Push to the Limit (the sixth book in the Glee series)

Chapter 6: Break Free

"Kurt, hi," Bree said as soon as Kurt had opened the front door to his house, evidently surprised that she had shown up at his house at all. She invited herself inside, walking past him as she said, "Is she here?"

"Is who here?" he asked, confused. 

"Our new girl," she said rolling here eyes.

"Oh," Kurt said. "That... I sort of didn't get a new girl."

"What?!" Bree exclaimed. "Kurt, we agreed that you were going to find us the new face of Welsh-Hummel. We need a cover girl. A pretty, available cover girl."

"We have so many," he said with a bit of a groan. 

"No, we had so many," Bree shook her head. "But two of them are off being musicians now and the third is a Victoria's Secret Angel now with exclusive contracts with Vogue which means that none of them are able to be our official face. We need an official face."

"So you've said," he rolled his eyes. It was too early for this and he hadn't had any coffee since breakfast. "I guess I can make a call to the agency for a model that—"

"No, no," she shook her head. "No models."

"But you said—"

"We're replacing three major models. We need someone bigger than a model. We need... an actress... Not a popular one—she won't last if she's going to be offered a role in a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie within a week. We need someone new and fresh. Get on it, will you? I want results fast. She needs to be pretty but... Not too pretty that I wouldn't trust either of our husbands around her."

"My husband is gay," he said.

"Then it shouldn't be too hard," she said with a smile before leaving the house just as quickly as she had entered. Kurt watched her walk down the yard back to her car and rolled his eyes.

"Why does she always leave the hardest jobs to me?" he asked himself as he headed to the kitchen for the coffee that he definitely was going to need now.

***

When John knocked on Julie's door, he regretted it instantly. Maybe showing up like this was a bad idea. But before he could regret it enough to turn away and leave, the door opened and a surprised Lyric was standing there. 

"Oh hi," she said. "Alex isn't here. He went out of town."

"Oh I know," he nodded.

"Ok..." she said slowly, confused. "Julie is also out of town still..."

"I know that, too," he said. Without bothering to ask for permission, he stepped inside the house and said, "I, uh, left something in one of the bedrooms here a couple of weeks ago and I finally need it so I thought I'd come by for it."

"What is it?" she asked, following him towards the staircase.

"Just a thing," he said. 

"Which room?" she asked then.

He looked back for a second and said, "Uh, the master bedroom."

"I'm staying in the master bedroom," she told him. "There were no personal objects there."

"Then the guest bedroom."

"Alex stays in the guest bedroom."

He stopped at the top of the staircase and said, "What about her room? Would I have left something there?"

"Maybe," she shrugged. "But she locked it. Said she knew Alex would snoop if she didn't. So no chance of you getting in there now."

"Then maybe it was the guest bedroom after all," he said, making his way there.