These strange steps

17

The call comes, as these things tend to, without warning.

...

One minute, she's listening to the news on the kitchen radio and buttering some toast while an orange is being pressed in some gadget that Quinn showed her how to work, two weeks ago, and the next, her phone is ringing.

It's pre-coffee, and anyone who knows her would know that, so she lets it go to voicemail and changes the station to something else. 80s classic rock, 2000s R&B, hits from the 70s... she keeps going, until suddenly she's found some motown.

Not a genre she ever got to sing in Glee; it had been Mercedes and Santana, usually, except for those rare moments when Quinn had bothered with a solo-and those had been sparing, but this is a gentle, pleasant reminder of the girl she'd once known.

It's also not music that reminds her of her life, and that's-

The phone rings again, almost as soon as it's quieted down the first time, and she puts down her knife and heads over to it.

"Kurt, what-"

"Rachel, I am going to be as calm about this as possible, okay, so bear with me-"

She pauses, literally stills her entire body, and then says, "Calm about what, Kurt?"

"TMZ. Front page, third article down. I have no idea why this wasn't cleared with us although the official response I just got was that since they blurbed it with Rachel Berry plays miniature golf with a friend, they-"

She lowers the phone, and in a daze flips open her MacBook and opens up Safari. She ... what the hell is the TMZ website address, anyway? Is it just a dot com?

These are things she knows, when Kurt isn't saying things like Rachel Berry plays miniature golf with a friend, but it doesn't matter, that she's blanking on them now. Google exists for this reason, and so she types in the three letters, while Kurt is still warbling on about something in the background, hits search, and then clicks the top result.

A few taps of the down arrow later and-

It's not even really a gasp, the noise that escapes her. It's just sort of a brush of air that wobbles out from her lips, at the first picture, which is her pointing a golf club at Quinn, who is laughing at something she's saying. And it's innocent. So that's-

It's containable. And so she clicks on the more, and sees the next picture, and now they're walking side by side towards-the seventh hole? She doesn't know.

And the next picture. Quinn is bending over for her ball and she's grinning at something.

And the next picture. They are looking at each other, and-

She slowly raises the phone to her ear again, and then says, "I... we were just playing miniature golf."

"Rachel, I'm not here to ... chastize you, for ... okay, no, I'm sorry, I promised myself I wouldn't turn this into an epic match of how the fuck could you do this, because frankly, you're right. You went to play some idiotic children's game together, which isn't on par with attending naked lesbian mud-wrestling or a Tegan and Sara concert, so..." Kurt sighs in frustration and then says, "They should've been pre-cleared. We're exceptionally lucky that the editors actually used common sense in terms of what would invite my eternal wrath and the holiest of all legal smack-downs, because, Rachel, I have the rest of the pictures here and in one of them, I swear to God she's attempting to hump your behind-"

She squeezes her eyes shut and pinches the bridge of her nose. "The lady manning the booth. She recognized me. She...there was a look on her face when I was getting the club, and I should have known. We were in public, and I should have known better."