"Mija, are you feeling okay?" Maribel Lopez asked Santana.

It had been three days since she had been raped. Brittany had spent the majority of those three days calling and texting Santana, trying to get her to open up, to let her in, but she wouldn't let her. Santana wasn't good with feelings. She wasn't down to just open up and spill her guts to Brittany like some extra-cheesy, R rated version of an episode of Barney. And Brittany was too beautiful, too pure, too innocent. That was a big part of why Santana loved her so much in the first place. She didn't want to mess that all up.

"I'm fine." She didn't even look up as she spoke, simply taking another bite of her rice.

"Are you having any difficulties at school?" Her stepfather asked. She rolled her eyes at him, which he chose to ignore. "Are the kids picking on you? Is the work starting to get too hard? What's going on?"

"Don't be fucking stupid."

"Santana!" Maribel admonished her daughter, but Santana ignored her, continuing to speak.

"No one would dare bully me unless they wants to become close friends with my fist. I have an epic left hook." She stood up, beginning to gather the dishes, since it was her night to wash them.

"Mi amor." Maribel stood up, gently touching her daughter's arm. The Latina began to shake from the contact, face flushing. Her mother laid a hand against her forehead, judging the warmth in her skin to be caused by illness instead of panic. "Vaya acostarse. I'll take care of the dishes tonight."

"Whatever." Santana set the dishes that she had been collecting back down on the table, turning around and heading to her room.

What she wasn't expecting was to see Brittany sitting on Santana's bed, waiting for Santana to come back, she guessed. Judging from the open window and the dirt on Brittany's arms from scaling the side of the Lopezes' house, it wasn't hard to figure out how she had gotten in without anyone noticing. Using her key would've been too obvious. She couldn't just strut into the house like she owned the place while the family was eating dinner, after all. And she needed the element of surprise on her side if she was gonna break through to Santana.

The dark haired girl couldn't help but chuckle a little, shaking her head in amusement as she stared at Brittany, examining what the girl was wearing. Apparently, she had taken this 'break into Santana's house' adventure as a spy mission, and from the looks of things she had taken it very seriously. She was wearing jeans, black Converse, and a black hoodie. Her hair had been put into a ponytail and then hidden by the hood of her hoodie.

"Brittany. You can't just come over here whenever you feel like it," Santana sighed. This was her home, this was her room, this was her bed. So why was she the one feeling like the outsider, what with the disapproving way Brittany was looking at her?

"But it's important!" Brittany insisted.

"What, like the time Lord Tubbs accidentally drank two bowls of water instead of one?"

"That was serious, Santana! He could've gotten, um- what's the word for it... oh yeah, dehydrated!"

"You get dehydrated if you don't have enough water, Britt, not too much."

"Oh, yeah- big words confuse me."

"Big surprise," Santana muttered.

"Listen- I think we should talk," Brittany said, standing up.

"What's there to talk about?" Santana asked, but she just sounded defeated instead of angry now. "It happened. It's over. Someone- someone just violated me, and no matter what we do, we're never gonna be able to erase that. We're never gonna be able to fix that, and the more you keep bringing this up and trying to solve things, the more I'm gonna end up hurt. So why don't you just leave it alone?"

"It's happened to me before."

Santana's eyes widened. She definitely hadn't been expecting that. "What? How? W-when?"

"Cheer camp. Don't you remember? He just climbed into my tent. I didn't even invite him in, and he... he raped me."

"I thought you had just been joking about that." Suddenly, Santana was feeling very faint. Well, this day had taken an unexpected turn. She sat down weakly on the bed. "But you told me Mike Chang was your first."

Brittany shrugged her shoulders. "I lied."

"Why did you never tell me about this? I could've kicked his ass for you! I could've protected you!"

"The same reason you're refusing to tell anyone about what happened to you now- I was ashamed. And embarrassed. And I thought that if I was stronger, if I wasn't so stupid, if I was a genius like you, maybe he wouldn't have done it to me."

"You're not stupid, Brittany," Santana said firmly, heart melting all at once. The block of ice she had built up around her heart in the last few days to protect herself was now nothing more than a puddle of water. "You're the smartest person I've ever met. And you're almost the kindest, sweetest, most beautiful girl I've ever known. You didn't deserve for that to happen to you."

"I know. After having a couple of years to think about it, I've realized that... I didn't deserve it. I didn't do anything wrong. You didn't deserve what happened to you, either, you know," she said gently, sitting back down onto the bed.

"Yeah..." the Latina whispered, although she wasn't so sure she believed that. She wasn't like Brittany. She wasn't a good person. On the contrary, she was a very bad person, and if anyone deserved their fate it was Santana.

"Please, just let me help you, Tana," Brittany told her, lacing their fingers back together. "I love you. I wanna help you. But you need to let me in first."

"You can't help me until you know who it was first."

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