Four Times Brittany Inadvertently Breaks Santana (And One Time She Doesn't) (4/5)
Title: Four Times Brittany Inadvertently Breaks Santana (And One Time She Doesn’t), 4/5
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany
Rating: PG-13 (vague sexual content, language, the existence of Puck)
Spoilers: None in particular, as it's a self-constructed timeline.
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profits gained.
Summary: Santana's friendship with Brittany has always involved a couple of bruises.
A/N: It's been a long damn time since I've wandered into fic-land, but Brittana will not get out of my head. And I guess there are worse ways to kill time in a boring summer.
4
They are fifteen-on-the-cusp-of-sixteen years old when Santana finds out what a happy and ridiculously frustrating drunk Brittany can be.
They’re at Noah Puckerman’s house, where the parties almost always are, because Puck’s mom works late and his sister has plenty of friends to stay with. Also, Puck’s a total meathead, but the boy is almost as adept at conning alcohol out of his pool cleaning customers as he is at screwing their wives.
Sometimes, Santana thinks Puck is the most horrifying person she knows, and that makes her appreciate him all the more. He actually makes a good friend, when Brittany isn’t around to fill the void and he isn’t trying to get into her pants.
It’s a typical party; the music is grating and the company mediocre. Santana wonders why she even bothers coming to these things. On an socially intellectual level, she’s aware that it’s necessary to keep up her top-dog persona-or, she amends with gritted teeth, secondary-dog, since Quinn Fabray is still ruling with an iron eyebrow. But on a personal level? She kind of hates this high school cliché crap.
Oh, it was fun enough when it all started. She likes drinking, sort of, because it allows her to be as raucous as she wants without doing any damage to reputation. Even better, when she’s got a red plastic cup in her hand, no one cares much about what she does-even if what she’s doing happens to involve dancing suggestively with her best friend, who is very distinctly a girl.
That part’s still pretty okay, she thinks, but the rest of it is lame upon lame. Finn Hudson is always blundering around oafishly, his big dinosaur sneakers tramping across the carpet, taking out everything in their path. Quinn always sits on the center sofa, hands linked daintily in her lap, a sadly undisputed queen observing her subjects. Puck flits from room to room like a mohawked sex hummingbird, catching whichever girl has been stupid enough to drink his punch and hauling her off to his bedroom. It’s the same scene, every time, and it bores Santana to death.
There are others here too-Matt Rutherford, who, to Santana’s knowledge, has never spoken a word, and Mike Chang, who somehow understands Matt’s every move like some he’s some Helen Keller-esque miracle worker or something. Santana doesn’t particularly like or dislike either of them-not the way she grudgingly likes Finn or Puck, or the way she embraces her fervent hatred of neanderthals like Dave Karofsky (who, at this exact moment, is performing the world’s most pathetic keg stand as his hockey buddies hoot and holler in approval). They just sort of exist.
If she were forced to choose, Santana would claim Matt as the better of the two, but she only says so because she knows Mike Chang is a downright terrific guy. He’s smart and light on his feet, and one of the only people in this school who manages to be perfectly popular without compromising himself or stepping into the stupid stereotypical box. Even Santana isn’t quite cool enough to pull that off, and while she usually doesn’t care-it’s fun to be a bitch, even if it does make her mother wince each time the phone rings, nervous that it might be Principal Figgins on the other end with yet another horror story-she thinks it would be interesting. If she weren’t the girl everyone else wants her to be-the girl Quinn is-how different would her life look?
For starters, maybe she’d be the one with her arm wrapped around Brittany’s slim waist, instead of Mike and his stupid nice-guy smile.
Grinding her jaw uncomfortably, Santana takes a long pull from the bottle between her hands and leans back in her chair. Her eyes find a spot on the ceiling and hold tight to it, as though letting it slip away might imply some deeper universal truth she isn’t yet ready to face.
Twenty feet away, she hears Brittany giggle over the current blaring Beyonce song, and Santana blearily wonders when the soundtrack of her life started reflecting horrible pop music and teen angst. She’s better than this-hotter and cooler and definitely more well-equipped to deal with this crap. Who does she look like, for Christ’s sake, Rachel “Man Hands” Berry?
She shakes her head, deeply annoyed with herself, and swallows another mouthful of beer. Twenty feet away, she hears Mike murmur something. Brittany giggles again. It’s her stupid fake giggle, the one Santana taught her when they were thirteen and she was explaining the finer points of manipulation. She had meant for it to be used in really important situations-getting ice cream, or convincing Brittany’s father to pay for a movie they weren’t technically old enough to see yet, or sliding sideways out of math class just before a quiz on fractals. She hadn’t realized, at the time, that her tactics might one day be used for evil, and for that, Santana can’t stop kicking herself.
She should have known better, but that’s Brittany. The girl has always been able to sneak up on Santana when she least expects it. Usually, this leads to chipped teeth, bloody noses, and-on one memorable occasion-broken wrists.
Tonight, it feels like something else is breaking, and Santana has changed her mind: she is really just not well-equipped to deal with this at all.
She sinks the last mouthful of beer and lets the bottle drop to the floor between her legs. It takes less than two minutes for Puck to meander out of the kitchen, brandishing another, and he might be kind of a douchebag at times, but she trusts him enough to pop the cap and down the first third in one breath.
“Rough night?” he asks, eyes on some busty redhead draped over the fireplace mantle. She shrugs, watching Mike twirl Brittany expertly out of the corner of her eye.
“I guess.”
He nods absently, like he really cares. She knows he does, deep down, because Puck really is a good guy-not Mike Chang-good, but better than people generally give him credit for.
“Looks like Chang’s got the hook-up tonight,” he observes, a little more callous than she would like, but exactly as she’d expect. Her jaw clenches around the lip of the bottle until she’s worried about potentially chipping a tooth.
“Deep breaths, Lopez,” he adds, clapping her on the shoulder until the tension in her spine gives a couple of inches. “No big thing.”
“No big thing,” she repeats, fingernails scratching rhythmically down the knee of her jeans. Twenty feet away, Brittany lets Mike dip her backwards and giggles yet again. “Goddammit, Puckerman, look at her.”
“I see her.” His shoulders curl up around the sides of his neck for a second, then drop back down again. “Like I said. No big thing.”
The urge to punch him hasn’t been this strong since they were nine years old, indulging in a little spontaneous fight club action behind the school on the one and only occasion he’s ever dared speak ill of Brittany’s intellect. Santana swallows a little more alcohol, doing her best to steady herself.
“Look,” he says at last, swilling the liquor in his own cup thoughtfully. “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. It’s Brittany.”
“That’s exactly the point-,” she starts to hiss back, until his fingers tighten around her shoulder.
“Right. Brittany.” He looks down at her with surprisingly clear eyes. “Chill the fuck out, Lopez. And figure your shit out without punching one of the only decent defensive guys we’ve got, all right? We need him to avoid getting totally crushed Thursday night.”
Santana watches him take a long drink. When he lowers the cup, his eyebrows give a lecherous wiggle. “If you want,” he adds teasingly, “I could help you figure things out. Got a nice bathroom right down the hall-“
“Shut up,” she snaps, punching him in the thigh hard enough to make him wince, but she feels herself grin a little anyway. “I don’t want your measly Jewish dick, and you know it. Puckasaurus.”
He smirks. “Suit yourself, babe. You’ve got my number whenever you come to your senses.”
“Fuck off,” she replies, her tone perfectly level, and he throws his head back with the force of his guffaw. Ruffling her hair in the most annoying way possible, he tosses his now-empty cup aside and strides cockily off in the direction of his new ginger-headed friend. Santana rolls her eyes.
“Unbelievable,” she mutters, not without affection, and tilts back in her chair again until the front legs lift off the floor. She braces herself carefully, heels locked against the carpet, and closes her eyes.
“Guess who!” a bright voice cries out, hands coming down hard over Santana’s face, and the Latina thinks she’d be on her ass right about now if it weren’t for the body behind her chair.
“Jesus, Britt,” she mumbles, rocking forward until all legs touch down safely. “You can’t do that kind of shit.”
“Sorry,” Brittany giggles, and this time it’s a real mark of amusement, not some display for the sake of a cute boy. Santana casts a wary glance over her shoulder.
“What do you want anyway?” she asks, tone a little colder than she tends to use with the blonde, but Brittany’s far enough gone that she barely seems to notice.
“The music’s good,” Brittany says, and though Santana’s not inclined to agree, she gives a noncommittal shrug anyway. Brittany steps around the chair, the motion much smoother than usually found on drunk teenagers, and tosses one leg casually over Santana’s lap. She stays like that, hands on the back of the chair, body hovering just over the smaller girl’s splayed legs, and smiles beatifically. “It’s dancin’ music.”
“All music is dancin’ music to you,” Santana notes as dully as she can, doing her best to regulate the way her breath seems to hitch in and out of her chest with all the civility of a knife blade. Brittany’s hips are moving ever so slightly, nudging forward and back to the beat, and Santana is suddenly very aware of how pretty the other girl is. Prettier than usual, even, in her tight black jeans and corset top, her hair loose around her neck.
Santana looks away, Puck’s voice echoing in her ears. Get your shit together, Lopez.
Brittany’s hands flex against the chair, her knees bending to bring her body low. The air around Santana’s head feels incredibly thick and hot, so much so that it’s getting hard to think through. She tries to raise an eyebrow, but her entire face seems to be locked into a singular stunned position.
“C’mon, San,” Brittany says, her voice huskier than usual. Santana reminds herself that this is Brittany, for God’s sake, her best friend in the world, the only person who knows exactly how much Muppets get under Santana’s skin, the only one she’s ever willingly shared a Push-Pop with. It’s Brittany, but as she was just trying to explain to Puck, that seems to be exactly the point.
It’s Brittany, and she’s stunned so thoroughly and so embarrassingly that Santana is beginning to wonder why she even left home tonight.
“C’mon what?” Santana breathes back, with absolutely no bite to her tone. She shifts her feet against the floor uncomfortably, wishing like hell that she could press her thighs together and forget this whole mess. But, of course, Brittany is still hovering over her, practically straddling her with dancer-strong legs, leaning forward just enough to give Santana a pretty terrific view down the front of her top, and Christ, Santana is so not drunk enough for this.
“C’mon,” Brittany repeats, with the hint of laughter bobbing behind the word. She cranes her long neck forward and nuzzles-actually nuzzles-Santana’s ear with her nose. She’s soft, and she smells like tequila and citrus, and Santana has the mad desire to thrust both hands deep into thick blonde hair and drag Brittany into her lap. Because that’s the worst part of all of this; it’s not that they’re in the middle of a crowded room, or that Mike Chang is watching them nervously even as he pretends to play cards with Matt Rutherford and Finn Hudson. It’s not even that Santana is only halfway to Drunksville, while Brittany appears to be appointing herself mayor. The worst part is that Brittany is here, dressed in jeans that hug her ass like molten steel and a top that shows off exactly how smooth her ivory skin is, and she’s refusing to actually make contact with Santana’s lap. Which just isn’t fair.
It’s loud, and it’s hot, and it’s Brittany, and Santana is pretty sure she’s going to explode.
“Goddammit, Britt,” she hears herself say, as though speaking through a gently-rolling ocean wave.“What?”
If Brittany giggles one more time, Santana might snap and kill them both. And if Brittany, so help her God, brings her mouth any closer to Santana’s ear, she’s not sure she’ll be able to stop herself from leaping up and running away.
“Dance with me,” Brittany says at last, a soft breath of a command, and Santana really doesn’t want to. She’s thanking every God in every existing pantheon that she is in fact a teenage girl, because if she had boy-parts, she wouldn’t be able to move. As it is, she’s not sure she’ll be able to stand up and keep her balance. The heeled boots she’s wearing don’t exactly play well with arousal and anxiety.
“Dance with me,” Brittany commands again, stepping back from the chair and pulling Santana by the shoulders as she goes. “Dance with me, come on, this song is good.”
It’s not good, Santana thinks. It’s some Kanye West piece of crap, or maybe one of those jerks with names that begin inexplicably with “Lil’”, but either way, it’s absolutely awful. Still, it has a beat, and Brittany is already fluidly moving to it, holding tight to Santana’s arm with one hand and pumping the other in the air. Against her better judgment, Santana allows herself to be dragged until they’re standing parallel to the speakers and settles, almost awkwardly, with her free hand buried in her back pocket.
Brittany laughs madly and spins, yanking on Santana like a child at her first parade. “Come on, Santana, don’t just stand there all useless-like. God, you look like Finn.”
A few feet away, the tall boy’s head snaps up. He looks thoroughly wounded, which is exactly enough to make Santana cackle hysterically, breaking the uneasy shell she’s been wearing all night. It only helps that, to his left, Quinn lets out a snort and shrugs in a very ‘what can I do?’ sort of way when her boyfriend glares indignantly back.
“Can’t have that,” Santana chortles, reaching for Brittany with both hands. The taller girl hums happily, permitting Santana to encircle her waist and pull her close.
They move together through that crappy song, and then the next, and the next. Santana’s skin is practically vibrating with the pulse of the music, her legs burning with the effort of pushing through an alcoholic haze. Brittany is in her own little world, the way Brittany gets when she’s drunk (and, truthfully, when she’s sober), arms above her head, hips grinding gently against Santana’s. She gives a little twirl every now and again, prompting Santana to change it up, and laughs loudly when Santana takes this to mean she should show off a couple of very 80s dance moves. Santana grins, face flushed, and curls one arm loosely around the other girl’s middle until Brittany’s back is warm against her chest. No one’s watching-well, no one except Mike, who has missed seven consecutive beer pong throws in favor of gawking shamelessly while Brittany rocks her entire body enthusiastically against Santana’s-so she doesn’t bother thinking about anything other than how nice it feels to have her friend this close.
“San?” she hears Brittany ask, her mellow voice swooping easily through the Pink song blasting from their left.
“Hm?” Santana spins Brittany around to face her, smiling. The blonde girl eases closer until Santana begins to have trouble deciding where her body ends and Brittany’s begins. Long arms loop gently around her neck, the fingers of one hand tickling the back of her neck as it rakes through her hair.
“You seemed sad earlier,” Brittany observes, eyes hooded. Santana inhales as slender fingers skitter over the shell of one ear and trace a casual path along her cheekbone. She tries to shrug, but Brittany’s got her too tightly for much motion above the waist.
“It was nothing,” she promises, grinning when Brittany’s wandering fingers slide to the bridge of her nose. “Just needed some quiet.”
“You seem to need a lot of quiet these days,” Brittany mumbles, leaning her forehead gently against Santana’s. Her breath curls in tendrils around them both until Santana thinks they’re probably using the same miniscule amount of air to sustain each of their bodies. She kind of likes the idea.
“It’s nothing, Britt,” she swears again, momentarily distracted by the realization that their pelvises have been grinding slowly and rhythmically together for the better part of three minutes now. It’s a steady back-and-forth motion, like boats in a harbor, and it is nothing if not inspiring.
Although, unfortunately, it isn’t inspiring her to take any action that won’t get her in trouble.
Brittany doesn’t look like she’s particularly buying what Santana is selling, but the girl knows her well enough not to push. Instead, she lets out a soft sigh and drops her head against Santana’s shoulder. Hot breath roils across the shorter girl’s neck, and Santana has to brace her entire body against a shiver. Nonplussed, Brittany raises her head, blue eyes locking with dark with all the efficiency of a guided Dutch missile.
She can see the question forming on perfect pink lips, and Santana’s just not ready to answer it yet. She shakes her head and unglues one hand from Brittany’s hip, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind the other girl’s ear.
“I like this,” she confides quietly. “Dancing with you.” She’s not sure why she says it, exactly, but it feels like the right thing to do. Anyway, when Brittany cocks her head and smiles back with all the force of a sunbeam, it doesn’t matter so much that she’s Santana Lopez, Secondary Top Dog, or that Coach kind of loves and hates her at the same time and it makes for really violently confusing practices, or that she’s constantly rebuffing the advances of boys because she’s desperately, pathetically in love with the best friend she’s ever had. Brittany’s smiling like she’s the only other person in the world, and Santana wants so badly to kiss her. She settles for lowering her eyes almost shyly, drawing the blonde impossibly closer.
Ever obedient, Brittany leans in, cheek pressed deliberately to Santana’s, and sighs. “I know.”
“You do?” Santana questions uncertainly, one hand curling behind the blonde’s head to hold her gently in place. Brittany giggles.
“That’s why I asked you, silly.”
It somehow makes all the sense in the world, even through the thin film that always coats drunken-Brittany logic, and though her chest felt like cracking open barely an hour ago, Santana can’t seem to turn off her grin.
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany
Rating: PG-13 (vague sexual content, language, the existence of Puck)
Spoilers: None in particular, as it's a self-constructed timeline.
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profits gained.
Summary: Santana's friendship with Brittany has always involved a couple of bruises.
A/N: It's been a long damn time since I've wandered into fic-land, but Brittana will not get out of my head. And I guess there are worse ways to kill time in a boring summer.
4
They are fifteen-on-the-cusp-of-sixteen years old when Santana finds out what a happy and ridiculously frustrating drunk Brittany can be.
They’re at Noah Puckerman’s house, where the parties almost always are, because Puck’s mom works late and his sister has plenty of friends to stay with. Also, Puck’s a total meathead, but the boy is almost as adept at conning alcohol out of his pool cleaning customers as he is at screwing their wives.
Sometimes, Santana thinks Puck is the most horrifying person she knows, and that makes her appreciate him all the more. He actually makes a good friend, when Brittany isn’t around to fill the void and he isn’t trying to get into her pants.
It’s a typical party; the music is grating and the company mediocre. Santana wonders why she even bothers coming to these things. On an socially intellectual level, she’s aware that it’s necessary to keep up her top-dog persona-or, she amends with gritted teeth, secondary-dog, since Quinn Fabray is still ruling with an iron eyebrow. But on a personal level? She kind of hates this high school cliché crap.
Oh, it was fun enough when it all started. She likes drinking, sort of, because it allows her to be as raucous as she wants without doing any damage to reputation. Even better, when she’s got a red plastic cup in her hand, no one cares much about what she does-even if what she’s doing happens to involve dancing suggestively with her best friend, who is very distinctly a girl.
That part’s still pretty okay, she thinks, but the rest of it is lame upon lame. Finn Hudson is always blundering around oafishly, his big dinosaur sneakers tramping across the carpet, taking out everything in their path. Quinn always sits on the center sofa, hands linked daintily in her lap, a sadly undisputed queen observing her subjects. Puck flits from room to room like a mohawked sex hummingbird, catching whichever girl has been stupid enough to drink his punch and hauling her off to his bedroom. It’s the same scene, every time, and it bores Santana to death.
There are others here too-Matt Rutherford, who, to Santana’s knowledge, has never spoken a word, and Mike Chang, who somehow understands Matt’s every move like some he’s some Helen Keller-esque miracle worker or something. Santana doesn’t particularly like or dislike either of them-not the way she grudgingly likes Finn or Puck, or the way she embraces her fervent hatred of neanderthals like Dave Karofsky (who, at this exact moment, is performing the world’s most pathetic keg stand as his hockey buddies hoot and holler in approval). They just sort of exist.
If she were forced to choose, Santana would claim Matt as the better of the two, but she only says so because she knows Mike Chang is a downright terrific guy. He’s smart and light on his feet, and one of the only people in this school who manages to be perfectly popular without compromising himself or stepping into the stupid stereotypical box. Even Santana isn’t quite cool enough to pull that off, and while she usually doesn’t care-it’s fun to be a bitch, even if it does make her mother wince each time the phone rings, nervous that it might be Principal Figgins on the other end with yet another horror story-she thinks it would be interesting. If she weren’t the girl everyone else wants her to be-the girl Quinn is-how different would her life look?
For starters, maybe she’d be the one with her arm wrapped around Brittany’s slim waist, instead of Mike and his stupid nice-guy smile.
Grinding her jaw uncomfortably, Santana takes a long pull from the bottle between her hands and leans back in her chair. Her eyes find a spot on the ceiling and hold tight to it, as though letting it slip away might imply some deeper universal truth she isn’t yet ready to face.
Twenty feet away, she hears Brittany giggle over the current blaring Beyonce song, and Santana blearily wonders when the soundtrack of her life started reflecting horrible pop music and teen angst. She’s better than this-hotter and cooler and definitely more well-equipped to deal with this crap. Who does she look like, for Christ’s sake, Rachel “Man Hands” Berry?
She shakes her head, deeply annoyed with herself, and swallows another mouthful of beer. Twenty feet away, she hears Mike murmur something. Brittany giggles again. It’s her stupid fake giggle, the one Santana taught her when they were thirteen and she was explaining the finer points of manipulation. She had meant for it to be used in really important situations-getting ice cream, or convincing Brittany’s father to pay for a movie they weren’t technically old enough to see yet, or sliding sideways out of math class just before a quiz on fractals. She hadn’t realized, at the time, that her tactics might one day be used for evil, and for that, Santana can’t stop kicking herself.
She should have known better, but that’s Brittany. The girl has always been able to sneak up on Santana when she least expects it. Usually, this leads to chipped teeth, bloody noses, and-on one memorable occasion-broken wrists.
Tonight, it feels like something else is breaking, and Santana has changed her mind: she is really just not well-equipped to deal with this at all.
She sinks the last mouthful of beer and lets the bottle drop to the floor between her legs. It takes less than two minutes for Puck to meander out of the kitchen, brandishing another, and he might be kind of a douchebag at times, but she trusts him enough to pop the cap and down the first third in one breath.
“Rough night?” he asks, eyes on some busty redhead draped over the fireplace mantle. She shrugs, watching Mike twirl Brittany expertly out of the corner of her eye.
“I guess.”
He nods absently, like he really cares. She knows he does, deep down, because Puck really is a good guy-not Mike Chang-good, but better than people generally give him credit for.
“Looks like Chang’s got the hook-up tonight,” he observes, a little more callous than she would like, but exactly as she’d expect. Her jaw clenches around the lip of the bottle until she’s worried about potentially chipping a tooth.
“Deep breaths, Lopez,” he adds, clapping her on the shoulder until the tension in her spine gives a couple of inches. “No big thing.”
“No big thing,” she repeats, fingernails scratching rhythmically down the knee of her jeans. Twenty feet away, Brittany lets Mike dip her backwards and giggles yet again. “Goddammit, Puckerman, look at her.”
“I see her.” His shoulders curl up around the sides of his neck for a second, then drop back down again. “Like I said. No big thing.”
The urge to punch him hasn’t been this strong since they were nine years old, indulging in a little spontaneous fight club action behind the school on the one and only occasion he’s ever dared speak ill of Brittany’s intellect. Santana swallows a little more alcohol, doing her best to steady herself.
“Look,” he says at last, swilling the liquor in his own cup thoughtfully. “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. It’s Brittany.”
“That’s exactly the point-,” she starts to hiss back, until his fingers tighten around her shoulder.
“Right. Brittany.” He looks down at her with surprisingly clear eyes. “Chill the fuck out, Lopez. And figure your shit out without punching one of the only decent defensive guys we’ve got, all right? We need him to avoid getting totally crushed Thursday night.”
Santana watches him take a long drink. When he lowers the cup, his eyebrows give a lecherous wiggle. “If you want,” he adds teasingly, “I could help you figure things out. Got a nice bathroom right down the hall-“
“Shut up,” she snaps, punching him in the thigh hard enough to make him wince, but she feels herself grin a little anyway. “I don’t want your measly Jewish dick, and you know it. Puckasaurus.”
He smirks. “Suit yourself, babe. You’ve got my number whenever you come to your senses.”
“Fuck off,” she replies, her tone perfectly level, and he throws his head back with the force of his guffaw. Ruffling her hair in the most annoying way possible, he tosses his now-empty cup aside and strides cockily off in the direction of his new ginger-headed friend. Santana rolls her eyes.
“Unbelievable,” she mutters, not without affection, and tilts back in her chair again until the front legs lift off the floor. She braces herself carefully, heels locked against the carpet, and closes her eyes.
“Guess who!” a bright voice cries out, hands coming down hard over Santana’s face, and the Latina thinks she’d be on her ass right about now if it weren’t for the body behind her chair.
“Jesus, Britt,” she mumbles, rocking forward until all legs touch down safely. “You can’t do that kind of shit.”
“Sorry,” Brittany giggles, and this time it’s a real mark of amusement, not some display for the sake of a cute boy. Santana casts a wary glance over her shoulder.
“What do you want anyway?” she asks, tone a little colder than she tends to use with the blonde, but Brittany’s far enough gone that she barely seems to notice.
“The music’s good,” Brittany says, and though Santana’s not inclined to agree, she gives a noncommittal shrug anyway. Brittany steps around the chair, the motion much smoother than usually found on drunk teenagers, and tosses one leg casually over Santana’s lap. She stays like that, hands on the back of the chair, body hovering just over the smaller girl’s splayed legs, and smiles beatifically. “It’s dancin’ music.”
“All music is dancin’ music to you,” Santana notes as dully as she can, doing her best to regulate the way her breath seems to hitch in and out of her chest with all the civility of a knife blade. Brittany’s hips are moving ever so slightly, nudging forward and back to the beat, and Santana is suddenly very aware of how pretty the other girl is. Prettier than usual, even, in her tight black jeans and corset top, her hair loose around her neck.
Santana looks away, Puck’s voice echoing in her ears. Get your shit together, Lopez.
Brittany’s hands flex against the chair, her knees bending to bring her body low. The air around Santana’s head feels incredibly thick and hot, so much so that it’s getting hard to think through. She tries to raise an eyebrow, but her entire face seems to be locked into a singular stunned position.
“C’mon, San,” Brittany says, her voice huskier than usual. Santana reminds herself that this is Brittany, for God’s sake, her best friend in the world, the only person who knows exactly how much Muppets get under Santana’s skin, the only one she’s ever willingly shared a Push-Pop with. It’s Brittany, but as she was just trying to explain to Puck, that seems to be exactly the point.
It’s Brittany, and she’s stunned so thoroughly and so embarrassingly that Santana is beginning to wonder why she even left home tonight.
“C’mon what?” Santana breathes back, with absolutely no bite to her tone. She shifts her feet against the floor uncomfortably, wishing like hell that she could press her thighs together and forget this whole mess. But, of course, Brittany is still hovering over her, practically straddling her with dancer-strong legs, leaning forward just enough to give Santana a pretty terrific view down the front of her top, and Christ, Santana is so not drunk enough for this.
“C’mon,” Brittany repeats, with the hint of laughter bobbing behind the word. She cranes her long neck forward and nuzzles-actually nuzzles-Santana’s ear with her nose. She’s soft, and she smells like tequila and citrus, and Santana has the mad desire to thrust both hands deep into thick blonde hair and drag Brittany into her lap. Because that’s the worst part of all of this; it’s not that they’re in the middle of a crowded room, or that Mike Chang is watching them nervously even as he pretends to play cards with Matt Rutherford and Finn Hudson. It’s not even that Santana is only halfway to Drunksville, while Brittany appears to be appointing herself mayor. The worst part is that Brittany is here, dressed in jeans that hug her ass like molten steel and a top that shows off exactly how smooth her ivory skin is, and she’s refusing to actually make contact with Santana’s lap. Which just isn’t fair.
It’s loud, and it’s hot, and it’s Brittany, and Santana is pretty sure she’s going to explode.
“Goddammit, Britt,” she hears herself say, as though speaking through a gently-rolling ocean wave.“What?”
If Brittany giggles one more time, Santana might snap and kill them both. And if Brittany, so help her God, brings her mouth any closer to Santana’s ear, she’s not sure she’ll be able to stop herself from leaping up and running away.
“Dance with me,” Brittany says at last, a soft breath of a command, and Santana really doesn’t want to. She’s thanking every God in every existing pantheon that she is in fact a teenage girl, because if she had boy-parts, she wouldn’t be able to move. As it is, she’s not sure she’ll be able to stand up and keep her balance. The heeled boots she’s wearing don’t exactly play well with arousal and anxiety.
“Dance with me,” Brittany commands again, stepping back from the chair and pulling Santana by the shoulders as she goes. “Dance with me, come on, this song is good.”
It’s not good, Santana thinks. It’s some Kanye West piece of crap, or maybe one of those jerks with names that begin inexplicably with “Lil’”, but either way, it’s absolutely awful. Still, it has a beat, and Brittany is already fluidly moving to it, holding tight to Santana’s arm with one hand and pumping the other in the air. Against her better judgment, Santana allows herself to be dragged until they’re standing parallel to the speakers and settles, almost awkwardly, with her free hand buried in her back pocket.
Brittany laughs madly and spins, yanking on Santana like a child at her first parade. “Come on, Santana, don’t just stand there all useless-like. God, you look like Finn.”
A few feet away, the tall boy’s head snaps up. He looks thoroughly wounded, which is exactly enough to make Santana cackle hysterically, breaking the uneasy shell she’s been wearing all night. It only helps that, to his left, Quinn lets out a snort and shrugs in a very ‘what can I do?’ sort of way when her boyfriend glares indignantly back.
“Can’t have that,” Santana chortles, reaching for Brittany with both hands. The taller girl hums happily, permitting Santana to encircle her waist and pull her close.
They move together through that crappy song, and then the next, and the next. Santana’s skin is practically vibrating with the pulse of the music, her legs burning with the effort of pushing through an alcoholic haze. Brittany is in her own little world, the way Brittany gets when she’s drunk (and, truthfully, when she’s sober), arms above her head, hips grinding gently against Santana’s. She gives a little twirl every now and again, prompting Santana to change it up, and laughs loudly when Santana takes this to mean she should show off a couple of very 80s dance moves. Santana grins, face flushed, and curls one arm loosely around the other girl’s middle until Brittany’s back is warm against her chest. No one’s watching-well, no one except Mike, who has missed seven consecutive beer pong throws in favor of gawking shamelessly while Brittany rocks her entire body enthusiastically against Santana’s-so she doesn’t bother thinking about anything other than how nice it feels to have her friend this close.
“San?” she hears Brittany ask, her mellow voice swooping easily through the Pink song blasting from their left.
“Hm?” Santana spins Brittany around to face her, smiling. The blonde girl eases closer until Santana begins to have trouble deciding where her body ends and Brittany’s begins. Long arms loop gently around her neck, the fingers of one hand tickling the back of her neck as it rakes through her hair.
“You seemed sad earlier,” Brittany observes, eyes hooded. Santana inhales as slender fingers skitter over the shell of one ear and trace a casual path along her cheekbone. She tries to shrug, but Brittany’s got her too tightly for much motion above the waist.
“It was nothing,” she promises, grinning when Brittany’s wandering fingers slide to the bridge of her nose. “Just needed some quiet.”
“You seem to need a lot of quiet these days,” Brittany mumbles, leaning her forehead gently against Santana’s. Her breath curls in tendrils around them both until Santana thinks they’re probably using the same miniscule amount of air to sustain each of their bodies. She kind of likes the idea.
“It’s nothing, Britt,” she swears again, momentarily distracted by the realization that their pelvises have been grinding slowly and rhythmically together for the better part of three minutes now. It’s a steady back-and-forth motion, like boats in a harbor, and it is nothing if not inspiring.
Although, unfortunately, it isn’t inspiring her to take any action that won’t get her in trouble.
Brittany doesn’t look like she’s particularly buying what Santana is selling, but the girl knows her well enough not to push. Instead, she lets out a soft sigh and drops her head against Santana’s shoulder. Hot breath roils across the shorter girl’s neck, and Santana has to brace her entire body against a shiver. Nonplussed, Brittany raises her head, blue eyes locking with dark with all the efficiency of a guided Dutch missile.
She can see the question forming on perfect pink lips, and Santana’s just not ready to answer it yet. She shakes her head and unglues one hand from Brittany’s hip, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind the other girl’s ear.
“I like this,” she confides quietly. “Dancing with you.” She’s not sure why she says it, exactly, but it feels like the right thing to do. Anyway, when Brittany cocks her head and smiles back with all the force of a sunbeam, it doesn’t matter so much that she’s Santana Lopez, Secondary Top Dog, or that Coach kind of loves and hates her at the same time and it makes for really violently confusing practices, or that she’s constantly rebuffing the advances of boys because she’s desperately, pathetically in love with the best friend she’s ever had. Brittany’s smiling like she’s the only other person in the world, and Santana wants so badly to kiss her. She settles for lowering her eyes almost shyly, drawing the blonde impossibly closer.
Ever obedient, Brittany leans in, cheek pressed deliberately to Santana’s, and sighs. “I know.”
“You do?” Santana questions uncertainly, one hand curling behind the blonde’s head to hold her gently in place. Brittany giggles.
“That’s why I asked you, silly.”
It somehow makes all the sense in the world, even through the thin film that always coats drunken-Brittany logic, and though her chest felt like cracking open barely an hour ago, Santana can’t seem to turn off her grin.