These strange steps

5. Five

Patience has never been her strongest suit.

It surprises her that she lasts until her dinner break on Friday to dig out the note with Quinn's number on it—her print still fine and girly, as an almost morbid contrast to the rest of her these days—and shakily dials it. She doesn't let herself get nervous, because if she starts to think about it, she'll just—

"Hello?" Quinn asks, sounding distracted. Rachel can hear traffic in the background, which is good, because it means that Quinn's not—on her way to work. Or at work. God, that thought smarts. She pushes it to the side and clears her throat.

"It's me."

"Oh," Quinn exhales. There's another loud honk in the background, and Rachel waits patiently. "I thought I made it clear that—"

"I can't stop thinking about you," Rachel says, because it's a little bit better than we only have two months, Quinn, stop wasting our time. Not much, but a little.

The line is silent, background noise notwithstanding, until that suddenly dims and Rachel hears a door slam. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize Quinn's place; is it an apartment or a house? Is it homey or distant? Sleek lines or the same kind of archaic, Napoleonic print that Finn once told her lined the Fabray house?

"Is this how this is going to be?" Quinn finally asks.

Rachel feels her entire frame tense, almost immediately. There's no warmth in Quinn's voice; if anything, she sounds distantly annoyed, like Rachel is some fly buzzing in her ear.

"I don't know what—" she starts saying, just to say something.

"Is following my ... requests only an option for you when I'm fucking you?" Quinn asks, more harshly now.

Rachel closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. "No. I'm ... I'm sorry. I said I would wait and I was going to but—"

"Yeah, but. But, nobody says no to Rachel Berry these days, do they? Or hell—I don't even think I mean these days. Has anyone ever told you no? Have you ever even cared?"

This isn't how this is supposed to go. They fucked, and that's supposed to be the first step towards... she doesn't know what she was thinking.

"I haven't thought of you ... in forever," Quinn adds, with a little more composure, when Rachel doesn't have the nerve to interject again. "You come waltzing into ... my place of employment, with your platinum card and your hero complex, and you expect me to just be okay with that because the sex could be really good."

"It's not just about—"

"Of course it is, Rachel. It's about wanting to fuck me and wanting to save me. It can't be about anything else because you don't even know me. And you know what? As much as I didn't want to associate with you in high school, at least back then you weren't constantly being followed by people with cameras who are a little too interested in your dating life for me to be comfortable with any of this."

Rachel rubs at her eyes and says, "Technically, I think I'm the one who's supposed to be worried about things like that."

"Oh, yeah. Of course. It's primarily a concern for you that you're all chummy with an exotic dancer. It's not like I have a career to be conscious of here, or people who don't know about that part of my life for very good reasons," Quinn bites out.

Rachel tugs her lip between her teeth and then says, "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I wanted a week to figure out how I can do this."