['"For someone who apologizes all the time, you're still sort of an asshole," you say, and immediately watch her face fall, her shoulders slip, with some sort of terrible satisfaction.' or, 3 times rachel gets (irrationally) angry at quinn & proceeds to apologize. angsty but fluffy drabble.]

[a/n: trigger warning for eating disorder discussion stuff.]

& breathing in silence here they stand (what if breath awaked should plunge us in the flames)

.

we are supposed to desire only certain people & only in certain ways, but her desire does not work that way, & she finds herself torn between longing & belonging. because she does not desire in conventional ways, she seeks to avoid desire altogether. her struggle with language, her attempts to remake herself through naming & remake the world with a new order of being, are ultimately heroic…
—jack halberstam, female masculinities

…

1

It's not that you don't understand that she's busy, and that Lucy Quinn Fabray doesn't always have graceful emotional responses, even now, under stress, but you expect at least some effort. She's finishing her last term at Yale, and you're on her couch playing with her hair while she reads some essay about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Columbine.

"Isn't that depressing?" you ask, resting your head on her shoulder to glance over at the text.

"Yeah," she mumbles, "but important."

You roll your eyes because she doesn't even move to look at you, and she's terrible at reading signals right now, because you leave that evening to get back to the city; you're supposed to be celebrating your latest callback tonight. You brush aside her hair and kiss her jaw, then down her neck.

"Rachel," she breathes. "I have to get this reading done."

"I'm sure it can wait," you say, because she's been distant all weekend and for the past few weeks, head buried in some book or another.

"I'm swamped—" she gasps when you bite her earlobe—"with homework this week, baby."

"Quinn," you whine, sneaking your hands underneath her hoodie.

She puts down the book and you think you've won—it still thrills you to be in more control than Quinn Fabray sometimes—but then she puts her hands gently against your shoulders and pushes back. "Rachel."

You don't want to get angry, because you're leaving in a few hours and you hate fighting with Quinn anyway, but all of a sudden something grates in your chest.

"Really?" you spit out.

Quinn swallows. "I'm sorry," she tells you softly but with authority she can still manage.

"For someone who apologizes all the time, you're still sort of an asshole," you say, and immediately watch her face fall, her shoulders slip, with some sort of terrible satisfaction.

"I know I've been busy—"

"Do not give me that shit, Quinn," you say, and later you'll learn from this moment, because you really could stop yourself here, you think, if you tried, but you don't: "You're busy; you have books to read; you're going to this office hours, that seminar. I'm your fucking girlfriend."

She lifts her head and her eyes are so green, brimming with tears, and tucks hair behind her ears, a nervous habit you've picked up on. It's always been so easy for you to forgive her of anything.

But you are angry so you bite out every word: "Do not apologize again."

She bites her bottom lip and tilts her head back, and you can tell she's trying not to cry. "I'm trying really hard," she says to the ceiling.

And the thing is, you know she's right. You're being dramatic and irrational and you know what being with Quinn means at this point, but something about your own stress and the stacks of books all around her apartment make you want to scream.

Instead you stand and walk to her bedroom, start putting things in your suitcase. A few minutes later she quietly, sheepishly hovers at the doorway.

"I'm just going to go," you say.

"We should—"

"I'm busy, Quinn," you say, and she just stands there. You know that Quinn's impulses have never been solid, and you watch her close her eyes and ground herself before leveling you with a glare that seems to have gotten even more impressive in the years you've known her.

"I love you, and I've loved you forever, and right now you're being an idiot," she says coldly. She brushes past you and throws on a pair of running shorts and you hear her put on running shoes and then slam the door.

You sit down on her bed and put your head in your hands, take some deep breaths. It's not the first time you've overreacted but it is the first time you've done it since you and Quinn started dating again. The guilt hits you suddenly and acutely, and you lay back on her neatly made duvet and let tears stream down your temples and into your hair: Quinn is double-majoring at Yale, dealing with a serious mental illness so solidly; she texts you whenever she can; she has never once forgotten any of your appointments, any of your auditions, any of your exams.

You sit up and decide to go get flowers and things to make breakfast for dinner—her safest comfort food—because you're not sure when she'll be back, but she'll need to eat, and you really are sorry.

You just get back and are putting sunflowers in a vase when she comes in the front door, sweating and coughing.

She walks into the kitchen and glances at you, then says, "I thought you were leaving."

"I'm sorry," you say. "Quinn, I'm so sorry."

She clenches her jaw and then opens the fridge and gets a bottle of water, takes a drink, coughs again.

"Do you really think I'm not choosing you every single day above everything else?" she asks, sitting down at the table and slipping her shoes off tiredly. "Because more words than I already have to use right now are shitty and I put you ahead of everything."

You sit down next to her, grab her hand. She doesn't pull away, and you say, "I know how hard you're working, and you've been so good to me."

She swallows heavily, and there are sudden tears that you've always recognized.

"You're so good, Quinn." She sniffles, and you scoot closer and palm her cheek. You know all of her dark insecurities implicitly by now. "You're so much more than enough, and you don't need to be sorry for your brain or what it needs."

"I know I don't always say things well enough and I don't mean to—"

"Don't you dare apologize again, Fabray," you tell her with a smile, and she leans forward to kiss you gently.

"Just when I think you've gotten over your dramatics, Berry," she whispers against your lips with a little laugh.

She backs up when your hand goes to the back of her neck and up into her hair. "I really need a shower," she says, but then grins, "but you're more than welcome to join me."

You smile. "And then breakfast for dinner."

"And then breakfast for dinner," she confirms with a nod.

You help her stand with a few cracks in her joints, and you take her clothes off reverently before you get in the shower and kiss every inch of her skin.

.

2

She misses a Skype date. You're in LA for six weeks to film for an HBO miniseries and she's in her third year of graduate school at Columbia, and you're both intensely busy, so you have planned Skype dates every evening at exactly 7 her time. You've both had to miss one or two before, but always with warning, and for the past month she's been exact. Your first instinct is to worry, especially when she doesn't answer your four text messages and two phone calls: Quinn seems to be prone to bad things happening to her, and you'll always worry but especially with things like this.

You go from worried to fuming when you get a call from Santana. "I just picked Quinn up from a bar," she says in greeting.

"What?"

"Bitch is drunk off her ass but apparently she left her phone in her office and she wants you to know that she's sorry for missing whatever dumbass thing you two had planned tonight."

It's a Thursday night, and it's about 8 in New York at this point, and Quinn very rarelygets drunk alone, especially out—she's incredibly careful with alcohol. You're still worried because you know something must have happened, but your anger spills over. "What the fuck was she doing at a bar?"

"Whoa, Berry dropped the f-word," you hear Santana to say to Quinn, you assume, and you hear Quinn slur something like shit before Santana tells you, "She says she had a bad day."

"Oh, a bad day, huh? So she decided to be a self-destructive ass and get drunk and let me think that something terrible had happened to her?"

Santana's quiet for a second, and then she says, "That pretty much covers it, I'd say."

You pinch the bridge of your nose between your thumb and forefinger.

"She wants to talk to you," Santana says.

"I can't do that right now," you say, because you're going to explode and a drunk Quinn is never steady; on bad days she says things she doesn't mean.

Santana sighs. "I'll get her home and stay over, okay?"

"Thank you, Santana," you say. "I'll call you in the morning."

You don't sleep much that night, because you're angry and worried and frustrated—Quinn has never been easy to be with, because she's troubled and moody, even when she's very stable. She's also bright and lovely and you have no doubts that you're painfully, beautifully in love with her, but sometimes, very rarely, when you get especially hurt, you wonder if it wouldn't be easier with someone else, someone steadier, less intelligent—someone with fewer ghosts.

But then a knock on your door pulls you from those sunrise-early thoughts, and you pull on your robe, shuffle sleepily to the door. You assume it's probably your manager, coming to bring you coffee and inform you that the filming schedule changed and you're needed on set earlier, so you don't even bother checking the peephole. But when you open the door, there's Quinn, in leggings and TOMS and a Columbia sweatshirt and glasses, looking very exhausted and very hungover, holding a bouquet of roses.

"Quinn," you say, because you're tired and you're not entirely sure that this isn't a dream.

"You've been crying," she says with a frown, her voice gravelly and soft, and then you reach out to touch her, just to make sure you aren't imagining this.

Her hands are freezing as always, callused and smooth and lovely, and you tug her inside and into a hug.

"You're so hungover," you say.

She laughs lightly and nods into your shoulder.

You back up and walk over to the couch. "What are you doing in LA?"

She swallows and says, "I needed to see you because we need to talk and I wanted to do it in person."

You sit down as your heart seems to drop beneath your feet and into your throat all at once. In that moment you realize that your world would effectively end if Quinn wasn't in it any longer, and you fight the sudden onset of tears.

She sits on the coffee table across from you. "I've missed you so much."

"I've missed you too," you say, voice thick.

She takes a deep breath. "It's been hard to not have you there," she says, voice small. "And I—I didn't know how to tell you this over Skype."

For a second you think you might hyperventilate, because suddenly you're sure she's going to tell you that she's cheated or that she's realized she'd rather not be with you, that she's needed the distance.

But then she looks down at her hands and she says, "I—food has been—" She looks up at you. "I think I'm starting to relapse with food."

For a moment you want to scold her for setting something up that dramatically, but she looks intensely ashamed in front of you, and for a while now you've thought that you want nothing more in life than to never see Quinn Fabray look that sad again. Your entire body just hurts for her.

"Baby," you say, and you take her hands.

"I purged yesterday, which is why I got drunk," she says softly, not meeting your eyes. "No one's been there to cook with me and I miss feeling sure about my body because of your hands." She takes a rattling breath. "And I am so, so sorry for being needy and not nearly—"

"—Quinn," you say, gently but surely. You fight off your own tears, and this isn't the first time you wish you could go back in time and just throttle Russell Fabray for the expectations he set for Quinn, and then a whole host of people after that who just never tried hard enough for this beautiful human in front of you.

"I understand if you don't want to stay," she whispers brokenly, and all of the doubts you have last night seem absurd now because her cold hands are what you know as home, steady granite during all of the earthquakes that happen around you. Her body is the only place you've learned yourself, seen it in someone else, gestured back so desperately, so naturally, lips pressed against familiar skin.

"I am not leaving," you say. "And we'll do what we need to do, okay? You're going to be just fine."

You tug her hands and pull her onto the couch and into your arms, and she cries into your chest while you run your hands through her hair. "I don't mean to need you as much as I do."

You laugh lightly and lift her chin to meet you in the eyes. "I need you too. I've actually stopped singing in the shower without you here to wake up with it."

A tiny smile blooms on her face, and you are always amazed at Quinn's ability to cry so gracefully: her skin doesn't turn red; her eyes only get greener.

You kiss her cheeks gently, right over the tears: you learned that Quinn's tears should never be wiped away. "And I know it's hard to believe," you say, "but you're the prettiest girl I've ever met."

She smiles sadly, and you spend the next few hours just holding her, tracing her entire body gently, reverently.

Over the next few weeks you make sure to check in with Quinn frequently—and with Santana and some of Quinn's close friends at Columbia as well as her therapist—that she's at least eating, at least keeping things down, and when you go back to New York you put lots of effort into making food comfortable again. Within another six weeks, Quinn seems to have stabilized again, and she wakes you up one morning with French toast and fruit in bed, and when she kisses you she tastes beautiful and warm, like whipped cream and coffee and so many tomorrows.

.

3

She's usually not aware of when she's flirting. Usually it bothers you marginally at most, because Quinn is your wife and at this point you can't really see her betraying your trust; you still have absolutely mind-blowing sex multiple times a week, and she has never once been anything to faithful to you once you started dating all the way back during your senior years of undergrad.

But today is your first anniversary, and you're picking her up after class to get ready for dinner at Eleven Madison Park, and when you get outside of her lecture hall, there she is, standing with one hip slightly tilted, holding her briefcase and laughing with one of her very handsome colleagues, a professor of comparative literature and Latin American Studies. You've watched him flirt with her for months, even though she's clearly both gay and married.

She turns when you call her name, and you pull away from her happy kiss quickly, because you're already feeling annoyed.

"Kevin, you remember Rachel," Quinn says, and Kevin holds out his hand.

You shake it as hard as possible, and you say, "It's our anniversary, so we have reservations to get ready for."

"We've managed to be married for a year and not kill anything," Quinn says, laughing, and Kevin laughs too.

"Congratulations," he says, and he gives Quinn a hug before waving. You shove your hands in your pockets instead of holding Quinn's, and she looks at you with a furrowed brow.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," you huff. "I'm just not a huge fan of you flirting with Kevin, of all people."

"What?" Quinn says, clearly honest and taken aback. "I wasn't—Rachel, I—shit," she says when you speed up.

She struggles to catch up—her legs are longer but her back has been sore and you've learned how to walk incredibly quickly—"Fuck you," you mumble under your breath.

"Rach," she says. "Come on."

You stop and whirl around, and she almost runs into you. At this point you're off campus and in the middle of the sidewalk. "What were you even talking about?"

"Jesus, Rachel," Quinn says, tucking an unruly strand of short blonde hair behind her ear.

"No, Quinn, I want to know."

"Queer theory, actually, Rachel," Quinn says, her tone icy. "Specifically how I can have access to understanding certain texts different ways because I'm gay."

You swallow and it takes some of the anger out of you. "He flirts with you all the time."

"He's just nice."

"He's flirting with you," you say, and you sound more hysterical than you'd like.

Quinn takes her glasses off and rubs her eyes and then proceeds to put them back on before leveling you with a glare.

You turn around and start walking toward your apartment, leaving Quinn to follow. She does, but she doesn't reach for your hand, doesn't apologize.

By the time you get home, it seems like both of you have calmed down a little bit, and Quinn showers while you change. You're doing your hair when she comes into the bathroom in a gold dress that does amazing things for her eyes, and she taps your arm gently so you face her.

"I do not ever mean to flirt with anyone but you," she says.

You take a deep breath and then roll your eyes. "Sometimes my insecurities happen to flare up because—" you glance up and down her body fully, trace her jaw with your index finger—"who wouldn't want to be with you?"

She smiles and kisses you softly. "That's only before they know all the crazy."

You laugh lightly and shake your head, wrap your arms around her neck and kiss her fully. "I still don't like Kevin."

Quinn nips at your collarbone and growls. "Tonight is definitely not about Kevin, baby." She palms between your legs so suddenly you don't even have time to think of anything to say. "I'm so happy I married you," she husks into your neck. "I'm so lucky."

She lifts you onto the counter and starts moving to cup your breasts, and you tug on her hair weekly. "We have reservations."

She grins crookedly, eyes hooded, pupils blown, and you have fallen in love with all of Quinn Fabray in so many moments; you will always, very vividly, remember this as one of them. "I can think of something else I really want to eat."

You end up completely missing your reservations by hours, and then you take a nap, because you've both come five times. You spend a few moments tracing Quinn's scars after you wake up and she's still asleep, and you think of all of the fights you've both made it through to get here, in your lovely bed in your lovely apartment. You think she looks younger when she sleeps, curled up and folded in on herself, face smoothed and flawless as always. She reminds you of the girl you first met, scared and vulnerable, and you had always had an urge to hold her, comfort her, to make the world a bit less terrible. It hits you very acutely in that moment that you have done those things, that she's done the same for you, and you smile and kiss right between her shoulder blades to wake her up. She stirs gently, and you languidly kiss before your stomach grumbles loudly.

She laughs and you both dress in sweatshirts, walk hand-in-hand to the diner near your apartment. You have breakfast at 10:30 pm, and they give you a free piece of pie when you say it's your first anniversary. Your rings glint in the lights, and Quinn licks a dab of whipped cream from your nose with a laugh and then kisses you, all rhubarb and cinnamon, lovely and infinite.