A follow up to my recent one-shot.
Enjoy. :)
Your steady glare follows Santana as she guffaws, clearly finding your current predicament highly amusing. You wish that she was at least a little bit more upset over you canceling your plans. You wish that you were a little less affected by her laughter.
"This is fucking suicidal, Q," Santana tells you with a soft shake of her head. Your eyes roll upwards and your fingers curl even tighter into the light fabric of your favorite yellow sundress.
Santana spoke as if you didn't know that already.
You watch her as she converses easily with the parents of the children you're minding tonight. Your palms, you're sure, are sweaty, and you think the cardigan you'd chosen may have been from your winter collection. She looks unhappy.
You like to think that you know her much more than you'd ever show. You always thought that she spoke with her facial expressions just as much as she did with her mouth. She looked as gorgeous as ever, obviously, but her smiles did not reach her smiles and her hands fluttered excessively and her socks did not match her sweater - an owl print, this time.
You don't say anything, your body moving mechanically as you offer your own smile to the parents when they turn to you. They're charmed, and you can go back to pouring your attention as subtly as you could over her.
You were such a coward.
They were fighting, she told you after you had tucked the children into bed, and you had been still trying to pick the glitter out of your hair. Your hand stills, and your heart stutters, a ray of hope caressing your mind. It was gone as quickly as it came, because that is not what you should be thinking about. She needs you. She needs a friend.
You decide that you hate the word.
You sit with her as she cries. That is what a good friend does, after all. You really shouldn't be thinking about how she settles so comfortably in your arms, or how her head burrows in against your neck and you feel like you could hold her forever and be content. Your eyes close and your breath matches her and you cannot remember being happier than when you held Beth for the first time.
She's too close, you realize, too late, maybe, when she eventually pulls back, and your eyes flutter open again, as if you weren't reveling in her touch. Your eyes widen and your eyebrows shoot up and your heart thuds wildly and oh - those were her lips against yours. Her lips taste of summer's blood, leaving stains upon your tongue, upon your mind, and you feel as if you are drowning, the water lapping up at you, caressing you, loving you as you gasp out your breaths.
Her hands fist into your cardigan, anchoring herself to the ever-steady you, but it is you who feels like a ship lost in the eye of the storm, battered soothingly by the brush of her lips and the sighs in her kisses.
You lose yourself in the sea of her promises, the waves of affection crashing over you once, twice. The thirst leaves you aching for more.
Always more.
"It was merely a lapse of judgement," she tells you quietly, with a false confidence you cannot come to appreciate when you show up at her locker the next Monday with a brilliant smile, your entire being radiating with your delight. The letter in your hand now feels so insignificant. Your smile falters at her words, and your heart constricts, and your lungs collapse, and this time, as you drown, you die.
You tell her that she's just like them. You tell her that she's just like Finn, and Puck, and Sam. You tell her that she's a liar. You tell her that you hate her. Except you don't, and you love her so much that it's suffocating you, flooding your lungs and the battering is not so soothing any longer. Love had always been such a ravenous beast.
How much blinder could you have been?
You flinch away from her touch, her fingertips burning into your skin, your eyes brimming with tears, jaw trembling with the noises that threaten to tumble from your lips. The acceptance letter in your hand now feels like lead, and your walls are building once more when you throw it at her feet. You pretend that you don't hear her calling you back.
Even then, you don't tell her that you love her.
You decide that it was a good choice when you see her tucked against his side only moments later.