And Here's What You Missed on...GLEE

“Where the hell is Mr. Schue?” I asked excitedly, hopping from foot to foot as I tried to get a better view out the door. “He’s late, and I’m having heart palpitations.”

“Red, take a seat,” Puck ordered for the thousandth time. And, also for the thousandth time, I ignored him.

“Ellie? What are you doing standing by the door?” Mr. Schue wondered with a confused look on his face as he walked into the room.

“Watching for runaway giraffes?” I blurted before blushing. “I’m gonna go sit down now.”

“Smart idea.” He shook his head for a couple seconds before brightening his expression again. “Alright, guys, so I just got it approved…”

“We’re going to do an invitational!” Rachel grinned broadly, her hand in the air. I wasn’t sure that she knew the point of putting a hand in the air was so that someone could call on her before she spoke.

“Yeah…how did you guys know?” His eyebrows drew together before he finally put a hand in the air. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. But there’s no way that you know what songs we’re doing.”

My knee started bouncing up and down with anticipation, and Puck put his hand on my thigh, shooting a look at me. I must have been shaking his chair, too, or something.

Finally, Mr. Schue did his little dramatic underlining thing, and I squinted at the board.

“What is a Hedley?” Rachel asked, turning up her nose.

“Hey. Don’t make that face about Hedley,” I snapped at her. “Mr. Schue, what songs are we singing?”

“Alright…I was thinking we could make Perfect into a duet…” he trailed off, surveying the expressions of the students, but they hadn’t changed. “And then For the Nights I Can’t Remember. But I don’t know the third song.”

“Cha-Ching!” Puck called out with a smirk. “Definitely Cha-Ching.”

“I don’t know…” Mr. Schue trailed off. “Some of the material in that song is a little…”

“If we edit it, I think we could do it,” Finn backed up. I turned around and smiled at him a little, which he returned with a curt nod.

“It talks about a girl posing naked for Playboy, though.”

“So?” Puck snorted. “That’s hot. It’s not like people don’t know about Playboy anyway.”

“He has a point…” Matt trailed off. “I think we could do it.”

A grin spread across my face. I was looking more and more forward to the Invitational.

* * *

“Why did I like performing again?” I groaned after my shower, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling. We had started rehearsing that day, going right into the choreography, and I ached all over.

“Because you like the feeling of all the people watching you, loving what you were doing. And you like entertaining people,” Puck recited, settling next to me on the bed.

“That was a very convincing argument. But I’m not sure that it’s worth it.” A muscle in my leg twitched in agreement.

“It will be.” He stood up and looked in my mirror, flexing and checking out his arm muscle with a disgusted look on his face. “I have to start going to the gym and working out again. I’m getting soft.”

“Oh, yeah…” I rolled my eyes staring at him through his reflection. “Definitely…”

“Look at this!” he exclaimed, flexing again. All I could see was a bulging muscle, though I probably wasn’t the best person to be asking.

Chuckling a little, I poked his muscle. “It feels fine to me. It’s not soft at all.”

“You sure about that?” he questioned seductively, wrapping my hand around his bicep and making me tighten my grip.

“Stop,” I burst out, laughing harder.

“Aw, did I make you uncomfortable?” He stuck a cocky look on his face as he moved his way toward me slowly.

“Nope,” I responded with a small smirk. “You’re not going to be making me uncomfortable right now.”

He put his hands against the wall on either side of me so he was basically boxing me in. “Still not uncomfortable?”

“No,” I whispered, my eyes locked on his.

When his hands went down to the button of his pants, I shoved him off me. “Alright, you win, you win! Don’t you dare.”

He grinned a wide, satisfied smile. “That was a stupid game, Puckerman.”

“But it was entertaining, watching your face turn red like that.” Of course, that just made me blush even harder. Wonderful.

“Get out of my room,” I sighed, pointing toward the door. “I have to read some of that stupid book for English.”

“Have fun with that,” he teased before disappearing. Mentioning schoolwork was as good at getting rid of him as pumping a deadly noxious gas into a room. Not that I’d ever tried the latter or anything.

It only took me a little while to finish my homework, and once I was done, I threw the book across the room and threw an arm across my eyes, hoping that I’d never see it again. Even though I knew that I’d just have to pick it up in the morning and put it in my bag, only to be assigned more chapters to read.

Sighing to myself, I climbed into my bed and went to sleep almost immediately.

In the middle of the night, I woke up sweating with my heart beating a thousand times a minute as I checked around the darkness of my room. I knew that I had a nightmare, but I didn’t remember it at all. That just added to the creepiness.

As softly as I could, I opened my door and peeked out into the hallway. Not shockingly, it was completely dark, being two thirty in the morning.

“Puck,” I whispered when I entered his room, shutting the door behind me. He didn’t even stir. “Puck!”

Still nothing. Sighing, I walked over to the bed and crawled next to him, resting my head on his chest. Subconsciously, he wrapped his arms around me and wiggled around a little bit before starting to breathe deeply again.

Listening to the rhythm of his heart, I eventually drifted back to sleep, trying to leave my unremembered nightmare behind me.