Kurt paled.
"I… need to stay away from who?" Kurt asked, unable to hide the incredulous edge to his voice.
"You know damn well who," she snarled, getting right up in his face. "She's off-limits. I'm telling you right now, find somebody else to experiment with."
"Experiment… Oh, dear god…" Kurt said slowly, as realization dawned on him. "You can't mean Brittany?"
"Of course I mean Brittany."
Well, thank god. What a joke. It was almost hilarious. For a moment, Kurt had thought there might actually be a problem! He felt relief washing over him as he realized how easily the situation could and likely would remedy itself.
"Santana…" he had to will himself not to laugh, "Your level of intoxication notwithstanding, surely you can't honestly think I have feelings for Brittany. You have nothing to worry about-"
She shoved him backward.
"What the hell, Santana?" Kurt cried.
"I'm fucking serious, Hummel. Stay the hell away from her."
"I am staying away from her!"
"Oh, is that what you call it?"
"Santana-we haven't-"
"Look, I don't care if you're just trying to find yourself, again, for like the fifth time. I don't care if you wanna have a threesome with her and Finn. You leave her the hell out of your bullshit!"
Kurt reddened with a combination of anger and humiliation.
"Santana, what is the matter with you? Are you insane? What happened between Brittany and I was a one-time thing! I ended it. I like her as a friend, nothing more!"
"Well, that's apparently not what she thinks!"
Kurt scoffed.
"Well, it isn't my fault that she's sexually attracted to me, alright? I've done all I can. I've made it abundantly clear that it's over, and it's never going to happen again."
"It never should have happened in the first place! You had no right to use her that way."
"Brittany propositioned me, alright? It was her idea. She wanted to maintain her perfect record. I helped her do that. And it was mutually beneficial. She helped me realize once and for all who I really am."
Santana shook her head. Her eyes shone with a terrifying rage.
"Who you really are. I'll tell you who you fucking are. You're Finn Hudson."
Kurt stared at her.
"What? Are you too stupid to realize that? How it's exactly the same?" Santana cried.
"No. No. My relationship with Brittany is nothing like-"
"It's EXACTLY like that. God, how dumb are you, seriously? She's always sitting next to you. She's always leaning on you. She's always staring at you, touching you, cuddling with you. She acts exactly the way you would act around Finn, if you had any balls."
Kurt could feel the sharp, painful truth slowly drilling into him. Drilling through his incredulity, drilling through his denial, drilling through the shell of proclaimed self-respect, through the suddenly very cruel disgust he had absolutely felt, try as he had to pretend otherwise.
And Santana wasn't finished administering her psychic beating.
"She sang that song to you, the same way you sang to Finn. For the same damn reason. And you still didn't get it. What a fucking shock. Finn didn't get it, either, did he?"
Sweet Jesus.
"But Brittany... just wants to get in my pants," Kurt whispered.
Santana rolled her eyes.
"Brittany wants to get in everyone's pants. She wants to get in Artie's pants. She wants to get in Jacob Ben Israel's pants. This isn't the same thing as that, and you know it. This isn't about sex."
"Well, I don't understand. She can have any boy... or girl, in the entire school! Why is she-"
Santana scoffed.
"She doesn't want somebody she can have."
Such a devilishly simple statement. But it said everything. It said far too much, and Santana suddenly seemed to realize the implications behind the statement. She turned her back to Kurt, walking… or stumbling, rather, into the kitchen.
Kurt had to follow her. At the risk of getting his ass kicked, or of getting in too deep in something that hadn't been any of his business a few minutes ago, he had to follow her.
She was leaning against the sink, swaying back and forth. She'd turned on the water, but seemed to forget what she wanted it for. She just let it run.
"You love her, don't you?" Kurt whispered, before he could take it back. "The same way I…"
"I don't need a therapy session from you," Santana snapped.
"I'm sorry."
The water continued running.
"The whole school knew we were doing it, anyway," she said bitterly. "You know, god, because we're such big sluts that we'll fuck anything that moves, even each other. But it didn't mean anything. Half the time we just did it because we were bored. It didn't mean anything. We're best friends."
She grabbed a dirty glass out of the sink and started rinsing it out.
"You just don't... know what kind of..."
She drank from the still dirty glass.
"When we were kids, Brittany fell madly in love with Big Bird," Santana blurted out, spraying water all over the back of the sink.
"What?" Kurt asked, taken aback both by the strange admission, and the fact that it had been uttered at all. He wasn't sure which was more bizarre.
"Yeah. We went to Sesame Street on Ice, when we were like… four. We hadn't been there for five minutes before her mom noticed she was gone. We finally saw her, up on the big screen. She had jumped down onto the ice to go be with Big Bird."
Santana lifted her chin, smiling painfully, trying to blink back tears, but laughing at the same time.
"I still remember that dumb ass little girl running across the ice, screaming that now they could get married, because Big Bird wasn't stuck in her TV anymore; she got him out. She didn't know he was just some guy in a suit."
"What… happened when she found out?"
"She never did. But, luckily, when she joined kindergarten in the fall, she seemed to forget about it. Except for when she'd tell boys she didn't want to look at their wee-wees, because she was already married."
Kurt looked at the floor uncomfortably.
"You gotta understand, that's the kind of girl she is," Santana continued, "You know the last time she fell in love with someone she could actually have? Because I sure don't. And I knew her when she was 1 year old."
She turned and looked at him then. Uncomfortable, vulnerable, deep pain was written on her face.
"She can't… figure out how to love someone who actually loves her and wants her. She just… keeps going after Big Bird."
The situation was so absurd. So absurd, so comical, and so heartbreaking. And so identical to the one Kurt had been living with for the last eight months.
Every awful, unforgivable thing Finn had done to him, he was doing to Brittany. Every smile he shot her, she was misinterpreting, the same way he had misinterpreted Finn's smiles at him.
What kind of denial had he been in to have not seen that? How ridiculously pathetic was it that it had taken the ravings of a drunken cheerleader to put his head on straight? To show him how badly he had treated a girl he considered a friend, a girl who was possibly more damaged than he could fathom, who hadn't done anything wrong except to follow her immature, deranged little heart, just the way he had followed his?
Where had his insanity led him? The same place Brittany's insanity was leading her. Utter misery.
What he had now with Finn was an ambiguous, sexually-charged, unbearably painful and horrific emotional clusterfuck. They hadn't spoken or made eye contact in days.
Finn had run away. He had gotten in too deep, and now he was gone.
While Kurt knew he wouldn't get in too deep with Brittany, he was still setting her up for a great deal of misery.
And if anyone did, Brittany deserved better than that.
He had to fix this.
Brittany had relocated from the couch, Kurt discovered as he turned the corner back into the living room, only to find the Neanderthal from McKinley in her seat, feverishly banging on a set of Rock Band drums while a girl screamed off-key to "Hard to Handle".
Drums, video games, amateurish singing. What was this, a Finn Hudson theme party?
No, of course not. Of course not. This was just the way these people lived. And somewhere among them was Brittany, and she was the only person that mattered right now.
Still, he took great comfort in being catty. It may have been the one true comfort left to him at the moment. He just hated these people so much.
As Kurt scanned the area for any sign of Brit, Kelly (or Jade?) came running down the stairs into the living room.
"God, will you guys sing quieter? I told you already, if the cops come one more time, my grandma's never buying us beer again!"
Kurt squinted and peered out through the sliding glass door which led out onto the deck. Ah! There. He had spotted her, sitting on one of those horrible $30 plastic Adirondack style chairs from the supermarket. She was alone, in the dark.
He made his way outside, into what was really a very beautiful night, considering. Warm, a little balmy. The entire world smelled of tangy, pungent new life.
Though, it was funny. New life usually didn't smell like-
Oh, dear god.
Brittany was smoking a joint.
"Brittany!" Kurt exclaimed, rushing over to her. "What are you doing?"
It took her a moment to answer.
"Hey, Kurt."
"Brittany, are you smoking pot?"
"Totally."
"Brittany… You can't just sit outside and smoke dope. Someone's going to see you!"
"It's cool, Kurt. It's legit. I get it from Mr. Ryerson. Coach Sylvester thinks it makes me smarter."
"Coach Sylvester knows you smoke pot?"
"It was her idea."
Kurt sank down into the chair opposite hers.
"But... I really don't have enough to share," she said.
"It's okay, Brit. You go ahead." He felt like he was getting a contact high just being within 4 feet of her.
She took a deep inhalation, and as she held her breath, she gazed thoughtfully across the ill-kept backyard, at the empty parking lot that stretched on for a block beyond it, and the boarded-up former drug store in the corner of the lot.
"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in," she said softly.
Kurt turned his head to stare at her, shocked.
"American Beauty," he murmured.
"Totally. Mexico's nice, too. Before Coach Sylvester's budget got cut, she used to fly us down to the border on weekends so we could climb the fences and run from the border patrol. It's really good for toning your triceps. Lifting weights just isn't the same. I feel flabby-"
"Brittany," Kurt said, closing his eyes. "Brittany... try very, very hard to listen to me. I have something... tremendously important I must discuss with you, and I need your full attention."
