Missing Moments

Piper and Finn Get Pizza

The day after 6x11

The pizza place Piper and Finn ate at after rehearsal was a DIY pizzeria that gave its patrons free reign to craft the pizza of their dreams. Piper had never eaten there before, but Finn evidently had, judging from the way he rambled about it on the entire walk from the studio to the restaurant.

Though they asked several of their other teammates to join them, everyone else already had plans, meaning Piper and Finn were on their own. A few weeks ago, that would have bothered Piper, and she likely would have come up with an excuse to get out of it. Now however, she figured that an evening spent with Finn outside of the studio couldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Who knew? Maybe it would be fun.

"Don't tell me you're one of those people," Finn groaned as soon as he sat down at their table and lay eyes on Piper's pizza.

She glanced down at her meal and frowned. "What?"

"Pineapple on pizza? Really, Pipes?"

Ah. So he was one of those people.

Smiling for perhaps the first time since Amy had revealed she was leaving the studio that afternoon, Piper rolled her eyes at him. "What? It's good." She picked up a piece, intending to take a bit to prove her point, but immediately dropped the pizza crust back onto its tray. It was way too hot to eat yet.

"It's a fruit," Finn argued, "Fruit doesn't belong on pizza."

"Tomatoes are fruit," Piper countered, quirking an eyebrow at him and peering at his own pizza, which was covered with every meat available and topped off with extra cheese. "What kind of sauce did you get again? Tomato sauce?"

"Okay, but it's not like I have whole tomato slices on mine. They're mixed with seasoning and stuff to make the sauce. It's completely different."

"You might need tomatoes on that. That pizza's all carbs."

"I'm a growing teenage boy. Give me a break," Finn responded with a roll of the eyes, but the corners of his lips twitched, and Piper took that to mean that she was the winner of this debate.

Carefully, Piper finally picked up a piece and took a bite. The roof of her mouth still got burned from the hot pesto sauce and mozzarella cheese, but it tasted as good as she could have dreamed.

Finn still looked unimpressed, however, and she frowned at him. "Have you ever actually tried it?"

"No, I don't like pineapples," he said with a shrug before taking a bite of his own pizza.

Piper gave him a dumbfounded look. "Well gee, no wonder you don't like pineapple on pizza."

"I guess we'll have to agree to disagree," Finn sighed.

"I guess so," she agreed, "That's more than my family does on the matter. My cousin says I'm a disgrace to Italians everywhere."

"Wait, what? Seriously?" Her comment effectively caught him off guard, and she nodded.

"He was only half kidding, I'm pretty sure." She still had yet to figure out if Freddie was actually serious, but knowing his love for authentic Italian cuisine, he was.

Finn's eyebrows had shot up, and he let out a low whistle, picking up another slice of pizza. "And I thought my family was tough."

"We're just serious about our Italian food," Piper told him with a shrug. The joking tone had dropped from the conversation, and it seemed that they had moved on from the pineapple debate.

"So is your family from Italy? Like, you're actually Italian?"

There were probably several ways Finn could have better worded the question, but he sounded genuinely curious, so Piper let it slide and nodded. "My great-grandparents came here in, what? 1940? Sometime during World War II. But that's just my mom's side of the family. My dad's family has always been in Canada, but we think we've got French ancestors somewhere on that side."