❛ i love you. do you love me? ❜
Character: Noah Puckerman
Well he certainly hadn’t been expecting that.
Attending McKinley High’s twenty year anniversary for their class, Puck hadn’t been expecting much of anything or even a big turn out but he had been proven wrong. Rachel Berry, a girl he vaguely remembers annoying like hell and maybe throwing a slushy at a few times, organised the meet up and Puck had accepted the invitation with nothing much else to do.
He’d pretty much peaked at high school and he knew it. He was the star football player, a title given to him when his best friend--and captain of the team--had knocked his girlfriend up and they’d ran away to live out their best life as teenagers with a baby. The last he heard he was doing well on some farm somewhere or whatever and she was raising the baby in a big house with her rich parents. Neither were in attendance for reasons he really didn’t care about.
With a divorce of his own under his belt--his twenties were a blur of alcohol, cheap drugs and women with tits bigger than his future--Puck figured he’d throw caution to the wind and go back to his high school for one last night. He’d only moved a few miles out of his hometown --(after trying his luck in LA, Vegas, Washington and Nashville) -- so the drive had basically consisted of him bellowing the discography of Billy Joel and Bowie in his favourite truck. At one point Kelsea Ballerini started singing about living in high school and never growing up and he’d turned the music off at that point.
But when he’d arrived, it really was like stepping back in time and seeing all of his old familiar faces immediately calmed him. Brittany Pierce was dancing off to the side with Sam Evans, a couple that had gotten together in junior year and clearly stayed together through it all. Which was cool to think about.really since all the other couples had broken up. Mike Chang was stationed near the DJ area looking far richer than anyone else in attendance, besides maybe Mercedes Jones. There was another kid standing next to a guy in a bowtie but they kind of looked exhausting so he’d ignored that and found his way to where the snacks were.
It wasn’t until Santana Lopez had strutted in did he really feel like he was back in his Letterman, sporting a mohawk and fiddling with a football. Santana Lopez had always been that girl to Puck. The one he couldn’t quite have, the one that always kind of just stuck on the edges of being a best friend and kind of something more but never really stepping over that line. There was one time at a party where they were playing Spin the Bottle and it had landed on her and he had gone to lean in but Santana was so drunk she had ended up crying and, well, that was just awkward.
“Lopez, you look amazing,” he greeted her as she walked towards him and she just cast him that wicked red lipstick painted smirk that made his knees weak and his dick hard. “How long has it been?”
Eighteen years, turned out.
Eighteen years since he’d actually seen everyone after they graduated and, for possibly the first time in a long while, Puck appreciated the little nerds who did this shit. Santana was a lawyer, she told him, and she barely reacted when he told her he was still cleaning pools but, like, professionally now. With an actual business. And a website (that his sister ran.)
For hours he stayed by her side; occasionally dancing, sometimes drinking, mostly catching up over the lost years of their adult life. She laughed when he admitted he was divorced and then casually told him about the very rich man she had kept around for a long time while she climbed the ladder in her own career. It was exactly the same Santana he had fallen for; ruthless, independent, funny. Nearly forty and pretty girls still fucking broke him.
They were outside when she said it; “I love you. Do you love me?”
It shouldn’t have been surprising really. Santana was always brave where Puck was impulsive but he’d wasted too many years on bodies he couldn’t remember that he wasn’t going to pass anything up now. He exhaled the smoke from his lungs, watching as it gathered together and swirled in the freezing air surrounding the school and he nodded once.
“Think you might have been the one who got away,” he told her seriously, not wanting it to be a joke or a push and pull or some fucking stupid shit they would have done in high school. He was too old for that shit. “Not sure ‘bout the love thing yet, Lopez. But trust me, I don’t think it’ll take me very long to get there.”
