More often than she'd like to admit, she lies awake at night thinking about her last conversation with her grandmother, that last phone call before she'd gotten into her car and driven off to Kentucky in August.
"I just don't understand, Santana," her abuela had said to her, that once familiar voice now filled with a foreign disdain. "How did this happen? When did you start to feel that you were...that way?"
The truth is, she can't remember a time in her life when she didn't feel that way. There was just the time before she knew what it meant, and the time after.
Most days, she misses the time before. Those carefree middle school days when she collected smiles from Brittany Pierce like sparkling pieces of sea glass, with no concern for her motives for doing so. Brittany just seemed like someone who needed a little looking after, and looking after Brittany made Santana feel taller and tougher than she suspected she had a right to, more proud of herself than any ribbon or trophy had ever made her feel.
She knew their friendship was different, but she wasn't particularly interested in knowing the name of what that difference was, in speaking it aloud.
And in the early days, Brittany had never pushed for a thing. Santana was the one who had made all the preliminary moves, the ones that must have seemed so small from the outside, but felt to her like tectonic shifts: the brush of a hand, the resting of a head on a shoulder. Even though it required a complete reordering of the way she'd always envisioned her life, every move, once made, just felt so natural that she couldn't imagine not having made it.
Until one day, without thinking, she'd just kissed Brittany, completely casually, before moving toward the door to her bedroom to head downstairs for dinner.
She'd made it four or five steps away before feeling Brittany's hand on her arm, pulling her back into the room. Brittany had kissed her soundly then, holding her face so gently in her hands that Santana thought she might actually cry, and when Brittany had finally pulled away, she'd looked Santana right in the eyes and said, "There you are. I knew you'd get here eventually."
The two of them had collapsed into giggles at that until finally Santana's mother had had to come upstairs to see what was taking them so long.
After that night, everything suddenly seemed so much easier. Or, if not easy, at least everything seemed to make sense. Even if she wasn't ready to talk about it, even if there were times when she still used her body to get what she wanted (mostly to protect herself from the things she wasn't ready to say out loud), kissing Brittany made her feel like there was finally a place for her in the world, a place she actually wanted to be.