Rachel Berry has always followed a set of very simple rules. Firstly, do not let anyone make you believe that you are not a star. Secondly, purport in most circumstances that your opinion is the correct one. Thirdly, proceed with logic and caution as you play the game of life.
Her logic was almost unsurpassable by now. Like a Jacob's ladder in reverse, everything in her life had tumbled perfectly in its procession – save a few minor bumps – and part of this, she thought, was due to the infallible logic she applied to everyday situations.
What was not logical was her love for Santana Lopez.
She was the textbook bad roommate. So bad it was almost funny. So bad Kurt had looked into whether or not they could have a reality show filming the hot mess that was their apartment. So bad that, to Rachel, she was almost good.
Her habits were awful. As far as Rachel could tell, she hardly slept and barely ate; and only did the two at unconventional and inconvenient times. She slept fitfully through the day, just going to bed when Rachel was completing her vocal warm-ups for the day in front of the grimy and overused mirror in the bathroom; and mainly ate at three in the morning, often stoned and loud. 'What are you doing?' Rachel would murmur, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes; looking at Santana who sat cross-legged and elegant in the middle of one of Kurt's rugs, surrounded by cracker crumbs with the bag perched on her head like a fedora. 'Do you like my hat?' Santana would ask, and then she would burst out laughing and keel over, jumping to her feet and pushing past Rachel in her quest to obtain yet more of the crackers which resided in the cupboard labelled Rachel's Food/Vegan Shit. She would chew continually while Rachel dragged her off to bed, spraying crumbs over her star-patterned pyjamas with her protests. 'This fucking sucks,' she would whine, and at first Rachel would agree more than emphatically, but by now she would almost look forward to it. 'You suck, Berry,' Santana would continue, pouting and complaining like a child.
Rachel did suck. Was a sucker. Period.
Santana walked in on people in the bathroom, and she genuinely didn't care. She suffered no embarrassment of her own and seemed immune to the embarrassment felt by others. She felt that it was okay to barge in on Rachel in the bath and start using the water to shave her legs with; and granted, Rachel liked bubbles, but she still wasn't convinced that Santana never saw anything as she claimed was the case. She thought nothing of the intimacy that Rachel had so associated with the sheer vulnerability of being naked in front of another person, and thought nothing of peeing while Rachel towelled herself off after a shower. Sometimes, Rachel didn't even notice she was there. 'Hey, Berry!" she would say, her face popping up beside Rachel's in the steamy looking glass, splitting into a wide and genuine grin. Somehow it became weirder to think of being in the bathroom alone, and to be accompanied by Santana singing beautiful harmonies to songs she never would have admitted to knowing a year ago was the new normal.
Rachel ended up thinking a lot of things were normal.
No pyjamas became a thing that was normal in their apartment. No pyjamas, just a cheerleading camp t-shirt from sophomore year and a relatively modest pair of underwear. When the heating shorted out and the inside of their loft was boiling despite the bitter chill outside, Santana had thrown Rachel the t-shirt from freshman year and told her that it would 'suit you, Berry' with a disgraceful wink.
A lot of things that Santana did were disgraceful.
Rachel knew that when it got to two or three in the morning that Santana would be coming home from the late shift and post-drinks at the bar she worked at, and she knew that more often than not Santana wouldn't be able to remember how to operate a key. It was disgraceful, really, the fact that Rachel was getting up to let her in, but she sort of loved it. Drunken Santana just seemed to assume all of the guises sober Santana wasn't able to, whether this was the pent up sadness she was plagued by in junior year or herself as the star of Wicked, or Chicago. Kurt refused to take his earplugs out or leave the sanctuary of his bedroom, telling Rachel that in his opinion, Santana should sleep outside; so the time was reserved solely for the two of them. Sometimes Santana would slur songs, sometimes she would wobble around trying to dance, sometimes she would try and quote old movies – a particular favourite curiously being the Wizard of Oz – and sometimes she would just tug Rachel over to the couch with her and hold a very frank discussion about all that was going on in their respective lives at that moment in time. It wasn't a love-in. Santana was still Santana, and she would still snort with laughter when Rachel told her that she was worried her current drama-student boyfriend was gay, or when Rachel told her that she really felt like this year was her year as far as love and drama and fun was concerned; but she would listen attentively and cock her head to the side when Rachel spoke of her mother, or the continual pressure she felt her dads didn't know they were imparting to her. Even rarer than a Rent duet – one musical Santana would never admit to liking – Santana would tell her about her own family and their strict set of expectations, and sometimes she would come out with stories about her abuela. As far as Rachel could tell - or work out from the drunken burbles - Santana had grown up with parents who were forced to work more than spend time with her, and she had consequently almost lived at her abuela's in Lima Heights Adjacent. She once cried with laughter telling Rachel about the time her grandmother had beaten a drug runner with a wedged sandal for riding his little bicycle over her cherished tulips on their tiny front yard, and Rachel had almost joined her because she didn't think she had ever seen any person, let alone Santana, look so happy. But then her tears of joy would turn very quickly into sadness and she would end up clinging to Rachel and sobbing about how it might have been different. It was very intimate, Rachel realised, as the shoulder of her top was soaked through with broken promises of love and trust.
Broken promises were something Santana provided a lot of in terms of her behaviour as a roommate.
Not real promises, like the promise she made to Rachel that she would pull some strings so that she could sing in the bar Santana worked at when the attendance of some industry bigwigs was rumoured. Or the promise she made Kurt that she would never, ever let Rachel leave the house in a paisley skirt.
Promises like 'yes, Berry, I will do my own fucking laundry', and 'no, Berry, I'm pretty sure it was Kurt's latest boy who keeps creasing the playbills', and 'sure, I'll make dinner on Friday nights', and 'of course, I'll always go out onto the fire escape to smoke'. None of those things actually happened. She left her laundry in a bag outside Rachel's door with a sticky note and a creased twenty dollar bill, she was the one who would always accidentally collide with Rachel's pile of playbills as she crossed from her room to the kitchen, she ordered Chinese for their meal once a month maximum, and she set the fire alarm off with her constant cigarillo smoking in the kitchen.
Rachel didn't mind, and that scared her. She didn't mind doing Santana's laundry, she didn't mind that her various off and off-off Broadway playbill collection was damaged, she didn't mind making dinner (even though Santana would never eat it, professing that she was not a 'fucking woodland animal'), and she didn't mind the scent of the vanilla flavoured seven minute cigars, and even found herself liking the times when Santana would bring home a box full of Spanish chocolate and smoke them obliviously in the kitchen. Their smell became synonymous with Santana's, and Rachel would breathe it in deeply whenever she breezed past her or sat beside her on the couch. She remembered smelling it whenever Santana would walk past her in the McKinley corridors and was overcome with a strange sense of pride when she realised that she knew where it came from. Sometimes she had to pinch herself to remember that she was living in New York with Santana Lopez. It felt almost like a giddy secret, something Rachel would want to tell everyone but then remember that she couldn't.
She did have secrets, though.
Friday night was one of Santana's nights off, and in accordance with her roommate-bonding schedule, it was also one of the nights that Rachel spent in with trashy TV and pizza. Rachel liked to think that Santana's timetable was a deliberate attempt to conform to her schedule, but the idea was dismissed within thirty seconds of it being brought up and she figured that she won some, she lost some.
She also became used to two things very quickly: how easy she found it to forgive Kurt's consistent skipping of roommate-bonding to spend time with his new friends visiting all the gay bars in the city, and that Friday was apparently the day that Santana would visit the guy on the top floor with all the cats and return with a tenth of medical marijuana. Rachel was an artiste, and prided herself in the open-mindedness she had towards others' drug habits while maintaining a steadfast and certain 'just say no' stance herself.
Sometimes she would return home at six or seven in the evening and Santana would already be red-eyed and mellowed, and her secret was that she would stand and watch her roommate in the doorway or from her bedroom; just watching because really, Santana was breathtaking. She would usually just be dressed in an oversized university t-shirt and a little pair of sleep shorts, and she would usually be dancing to songs by bands Rachel had never heard of with her eyes closed and blissful, and she would sometimes be cooking. Rachel found herself leaning against the doorway and watching Santana's almost willowy arms and legs move gracefully around their kitchen, watching her murmuring along to some obscure ambient music, watching her throw her head back and smile brilliantly when she retrieved some brownies or cupcakes from the oven. She just couldn't look away. It was too beautiful, and Santana never noticed her there. When Rachel would tap her on the shoulder and grin at her knowingly, Santana would wrap her arms around her and say something like 'hey, Rach, do you want a cupcake?', but she would stop dancing and Rachel would start to feel like she was intruding on a private moment.
Kurt would come home and wrinkle his nose at the smell from the fire escape and ask Rachel over and over again why she would never tell Santana off for disrespecting their house. 'What, are you like in love with her or something?' he asked once, and Rachel let his words hang in the air a little too long before giggling and telling him 'no, no I'm not.'
She didn't know if she was in love with Santana, or whether or not she just loved her.
One bleary-eyed Sunday morning, Rachel had walked out of her bedroom and into another moment that she felt like Santana wouldn't really want her to see. She was lying flat on her back in the middle of the loft beside a sticker-covered guitar, tapping her foot to the floor and humming, holding a black notebook in her right hand and a fountain pen in her left; and Rachel thought she would never be able to stop staring. When Rachel had coughed Santana had rolled over and clutched the book protectively to her chest and even though Rachel knew it was nothing personal, she had felt a little hurt spring up in the back of her mind. She ended up hoping that maybe someday, at some point, Santana would feel as if she knew Rachel well enough to trust her to read it. But then maybe it was this mystery, this excitement, this charisma which first pulled Rachel under Santana's spell. She felt strange, unnatural; her attraction both confusing and unrequited.
Santana treated Rachel's boyfriends absolutely horribly, but Rachel didn't mind.
She had made two of them cry and run out wiping their eyes, and she had simply scoffed. 'Fucking theatre pussies,' she said, smirking as the door swung shut. 'I did you a favour, Rach. My gaydar was going insane.' Within her first week of living with Brody she had slapped him and screamed at him in incomprehensible Spanish. She would welcome Rachel's dates home with a fierce accent and introduce herself as Rachel's live-in manager. When she told a senior from her theatricality seminar who was actually straight and rather eligible that she was pretty certain Rachel had given her herpes, Rachel had wanted to push her down the stairs, or at least throw something at her. As he beat his hasty retreat, she had confronted Santana with anger previously unknown to her, furiously shouting at her about constantly sabotaging her life, and asking her why it couldn't just be different now they weren't in school. Santana had taken a small step back, and held her hands up in surrender. 'I just thought you deserved better,' she said calmly, and Rachel felt her rage and indignation dissipate, vanishing as quickly as they had come on.
Rachel's vegan lifestyle was something else that Santana completely ignored.
Rachel complained that she was using the wrong milk to make coffee and that she was mixing saucepans with the wrong spoons. Santana held her hands up defensively. 'Q and I went vegetarian in ninth grade, and that shit I can deal with. But what's wrong with an egg, really?' Rachel tried to explain that it was a different thing, that to be vegan was to pursue a way of life, but Santana didn't understand and continued to use up Rachel's soy milk – she would shake it and drink it from the carton because she liked the taste – without replacing it, so she was left with dry cornflakes in the morning. 'Why can't you just use our milk?' Santana asked, rolling her eyes. If it had been Kurt asking, Rachel would have unleashed her inner vegan monster. But she just smiled and shook her head bashfully, reminding Santana that cows were the ones responsible for the production of milk. Santana never learnt, and Rachel's hopes of converting their apartment into one wholly organic and vegan were dashed in the very first week of their living together when Santana bought what looked like an entire pigs worth of bacon at the food market. She bought Rachel a lobster and was offended when Rachel said she couldn't eat it, not bothering to listen to the explanation.
She rarely listened to Rachel.
Whether it was simple requests like 'turn that down, please' or 'stir my lentils', advice like 'it's still February and this is New York, you'll freeze' or 'she looked quite unkempt, I would recommend an STD test', or instructions like 'no, you can't go out on the fire escape, there's a snowstorm' or 'it's your turn to clean the bath', or more pertinent subjects that required her attention, like 'stop scaring my boyfriend's away' and 'please stop to think about your poor liver before drinking that'; Santana would point blank never listen. It happened once, when Rachel had seen a mouse scurry about on their floor and had screamed at Santana to kill it. Sometimes being an animal-lover plays second fiddle to pure fear, she defended herself. Santana had whirled around, eyes wild, and brought a plate down on top of the helpless animal. Then she had stalked off into her bedroom and left Rachel standing on a chair in the middle of the kitchen alone and afraid she would never return, but come back in holding a torn up sheet for the mouse's body and the smashed ceramic. When Rachel had opened her mouth to thank her profusely, she had placed a finger to her lips and blown a soft 'shh. Don't mention it.'
And usually, this act of blatantly ignoring her would send Rachel spinning over the edge into a dark pool of insecurity and worry, but with Santana it just felt real.
Real in the sense that Santana didn't listen because she didn't care about what Rachel had to say, not because she didn't care about Rachel. People had ignored her advice ever since she started giving it – albeit unwelcome in most cases – just because it came from her, but with Santana she knew that it wasn't her fault. Santana was different, and Rachel realised that even when Santana was mean to her back in school that it was seldom unfounded. She would insult Rachel offhandedly and wouldn't care about the consequences, sure but whenever her insults turned into something larger it would always be to do with Rachel's actions and not Rachel herself. And once she got past the initial offence, Rachel found herself accepting that it was a part of Santana's nature that would probably never change. And that was okay, now. Especially now, when her legs would rest on Rachel's as they sat on the couch watching crappy movies, skin against skin.
Sapphic desires were another new thing to Rachel, but she wasn't bothered by them in the slightest.
The only thing that bothered Rachel about being Santana's roommate was when she brought girls home with her.
Stupid, vapid, ignorant girls, who would giggle and hang off Santana's arm and bat their eyelashes and scream curse words that woke Rachel up in the middle of the night. It was difficult, living in a loft, but it had always been bearable. With Santana's arrival and after the first time Rachel watched her in the kitchen and fell a little bit in love with her, it suddenly became unbearable. Rachel was ashamed to admit that she had once spat in one of Santana's trysts cup of coffee in the morning, telling herself that people do stupid things when love in any way is involved. Santana's breaking up with Brittany, Rachel's offer to stay in Lima for her boyfriend and her best friend, Quinn's unadulterated madness when it came to her daughter; and now her own vicious jealousy that bubbled up whenever she passed Santana's room and peered in at a woman who was not her roommate curled up in the sheets.
She stopped letting them in after a point.
"What the fuck is this, Berry?" Santana shouted once, pounding on the door and stamping her feet. "Let me the fuck in."
Rachel had just returned from a night out herself, and had drunk a little more than she ought to have drunk. "Are you alone?" she had replied, squinting through the peephole as Santana and some whore.
"Yes."
'Bullshit,' Rachel said, and she refused to open the door before Santana called a cab for the girl and sent her out of their building and back to her crackhouse.
When she burst in her eyes were blazing with anger and it was all directed at Rachel. "Are you insane?" she shouted, slamming the door behind her. "What is your problem?"
Rachel had taken a sip of her wine, feeling a courage unknown rumbling up within her. "You," she said simply.
Santana stopped pacing, taken aback. "What?"
"You're my problem."
"How? Is this because I'm a shitty roommate, like Kurt always says? Because I'm telling you now, I will move the fuck out."
Rachel giggled. Santana startled at the sound, raising an eyebrow in confusion. "No. It's because I can't imagine a better roommate, and I can't even begin to fathom how this can be the case."
A myriad of emotions began crossing Santana's face while Rachel stared at her intently. Confusion, question, speculation, realisation. Rachel counted them, wondering at what precise point it was that she learnt how to read Santana's expressions.
"Oh," Santana said eventually. And she bit her lip, which Rachel found incredibly unfair. How was she realistically supposed to control her frustration when Santana did things like that?
"Don't bite your fucking lip," she blurted out, a cry of exasperation on the end of her words. "Don't do stuff like that! Stop doing stuff like that to me! Stop doing –"
"Doing what?"
"That thing, when you dance around because you're too baked to realise I'm watching; that thing where you walk around the apartment half naked looking for a shirt; that thing when you leave the door open while you shower; that thing when you lean all over me when we're watching TV, because it is sofuckinghard not to touch you!" Rachel clapped a hand over her mouth, shocked at her own outburst. "Oh, shit…" she said, muffled by her own palm.
Santana stood loosely, her arms dangling by her side and her eyes flashing with thoughts. She took a step forward, so Rachel was within touching distance.
Rachel could feel the heat from her body. "Please don't murder me," she whispered through her fingers.
"No," Santana laughed, lifting her hand and removing Rachel's own from where it covered her mouth. "You could've fucking said that earlier, though."
"What –" Rachel started, cut off by the crash of Santana's lips against hers.
She moaned despite herself and stumbled back into the table, feeling her hands gripping Santana's body to hers with an urgency she didn't know they possessed, kissing her greedily, with pure want.
The next morning, Rachel woke up alone and walked to the kitchen as normal. Santana was lying on her belly, writing rapidly and messily. Rachel coughed and she looked up at her with a nod and a smile so Rachel sat next to her and felt a kiss being planted against her cheek, and read over her shoulder.
She read the song which was sans its title, and smirked and felt her cheeks grow hotter when she realised what it was about. She picked up the pen and scribbled a working title.
I Just Do, it said, and Santana circled it and murmured: 'It's perfect.'