he had scribbled over it in pen and wrote what he had when she allowed him to sign it their junior year, but she doesn't think that she ever bothered to read it.
"I said, 'I don't think I've ever met someone as smart, talented and as beautiful as you before. I think that no matter happens within the next few years, you'll always be as cool as you are today. You're one of the only girls I know that doesn't care about what other people think about her – and in my book, that's the most attractive thing you could possibly do. Have a great summer, Finn.'"
He looks at her and Rachel looks back at him, sighing slightly. "I wasn't lying when I wrote that."
She nods her head and pushes her hair out of her eyes and behind her ear. "No, I - I know you weren't." She wants to kiss him and have him hold her in his arms while she goes on about everything that happened between the two of them in high school, but she's afraid to.
(Lately, it seems like she's afraid of everything.)
"I was never that girl in high school, though," she tells him, her voice bitter and weighed down with tears. "I was always afraid of what people would think of me if I did something wrong, or said something wrong, or spent time with the wrong people." She swallows thickly, still afraid to actually look at Finn. "You were wrong for thinking I was attractive for being all of those things."
The words stick in her mouth like taffy. She's never really had someone care as much as Finn seems to care about her before. The relationships that Rachel's managed to have over the years have never been romantic or all kinds of wonderful before.
All of them have seemed to end with her going through a box of tissues and listening to some Judy Garland album on repeat until she feels like she's ready to grow up and face the world again.
Finn sighs and looks at her, resting his hand on her knee. "I always thought that everyone was wrong for treating you the way they did in high school," he tells her. She scoffs and finally turns to face him, holding back tears.
"It's not like everything magically stopped after high school," she tells him. "When I went to college, I was still treated like I was some giant joke. I mean, people didn't think it was funny to humiliate me in front of the entire student body, but I was never the girl I wanted to be when I was little. I always wanted to be the girl that everybody looked up to." She sighs and leans her head against his shoulder; only because she feels that they've made it okay for both of them to do those kinds of things with one another now.
"You know how you always had that friend growing up that everyone wanted to sit next to on the bus? And so they would sit in the middle, because, naturally, it was the best way to solve an argument of two people wanting to sit next to one person?" Finn nods and watches as she falls into herself. "Well, I was never that girl. I was always the one who people would rather avoid than spend time with."
She watches as Finn smiles and looks at her sweetly. "I thought you said you had a boyfriend in college?" He asks, nudging her in the side gently. "Clearly someone must have liked you, Rachel."
"My relationship with Brody was very…. physical, I guess." She doesn't want to tell him about her past relationships, only because they're few and far between and they aren't exactly the proudest moments of her life. "We met in college and I liked him, and he seemed to like me, but we were never very serious. We dated and were romantic for a while, but it eventually turned into just sex, or whatever." She feels more embarrassed the longer she talks about it, so she tries to laugh to make it seem like she doesn't care about it as much. "I've never really dated anyone who's loved me, I guess."
She watches Finn as he looks at her and he grabs her hand, causing her to tip her head up to look at him.
"Would you ever date me?"
His question makes her feel like all of the feeling has escaped from her body and she feels herself start to tear up again.
"No," she tells him, her honestly even going to the lengths of scaring herself. "Because I'm afraid of falling in love with you."
She feels him press a kiss to the top of her head and she turns up to face him, catching his lips in her own. She kisses him and pushes him over on the bed so that they're both lying down on her bed, next to one another and their hands resting on the other; Rachel feeling Finn's large hands resting on her waist and her small hands resting against his chest. Her heart feels like it's going to beat out of her chest and she whimpers slightly as he continues kissing her, ultimately pulling away from him when the swimming sensation in her head gets to be too much.
"We don't have to love each other," he tells her, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She laughs softly and feels her face begin to pink the longer he looks at her. "We can just… be in love with the idea of each other."
She shakes her head and rakes a hand through his hair, trying her best not to cry, whatever the costs may be. "I just don't want to lose you," she tells him, knowing that her words are probably going to hurt her more than they will him. "You're sick, Finn, and I can't… I can't fall in love with someone who I don't know will be there in five years, or ten years, or-"
He laughs bitterly and looks at her, his smile making her feel like she's going to fall apart. "It's going to be alright, Rachel," he tells her, pressing a kiss to her lips. She kisses him back and continues to cry, feeling him pull her closer to him as she continues. "And if that's what you're afraid of, then I can… I don't need to stay with you anymore, or-"
"No," she tells him, shaking her head. "I want you to stay, Finn." She leans in to kiss him again, feeling his grip tighten around her waist. "I want you to stay and I want to be with you, and I don't want you to be alone while you fight this." He smiles at her and she smiles, giggling as she wipes her tears from her eyes. "If you're alright with it, I mean."
"Of course I am," he tells her, smiling and kissing her on the bridge of her nose. "I don't want to lose you, either."
:.:.:
A month goes by and they're still in the awkward living arrangement that she's set up from the beginning. She offers him a job at her school, because they're hiring in the library for assistants that don't need teaching degrees or licenses or anything, and he does, just because he tells her that he wants to spend the extra time with her.
She knows, however, that it's because he needs the money. Rachel doesn't understand how he still has enough money to continue with his treatments and everything, but he does. She refuses to ask him to help out on the rent or her electrical bill or anything else like that, simply because she feels sorry for him. She doesn't want him to feel like he actually needs to pay the rent or anything like that, but she feels like he needs a job.
Besides, seeing him at her job is more fun than she would have expected. She waves to him when she sees him shelving books in the library and he waves back at her, and sometimes when they're both in the staff lounge getting coffee at the same time he kisses her on the cheek, but that's about as far as they take anything. She doesn't want to lose her job, after all.
Finn's chemotherapy gets more intense and Rachel begins to take note in his weight loss and how lethargic he seems when they get home; sometimes too tired to even turn on the TV.
Some nights, he just lies on the couch with Berkley in his lap and she feels bad about everything. There are some nights where she starts to cry as she brushes her teeth at night or drives into work in the morning after dropping him off at the hospital, and she's been told by the doctors that it's completely normal for her to feel this way (they've assumed by now that she and Finn are more than simply friends).
There was one night where she had been cooking dinner for the both of them and Finn had been helping, but he told her that he felt sick and needed to lie down. By the time he had gotten to the couch, Rachel was leaning against the kitchen counter, head buried in her hands and crying uncontrollably.
She's always been a crier, but this is a new level for her. Rachel's never known someone to be as sick as Finn is.
The morning he wakes up and takes a shower and tells her that his hair is falling out, she decides to knit him a hat to keep his head warm and to keep him from walking around without any hair, or anything, just because she feels like he would feel insecure about it or something.
He tells her that he's not, but she doesn't believe him.
They're sitting on the couch together one night, Rachel in Finn's arms while she's knitting, watching something on the Food Network one night when he kisses her and she kisses him back, causing him to kiss her back again – only he really kisses her, causing her to drop the hat she's knitting to the floor and her legs to come up and straddle his waist, making her kiss him fiercely and lose herself for a moment before pulling away from him.
"We can't do this," she tells him, shaking her head at him. He looks at her, confused. "I mean, I want to, Finn, I – I really want to, but you're…"
"Rachel, I'll be fine," he tells her, pushing her hair out of her eyes and tucking it behind her ear. He drops a hand to her waist and traces her figure, sighing to himself. "I've wanted to do this since-"
"Since you kissed me that one night," she tells him, laughing to herself. "I know." She feels her heart swell and her stomach fill with butterflies, and she knows that he wants her, and it kills her because she wants him just as much, but she's afraid – and she doesn't want him to know, really.
"I'm just… I don't want to hurt you," she tells him, her voice dropping to a low, scared whisper. He looks at her and leans up, Rachel's hands falling behind his neck to support herself. "I mean, I don't know what you want and if you want to-"
"Rachel," he tells her, laughing as he cuts her off. "It's going to be fine. We'll just… take things slow, alright?"
She laughs and feels him pull her down onto his lap further, pressing a kiss to his forehead.
"Alright," she tells him, her voice soft and quiet. She likes how they whisper to one another despite being alone in her apartment. It makes her feel like there's something much bigger between them than she thinks there is, and she likes it. She likes the idea of Finn and her and if she were ten years younger, she would sketch their names together surrounded with little cartoon hearts in her notebooks.
He takes her shirt off and she removes his, spending more time with hands all over the bodies of one another and kissing one another than actually trying to be physical and rush into everything like two horny high schoolers. She's afraid to touch him and he's afraid to touch her, and she wouldn't have it any other way. It's almost better, actually.
She's never felt so connected with someone before – although she can't compare it to much, considering she's only been so involved with about three or four people in her entire life. He looks down at her and presses a kiss to her lips when she's ready to break, and it's enough to do it for her right there, her breath hitching in the back of her throat.
"I love you, Finn," she whimpers, her hips meeting his before nearly collapsing against the couch. He lays down on top of her, her nails raking down his back. For a moment, she's afraid of what she's said what she's said and she muses about taking it back or rewording her statement, but Finn presses a kiss to her lips and silences her.
"I love you too, Rachel." She kisses him back and feels her heart beat against his chest, her heart beating against his chest. They lie there with one another for a while until she falls asleep, his arms wrapped around her waist and holding her close against his chest.
She decides then and there, or at least before she falls asleep, that she doesn't want it any other way. Maybe Finn's come to her for a reason, like fate or some higher power controlling them like pawns or something. All she knows is that she loves him, and her heart can't afford to lose him any time soon.