Note: This is a Glee story only in that some characters from Glee are in it. Will Schuester is the hero, and all the Glee kids make an appearance, but it's written from the OFC's perspective, and the story is more about her than it is about her+Will. If that's not your cup of tea, I'm in the process of rewriting the whole story from Will's perspective; that story is called Willpower and you can search for it or click on my name to find it listed. You do not need to have read this story for Willpower to make sense, and in fact will probably enjoy it more if you stop reading right now, and especially do not read the extended summary for this story.

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Title: A Million, Two, One
Author: With My Radio
TV Show: Glee
Spoilers: Through Season One, Episode 13 (Sectionals)
Pairing: Will/OFC
Categories: Romance, Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: The highest you've got. This story is not for children, and not just because of the sex.
Extended Summary: Norah Castle's life is perfect. As a triple-platinum recording artist known the world over, she has everything she ever wished for and more. If she sometimes feels that it's not enough, she ignores it, because what else could there be? When a personal tragedy occurs in her hometown, she grudgingly returns to Lima, OH, dispensing with her stage name in the interest of privacy. "Disguised" as Honor Castlereagh, the girl who ran away to Los Angeles and never came back, she meets someone who just might force her to face her past, face herself, and want everything she never thought to wish for...

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1

The first thing I heard upon entering the bar almost made me change my mind. I wanted a drink, needed a drink, but I wasn't sure if I wanted/needed one badly enough to deal with that song. I've never been able to escape it, even to this day. No matter where I go, someone will eventually advise me (their voice painfully off-key) to Take the 5 to the 805/Exit at Mira Mesa Drive/And you're almost there/I'm almost there…Sometimes I regret the fact that the directions to my old apartment rhymed so perfectly, or regret the fact that I made them rhyme, put them to music, recorded them and became a star with them because it all means that I will always, always remember how to get somewhere I don't want to go. That night of all nights I needed no reminder, and I was thisclose to leaving.

But then it hit me: the man singing my song was brilliant. The bar was nearly empty, and karaoke night was obviously a complete bust, but he stood alone on their pitiful excuse for a stage and owned it like he was in a stadium and just… I can't explain it. He sang my song like he understood it better than I ever did, sang it like he knew it, sang it like he was inside of it. The way he wrapped his smooth tenor voice around every word, he somehow made them sharp and cold and used them to hurt me more than I had ever used them to hurt myself. And it was so strangely appropriate, so strangely perfect, because I had written it about my mother and here I was, back in Lima, for the specific purpose of burying her.

It suddenly seemed like fate to me, and I wanted to kiss my younger self for rhyming those stupid directions and deciding it sounded pretty good, maybe people would listen to it. They'd inadvertently directed me to the perfect distraction, directed him to take the stage and sing out his sorrow, directed me to comfort him and thereby myself. By which I mean I decided on the spot that I would seduce this man, take him to my mother's house and hope that he would do things to me that would make me forget myself for awhile, things that were possibly illegal in Ohio (it is a fairly backwards state, after all). He certainly looked capable of it.

His skin was pale and golden, his body slim yet cut, his face a harsh, beautiful combination of planes and angles, thin lips, high cheekbones. I could easily imagine myself touching him, caressing the deep dimples framing his mouth and burying my hand in his softly curling hair. The point is that he would have drawn my eyes eventually, and once that happened I wouldn't have been able to look away. In all likelihood I would have decided to seduce him anyway; his brilliant rendition of Summerview (bane of my existence) simply made it possible for me to dispense with all my other criteria.

At this point I should probably add that I'm not completely full of myself. It's not like I believed I could just point to him, make a come-hither gesture and he'd react by come-hithering. I will say that I'm well-known and reasonably easy on the eyes, which would have made it a slam dunk, if I'd entered the bar as the glamorous singer I usually am. Norah Castle could make a come-hither gesture and the entire bar would react by immediately come-hithering. But I was in disguise and doing my best to keep a low profile; I had no desire to be stalked by an Ohian (Ohio-an? Well, someone from Ohio anyway) paparazzo, if such a thing existed, who would snap some pictures which would inevitably end up 1) making me look fat, and 2) on the cover of some tabloid along with the headline Norah Castle's Private Pain.

Hello, it's not private if it's a banner headline on a glossy magazine, but I know from personal experience that it's still just as painful, and my desire to avoid such a disaster made this new project a challenge. Could I seduce this gorgeous, talented man as cabbie hat-wearing, glasses-having bare-faced Honor Castlereagh, and could I do it without him realizing my true identity (which is a weird way to put it, come to think of it, because Honor Castlereagh is the name I was born with and when did it start to feel like an alias)? It was brilliant; I was distracted already.

TBC