A/N- I wanted to point out that any character bashing in this chapter is not me venting my own opinions, but rather those of the characters. Keep in mind that I'm writing from their POV, not my own, so know that I'm not trying to hate, just be genuine.

Disclaimer- Still not mine. Unfortunately. =(


It had been a few weeks since the slushy incident.

They had bared their souls to each other and Santana was well aware of the fact. It was probably due to this knowledge that, despite them both agreeing to go their separate ways and forget about the situation entirely, she couldn't get it out of her mind.

She would see him in all the same places she had before- at his lunch table with jocks, getting something from his locker in between 3rd and 4th period, heading off to some kind of sports practice after school. She hadn't really taken any conscious notice of him before, but how could she avoid doing so now? Worse still, their eyes would sometimes meet and it was in that brief moment that they'd relive the locker room. They knew something incriminating about each other. Each had the power to ruin the other one.

Santana liked to think of it as something of a stand-off, Ennio Morricone style. It was probably for this reason that she bided her time, simply waiting for him to let the truth about her slip. She treated it as inevitability and readied herself to do the same.

But time wore on and no such thing occurred. The longer he kept his promise the more impressed she became and the more she felt inclined to approach him again.

When she finally caught him more-or-less alone it was after his baseball practice on a balmy spring evening. She was on her way to the parking lot from Glee rehearsals and he was sitting sweaty and gross on a bench close to the field, watching as some of the guys ran through their own game. Not eager to get home and study history notes, she threw caution to the wind and meandered over.

"Hey there," she said, inviting herself to plop down next to him and cast her messenger bag to the side.

He looked over at her, both bewildered and a little startled. "Oh…'sup." He then returned his attention to the diamond.

"What are you doing here?" she felt compelled to ask. "Don't you want to go home? Take a shower at least?"

He laughed a little at that, albeit nervously. "Yeah…I'm not exactly in a big hurry."

"Dude, you should be. You smell like dirt and four month old gym socks."

He chuckled again, but she could tell it was doing seldom little to relieve the tension. He obviously thought she was harboring ulterior motives and given her dirt on him coupled with her history of being the worst confidant in the world, she couldn't exactly call this fear irrational.

She leaned a bit closer and lowered her voice, fighting to not breathe through her nose. "I'm not here to threaten you or something. I just want to talk."

He cocked an eyebrow. "'Bout what?"

"I don't know, anything. Your life, my life. My troubles, your troubles. Whatever."

He kicked absentmindedly at a patch of grass while a homerun was scored, missing it completely and seeming to not care.

"Yeah…I dunno."

She sighed and wet her lips, getting a bit frustrated with his reticence.

"Look, Karofsky, that was a big thing you did a few weeks ago. I haven't even managed to find the balls to do what you did. I don't want fuck with you, I just want someone to talk to about our shared situation. Something tells me you do too."

He glanced at her briefly, then the field, and then back at the ground, seemingly mulling over the situation. Eventually, he placed hands on his knees and rose from the bench.

"You hungry?" he asked as he began to gather his things. "Give me a second to take a shower and I'll buy you dinner."

She smirked, a little disbelieving. "A guy buying me dinner? This'll be a first."

He smiled back, and this time she could tell it was genuine. "Cool it, Lopez. I figure it's the least I can do after the epic slushy incident of 2011."

"Just don't think this gets you out of buying me a new outfit."

"Nah, wouldn't dream of it."

He then shifted his sports bag onto his shoulder and headed off to the locker room. She waited patiently on the bench, deciding to use the opportunity to skim over her neglected history notes.


They chose to meet at the nearby Thai place down the street. It had been his suggestion, not hers, and probably needless to say she found herself a bit surprised. She would have expected him to pick something a bit more casual and far less ethnic.

Not that she was complaining, or even planned to call him out on this. Free Thai food was free Thai food, no matter who was buying it.

The conversation they shared was fairly light and relaxed and she wouldn't have had it any other way. It was because Dave wasn't a friend and in just the same royal mess that she was that she felt like her walls could come down. How long had it been since she just talked to someone? It seemed like every conversation she'd had in the past month -with those who were supposed to be her friends, no less- had been drenched with facetiousness or excessive drama. In fact, that was something of a regularity in her life.

Save for Brittany, who she hadn't been able to talk to the same way since the confession, there was no one she knew currently that she could talk to like she could talk to Dave. It was because everyone else, in one aspect or another, was just a pawn in her schemes.

But Dave was not and couldn't be any of those things. He simply held her deepest secret and she, his. The only thing they could do was bond with and find some kind of solace in the only other person at school who got it. But Santana was beginning to discover that it wasn't nearly as hard as she thought it would be.

As it turned out, Dave was a surprisingly cool guy.

"Why don't you just act like this all the time?" she found herself asking as she twisted rice noodles around her fork.

"What do you mean?"

"Like this. As in, not a douchebag. You try so hard to get people to like you by being this big jerk, but I bet you anything you could be as popular as Finn if you'd just -oh, fuck, excuse the sickening cliché- be yourself."

He sighed and laughed somewhat half-heartedly. "Yeah, well, maybe you should take your own advice, Lopez."

"For crying out loud, it's not that easy. You at least told someone your secret point-blank, unlike me who just blurted it out like an idiot. You're much closer to being legitimately awesome than I am. I've got no choice but to barricade myself in the bitch fortress."

"Well, I'm right in there with you, like it or not. I told you because I knew yours and it was only fair that you knew mine. I'll be damned if I'm going to be waving the rainbow flag down the halls of McKinley anytime soon."

She rolled her eyes. "I don't mean that."

"You said I should be myself, right? Act like this in front of everybody? Well, that's part of who I fucking am. There isn't anything I can do about it. As long as I'm stuck in this podunk town I'll continue to act like the last guy on earth anyone would suspect. You get that, Lopez, I know you do."

Santana shook her head, but kept a slight smirk to help lighten the mood. "Yeah, I get it."

He seemed to sense her resigned disappointment.

"Hey," he said softly, attempting to remove her downcast eyes from her plate. "Do you think the bitch and the douchebag fortresses are one in the same?"

"I think we might have to combine them," she shrugged. "It wouldn't make sense for us to fight the battle of self-denial alone."

He nodded and she smiled sincerely at him, hoping that he'd appreciate being one of the only people she knew to actually see it.

Santana then heard the chime of the door ring as another customer came in, but she didn't think much of it. It had been ringing intermittently all night and the restaurant was fairly busy in any case.

When she looked up from her spring roll, however, she saw that Dave felt quite differently. He was currently staring wide-eyed and uncomfortable at the host's desk, and so she just had to turn around and see what had procured such a reaction.

Well, I'll be damned, she thought as she soaked up the sight of an unsurprisingly perfectly groomed Kurt Hummel in the company of his deliciously gorgeous Eurasian boyfriend. As she remembered having neglected to tell Dave about Kurt's new beau, she also recalled that she had forgotten the name of said boyfriend.

When the two boys caught sight of them, Santana spun around quickly, hoping to make it look like her attention had been on her food all along. Dave's eyes darted down in the same direction, but continued to shift uneasily until his met hers.

'I forgot his name…' she mouthed to Dave. She knew it was the least of their worries at the current moment, but she still managed to earn a repressed, albeit nervous-as-fuck chuckle from him as he shrugged his shoulders.

"Hey!" said gorgeous boyfriend pleasantly as he approached their table, dragging a very reluctant and spiteful looking Kurt behind him. "Fancy seeing you guys here! Small town, right?"

Santana returned his pleasantries with a wan smile while Dave brooded and avoided eye contact with either boy.

"Yeah, fancy that." She replied, a bit sarcastically. Gorgeous boyfriend didn't seem to notice.

"Kurt and I had just wrapped up Warbler's practice and since school's out for the rest of the week, we figured we come celebrate at our favorite Thai place."

"The only Thai place," Kurt corrected through his teeth, eyes darting around desperately for an escape.

Gorgeous boyfriend shrugged his shoulders. "So…what are you two doing here? We aren't…uh, interrupting anything are we?"

Santana could almost feel the heat of Dave's rising anger radiating off of him. The implication in gorgeous boyfriend's voice hadn't been in the least bit subtle. No doubt that now both boys were wondering if the two of them were dating, if Dave was trying for a final go with heterosexuality, and if she was aware of it.

But before she could think of a witty retort, Dave had placed a wad of cash on the table and was rising from his chair.

"Nope," he said almost inaudibly. "I was just leaving."

He then was careful to maneuver around the couple so as to not brush up against either of them the wrong way. Santana didn't miss Kurt's pointed glare after Dave as he exited the restaurant.

"Oh…" Gorgeous boyfriend managed, seeming to her to not know when to shut his handsome gob. "Did I- I mean…maybe I said something-"

"I wouldn't worry about it," Santana interrupted, rising and gathering her own belongings. "You guys enjoy your meal. Don't singe your tastebuds off with the Sriracha."

Kurt must have detected the intentional bitterness in her tone, as she heard him say, "Forget it, Blaine." and lead him to their table before gorgeous boyfriend could spew anymore stupidity.

'Blaine…that's his fucking name.'


She was pleased to see that his 1994 Ford F150 was where he'd left it last. She had hoped to get a word in edgewise before he zoomed off back home to beat off and cry alone or whatever it was he did to deal with the pain.

She came around to the passenger side door and invited herself to climb in, only to be met by Dave leaning up against the steering wheel. Naturally her unannounced arrival disturbed the tranquility of his brood.

"Oh, Jesus, what the fuck, Lopez…" he gasped, apparently more startled than she thought he'd be. "You could have at least knocked…"

It wasn't hard to see his bloodshot eyes or whitened knuckles as they clenched the wheel. She'd cut the crap for now.

"What did you expect, Karofsky? That he was going to be happy to see you?"

"No!" he barked. "…but fuck all if I expected him to walk in there at the exact same time with that…fucking guy…"

His voice was breaking. She supposed any other proper gal pal might hug him or something, but she wasn't that kind. She suspected he wasn't either.

"Please…gay guys love ethnic food. And given we live in Bumfuck, Ohio with only one remotely ethnic restaurant you should have treated their appearance as inevitable."

This didn't appear to cheer him up in the slightest. He simply collapsed back on his steering wheel.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner," she said, purposefully softening her voice. "I of all people should have known."

He still didn't stir from his slump.

"Don't you think I know what it's like?" She leaned in closer to his hunched over form. "Every day I have to watch the person I love with some fuck in a wheelchair. And it's not as if I haven't made it blatantly clear how I feel. She knows, and that's what hurts the most. She knows and she still doesn't want me."

Dave made a sound akin to whimper. "At least she would care if you were to veer off a bridge or die in a fiery car wreck. Sometimes I think Hummel dreams about it happening to me."

Santana scoffed sadly. "Don't be ridiculous, Karofsky. He doesn't think about you in his spare time, not even to fantasize your death. Besides, as creepily maniacal as he can be I don't think he's ever harbored a deathwish for you. He just wants you the fuck out of his life, that's all."

He suddenly sat up, glaring daggers at her. "Is this supposed to be making me feel better?"

"No." she said pointedly. "I'm doing you one better. I'm telling you how it is."

He ground his jaw, unable to argue with his appreciation for her lack of bullshit.

"But you've got an advantage that I don't. You wanna know what it is?" When he didn't respond with an even remotely interested answer, she continued on anyway. "Kurt doesn't even know you. He knows douchebag jock Dave, but not the Dave that just had dinner with me. You know something? I bet with the right amount of time and effort, he'd want to fuck the shit out of that Dave."

He couldn't help but laugh. It was obvious he wanted to keep being frustratingly depressed, but the ridiculousness of her last sentence –and, arguably, the hope that carried with it- made it nigh impossible.

"You've got to be kidding me, Lopez…"

"Fuck no, I'm not," she continued, unabashed. "You start acting more like real Dave and Kurt will forget all about Gorgeous McStupidhair."

"Gorgeous McStupidhair? Really? That's the best you've got?"

Santana shrugged, pulled some lipstick out of her purse and applied it casually in the rearview mirror.

"Hey, fuck you, I'm not firing on all four snark cylinders tonight."

He sighed and leaned back a little, seeming to have healed a bit from their odd conversation.

"Yeah, that much is obvious."

"So we should do this more often." She capped her lipstick tube and smoothed her lips. "We can just chill out and be gay douchebags together. It doesn't have to be anything obvious, if you don't want it to. We could have a secret platonic gay friendship affair. What do you think?"

"Yeah, I'd like that," he grinned. "Besides, I still need to take you clothes shopping."

"Bet your ass you do."

She then opened the side door and climbed out into the warm evening air.

"See you later, Karofsky."

"Yeah. Later, Lopez."