thorns and thistles

- mermaiddrunk

So He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. - Genesis 3:24

It happened because they were careless. Because it was Thursday after Cheerios practice and Santana was supposed to give her a lift home. But Coach Sylvester had made all the bottoms run extra suicides and she found herself impatiently waiting for her friend to either finish her laps or drop dead from exhaustion. Before either of those things happened, Rachel came out of the auditorium and spotted her.

It happened because they were impatient. Rachel offered her that lift home. She accepted. It was already arranged that they would see each other later that evening. Under the guise of an AP American History assignment, they'd been managing to spend a significant amount of hours behind Rachel's closed bedroom door. Going back to her house was never an option. The thought of Rachel tainted by the smell of furniture polish and bourbon that encased the lower half of the Fabray household made her sick. She didn't want those worlds to mix. And when she was really honest with herself, the real reason Rachel had never seen the inside of her bedroom was because she was terrified of her parents seeing them together. She somehow imagined that around Rachel she'd be naked and exposed. They'd see her for what she really was.

It happened because they were reckless. She was supposed to thank Rachel and hop out of the car. They would meet later that evening anyway. Rachel's little blue Volkswagen was supposed to pull out of her pristine driveway and that was supposed to be that. But they were sixteen and hormonal and it had been more than twelve hours since they had kissed (because public displays of affection at school were absolutelynot allowed) and so she tentatively put her hand over Rachel's (tentatively because Mrs Truman next-door was a nosy old witch who watched her window as if it played daytime television) and said, "You want to see my room?"

Rachel's eyes widened. Those big brown Bambi eyes that kind of made her heart jump every so often. "Are you sure?" Rachel asked. And it was then that she knew she loved Rachel. Like really, really loved, not just teenage-dream kind of love. She always thought the realisation would follow a romantic date, or hand-holding or something grand and epic. But just then, the way Rachel looked at her and said, "Are you sure?" like it was okay if she wasn't, like Rachel knew her well enough to understand that this wasn't easy, like Rachel cared. It was the first time in a long time that she felt protected.

In the end, it happened because Rachel's car was blocking the driveway and she had forgotten that it was Thursday and on Thursday evenings, Russell Fabray came home an hour earlier.

She had Rachel on her lap. The girl was straddling her, one knee pressing against each hip. This was their go-to position after discovering it a few days prior. She liked it because she got to feel Rachel flush against her. She liked it because it was the kind of thing she could never do with a boy. The first time Rachel moved to sit on top of her like this, she had to fight the urge to push her off. They had never touched like that before and suddenly, Rachel was there. Breasts rubbing against breasts, that feeling of warmth in her lap, those breathless whimpers right in her ear, the way Rachel squirmed and ground down every time she ran her fingers up her spine. It was frightening how much it affected her, not just because Rachel was saying things like, "Last night, I uh, I thought about you when I was um…" but because the position they were in left no doubt that what she was doing, she was doing with a girl.

It happened when her hands were under Rachel's skirt, cupping her ass to urge her closer.

She didn't hear her door knob turn because she happened to groan when Rachel suckled on her lower lip and the sound drowned out everything else. She didn't see the door opening because her eyes were closed, as she focused intensely on the way Rachel was now rolling her hips into her lap, causing them to bounce lightly on her mattress.

It was the voice that startled them, that caused it all to come crashing down.

"What the hell is going on here?"

She shoved Rachel off of her before she even turned towards the door. As if getting rid of the evidence could erase the crime. But the offense sat on her carpet, with a bruised knee, looking up at her with those Bambi eyes. Shiny with fear and hurt. She couldn't look at those eyes, not when her father was standing over her, red-faced and trembling in a way that made her want to vomit.

"Daddy, I-" the words got stuck in her throat along with the bile and the taste of Rachel's chapstick.

Russell Fabray looked down at the girl on his daughter's floor as if she were filth that needed to be swept up. She wished Rachel would get up. She wished Rachel would smooth down her skirt and tuck in her shirt. She wished Rachel would just disappear.

When the front door opened and her mother's voice filtered up the stairs, she began praying. Please, god, please make this okay. Please god, I promise to be good from now on. Please god, don't make them hate me. Please god, pleasegodpleasegod.

"Russell, you naughty man! You didn't tell me to expect company for dinner. Whose car is that?" Her mother's 'show-voice' seemed to rattle the walls.

"Make yourself presentable and get yourself down there," Russell growled it. Her father actually growled at her.

She didn't understand what he meant by 'presentable' until he was gone and she stood up on shaky legs. The reflection that stared back at her from her vanity made her feel ill. Her hair was messy, her bra strap was showing, her lip-gloss was smudged over her chin.

"Quinn, I'm so-"

Rachel's voice came from behind her. Rachel who had done this to her. Rachel who was to blame for making her feel this way.

"Qu-Quinn just," it was Rachel who sounded close to tears. "We'll go down and explain what happened, okay?"

"What happened?" Her voice barely reached those last syllables because it had gone so high, so panicked. "What happened, Rachel is that my father caught," she took a deep breath, "he caught us together and now, now they're going to…" she had to stop talking when her body began to shudder and the tears clogged up her throat. "We should never have come here," she managed. "We should never have done this." And what she meant then was all of it, the past six weeks, starting with that first kiss outside the choir room.

She made it downstairs without tripping. Rachel followed, but she didn't look at her or touch her or even acknowledge her. This was her fault after all.

Her mother sat on the chaise, legs crossed, a glass of scotch that she could smell from across the room in her hand. Her face was pulled tight, like she was being pinched by an invisible assailant and she wanted to scream but couldn't. Her father was red. His face was red. His neck was red. His ears were red. His hands, also clasped around a glass of sour brown liquid were red. Only his knuckles, thick and round and mean, were white.

She stood in front of them and resisted the urge to throw up all over the carpet. She did that once when she was three years old and had eaten too many raspberry popsicles. She still remembers the bright red stain that took their housekeeper forever to get rid of.

As Rachel came to stand next to her, she prayed that for once in her life the girl would keep her mouth shut and not start babbling some ridiculous nonsense about her homosexual fathers or the ACLU.

Her father spoke and the vein in his neck throbbed. Her mother drank and the ice in her glass clinked. Rachel trembled next to her, small hands curled into fists when Russell called her fathers godless faggots. It was around this time that she was certain she was going to throw up.

"You're not likethat, are you, Quinnie?" Her mother asked in a voice that sounded strangely hollow. "There must be some mistake." The word 'that' of course implied a multitude of sins.

She wondered if suicide was a bigger sin than homosexuality. Both would get her into hell, one would just get her there faster.

She stood there and listened as her father openly launched into a rant about how the "gays in this town were corrupting the youth" and how "You" (you being Rachel) "are an immoral by-product of depravity." She stood there and wondered how Rachel managed to keep silent as her father hurled sentence after poisonous sentence of abuse at her. It was only when he accused her of "spreading your filth onto my daughter," that Rachel straightened and said, "Mr Fabray, there is nothing wrong with Quinn."

His eyes shot to her then. Blue eyes that crinkled when he smiled at her and winked in that special way when he was proud. Those eyes narrowed as he looked at her and she knew that Rachel was mistaken - there was something wrong with her. There had to be.

"I can barely look at you right now." Her father said this with such pain that she felt a stab in her own heart.

"Daddy, please -" She didn't know what she was begging for, but it was something bigger than forgiveness. Something that might have been shaped like acceptance.

And then there were four fingers, curled tightly around her hand and she wanted to scream, because that was the worst thing Rachel could have done and her mother actually gasped before swallowing the rest of her scotch.

"Mr and Mrs Fabray, I think you fail to understand. This is not just some illicit, immoral coupling as you seem to believe." Her voice was shaking. It was the first time she had ever heard Rachel sound scared. "I am in fact in love with your daughter." The grip on her hand tightened and she was suddenly torn between pushing Rachel away from her and pulling the girl in for a hug. She settled on standing there, helplessly as her father's scowl deepened.

"I want you out of this house," Russell Fabray's glare was aimed at Rachel. Strong and imposing. He wasn't a big man, but he towered over the girl at her side and she suddenly thought of David and Goliath. David was a Jew wasn't he? One of God's chosen people. There was irony in there somewhere, she was sure of it. "I don't want to see you near my daughter ever again, do you understand me?"

She could actually feel Rachel shivering next to her and for a brief moment, her mind went back to her bedroom and the moment before her father had entered and the softly whispered words against her cheek. "You're wonderful," Rachel had breathed in something like awe. "You're wonderful."

"Daddy, it's not Rachel's fault." She didn't know where the words came from, but once they were out there, dribbling from her lips, she couldn't stop, "She didn't do anything wrong."

Did she really believe that? Well if she was supposed to believe that Jesus turned water into wine, then she could sure as hell believe that the girl standing next to her was not in fact evil incarnate.

"Who are you?" Her father's question shocked her, not because of the coldness in his voice, or the look on his face as he said it, but because at that moment, she didn't have an answer. She honestly didn't know.

I'm your daughter, she wanted to say. I'm Quinn, she wanted to say. I'm gay, she wanted to say. Somehow these things all seemed to contradict the other.

When her father finally asked her to pack her bags, she felt as strange sense of relief wash over her. She was being kicked out, rejected, thrown out of the only home she'd ever known. That was her punishment, her sentence. She could stop holding her breath and finally exhale (though the choking sobs made it difficult).

Rachel's heathen parents fetched them and she looked back only once as they drove away, half-expecting to be turned into a pillar of salt for her transgressions. The house on Dudley Road became smaller and smaller until they turned the corner and it was gone. And by 7pm on that Thursday evening, she was an orphan.

It happened because it had to. Leaving Eden was inevitable. She understood that now.

.