Sorry, I'm teasing you again. I don't have time to write a long chapter right now :(

Chapter 51

"Thanks for bailing me out of the slammer the other day," Santana said.

We'd somehow managed to squeeze ourselves onto the bottom of the slide. It was a tight fit. Her thighs were lodged along mine. We were so close that it hurt.

"I didn't do anything," I muttered, staring down at Santana's skinny boy legs in her skinny jeans. There was a white patch at her knee where the fabric was coming undone. I wanted to reach out so bad and touch it. I wanted to know what her skin felt like through that, underneath. "You should thank my mom, not me." I pulled my hands into my lap.

"No, I mean..." she stammered. "You were there. You saved me." She gave me a nervous smile as the wind hit her hair and blew it into a spool of black cotton candy.

"Like Batman?" I asked.

"Totally." Her smile grew bigger, her pink balloon cheeks full of air. She dug her heels into the grass.

"Did your parents find out?"

"What?" She put a hand to her head, combing her hair with her fingers.

"That you got arrested."

Her face froze, her eyes paused on the glowing morning sun in front of us. "You wanna know how I wound up in jail?"

I nodded. She didn't say anything, and then I realized she was still staring straight ahead and not at me. "Yeah," I breathed.

"I finished my song," she said. "Remember? The one I sang for you here before?"

"Yeah, I remember."

Purple bruises, not about a friend, not about a friend...

"Yeah, so, there was this totally rare moment on Thursday where my mom was like mostly sober for once and being nice to me. She didn't even notice that I was cutting school. She just wanted to sit and watch TV with me. She made me lunch and everything," Santana explained. She bit her lip, swiveling her head to look at me. Her eyes were red and watery and tired. "Anyway, things were going pretty good until she broke out the vodka. But I already had my mind made up, that I was gonna sing my song to her."

"You sang it?"

"Yeah," she said, in a voice so quiet it might as well have been a whisper. "And she listened. She actually fucking listened. Well," she said, laughing loudly, "that is until she figured out what I was saying and she threw her vodka glass at me. Lucky I'm quick. I ran into the kitchen before my smoking hot face could get slashed."

"Why are you laughing at that?" I asked, my heart thudding inside of my chest.

She smirked, her wide mouth shaking just a little. "'Cuz I have to," she spit out.

Her body was so close to me. Her beautiful, beautiful eyes and her skinny nose and her perfect lips. I put a hand on her cheek, running my fingers down the length of it.

"What the hell are you doing, Brittany?" she asked. She didn't bother to knock my hand away. Her shoulders slouched in defeat.

"Why don't you tell someone?" I whispered. "Tell my mom."

She closed her eyes, her fake lashes curling against her skin. "I'm telling you," she said. "And I'm taking you with me." She jumped up from the slide, my leg drawn away from hers and crashing into a metal edge.

"Taking me where?" I asked, gazing up at her.

She bent into my knees and lifted my hand out of my lap, her fingers grazing the space between my legs and making stars shoot up into my head. "Somewhere we can be alone," Santana said.

And she tore me off of the sliding board like I was a Band-Aid she didn't want covering her anymore.