The snow blocks your windshield as you make your way to the grocery store. You'd been back in Lima for less than two hours before your mother sent you on an errand for her, and you'd grumbled the whole time she sat writing her list. You've traveled all over the world, but there's nowhere you hate quite like you do Lima. The whole town fills with bad memories each time you drive through, and the idea of going to the grocery store where you might be recognized, where people might pretend they didn't hate you in high school simply because they want to take an absurd selfie with you to post on their Instagram gets you every time. But she's your mother, and you're home for the first Christmas in eight years, so you couldn't exactly say no to her.
The parking lot is crowded when you pull in, and you grumble some more as you park in the back row. There are six things on your list, but you can tell by the volume of cars that this is going to be an excursion, and you pull your coat tighter around yourself, hoping that your knit cap will serve to hide your face while you race through the store. The cold sends a shiver down your spine as you walk up to the door, but it's the scent of the entryway that really gets you. It's not a bad scent, per say, it just brings back those memories you're trying to avoid, and you shudder, thinking too much about the things you've spent the last fifteen years trying to lock away.
You manage to gather most of things your mother asked for in a basket, and you make it to the frozen aisle for concentrated orange juice. You're looking forward to the mimosas you'll make in the morning, and you're almost home free, when you spot a profile across the way. It's one you'd know anywhere, and though you try to hide yourself, it's too late. She sees you, and you wish you could disappear beneath the freezers. She's not the kind of person you can make casual conversation with, she's not the kind of person you think you can make any conversation with, but before you can drop your things and escape, you find yourself approaching her, touching her sleeve, as if you're bridging a gap between decades.
"Santana? Is that really you?" She sing-songs, and you feel the ice that's formed around your heart melting at the sound of her voice. You haven't found yourself able to love since she left you, your life has been a series of one night stands with groupies, and now here she is, smiling like she never broke your heart.
"Hey, Brittany." You smile, and you accept the hug she gives you, and when she spills her purse on the tile floor, you bend down to help her. Immediately, you notice the ring on her left finger, and you feel like you might vomit right there. "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas!" She chirps. "How have you been?"
"Life is good, you know? Traveling a lot, music sales are still good…" You trail off, not knowing what to say to someone like her, someone who couldn't handle the idea of you doing what you love. "You?"
"I'm good…still at NYU. I got tenure, so I'm not going anywhere…"
"Good, that's good." You force the conversation, torn between not wanting to talk to her, and wanting to hear every single thing that's happened since the day she packed her bags and moved out of the apartment you'd shared in New York City. You walk her to the register, and you just…stand there, confused about where to go next.
"Hey, I know it's Christmas Eve, but I'd really love to buy you a drink." She startles you with the offer, and you fight with yourself, knowing it's an absolutely terrible idea. "Unless you're in a rush to get back with your…cranberry sauce."
"Brittany, I'm not sure that's a good idea."
"Yeah, I mean…you're right, it's probably not. But…you know me, I've never been one for the best ideas." She grins, and you continue to melt, melt, melt, until you're sure you're nothing but a puddle on the floor.
"I haven't known you in fifteen years."
"All the more reason you let me buy you a drink. For old time's sake. You know, should old acquaintance be forgot, and all of that."
"Shouldn't you be getting home?" You try, though you feel yourself caving.
"Not really in a rush." She shrugs. "I'm not gonna pressure you though, it's your call."
"Santana? Santana Lopez?" The cashier, some girl you vaguely recognize from some study hall in some year of high school giggles, totally unbecoming of someone nearing forty. "Oh my God, I can't believe you're here."
"Leave her alone, Jenny." Brittany rolls her eyes. "You think famous people want to be flagged in the grocery store like that? Just ring up her crap, and let her go."
"Uh, thanks." You nod in Brittany's direction, and pay for your things quickly, debating whether you should make a run for the parking lot or not. "One drink?"
"One drink. I'd just like to hear about everything you've been up to."
Because you've always been hopeless when it comes to Brittany, you follow her out to the parking lot. She suggests you put your things in your car and get into hers, and you do, figuring your mother will be fine until you get home in an hour or so. Her scent overwhelms you as you get inside, and you immediately regret your decision to do this. You remember the ring on her finger, you remember the fact that she broke your heart into so many pieces you could never pick them all up, you remember that you vowed never to do this again, but yet here you are, in her car, staring at her wedding ring.
You can't seem to find a bar that's open—fucking Lima—and she suggests going to the liquor store for a six pack. You're powerless to argue, now that you've gotten into the car with her, and you simply nod, following her like a puppy as she buys the beer and brings it back to the car. She drives back to the grocery store, and she parks next to yours, giving you an out if you want one. She pops open two bottles of Blue Moon, and she hands you one. Her fingers graze yours, and you swallow hard. This is all a lot, and you suddenly wish you had something much stronger than a beer to dull the ache in your stomach.
"Toast?" She asks.
"To what?"
"To innocence? To now?"
"I guess so, since I'm not really sure what there is to toast to."
"You're happy, aren't you?"
"I'm…as happy as I can be, I guess." You tell her honestly. "Traveling sucks sometimes, but I love my fans, so, I keep it up as best as I can."
"You always pop up in my iTunes. It's…a weird experience for me. I hear your songs on the radio sometimes, and it takes me back, I guess, makes me feel some weird kind of regret that I'm not part of your life. I could have broken up with you in a better way."
"Can we not do this, Britt?" You border on begging, not realty emotionally stable enough to have this kind of conversation. "It's been fifteen years, you're married."
"In the process of getting a divorce, actually." She corrects you, and you fight the urge to whip your head around. "We're pretending right now…for my parents' sake, and for Christmas. I filed for divorce six weeks ago."
"I'm…sorry to hear that."
"Are you really? I'm surprised you don't wish the worst for me. I know you did, at least for a while."
"How was I not supposed to?" You defend. "I came home from a tour, and you had all of your shit packed up in our apartment. I hated you for that. I felt like you had absolutely no joy in my dream coming true."
"You were never there, Santana. I was having a relationship with your voicemail. How was that fair to me?"
"I don't really want to fight about this a decade and a half later." You roll your eyes. "Don't you think we hashed it out enough back then?"
"I don't know…I really don't. My relationship with you has colored every other experience I've ever had. I was with you, one way or another, since I was fifteen."
"Including with your husband?" You can't help but ask, though you don't really want to know the answer.
"Wife." She corrects you, narrowing her eyes.
"You married a woman?"
"Don't sound so surprised. I'm bisexual, Santana, there was just enough chance I'd marry a woman than that I'd marry a man."
"I—I'm." You don't finish your sentence, you don't want to tell her that you'd always expected that the only woman she'd marry would be you. You can't let her into that vulnerability. It's mortifying, really.
"She was good to me. She's an architect, and it kept things really secure for me, when my job was unstable, and I wasn't sure if I'd get tenure. I...I loved her then, I really truly did, but…"
"But what?" You ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.
"She wasn't you. She was never you. No one ever could be."
"It's been fifteen years, Brittany."
"I know, and if you tell me I wasn't the great love of your life, I'd believe you. But that doesn't mean you weren't the great love of mine."
"Jesus." You chug the rest of your beer, and you open another one, not sure how you can even begin to handle this conversation. Of course she was the great love of your life, that's the reason you hadn't ever been in a relationship with anyone else, it's the reason you're spending yet another Christmas alone, just you and your mother. It's the reason nothing has made sense since she walked out and left you scrambling to figure out who you were. But you don't know how to say all of that. You don't know if you want to. "You left me."
"I know. Everything was too much to handle. We were twenty-five, and I missed you every single day."
"Do you think I didn't miss you when I was on tour? That I didn't go to bed in some strange city every night wishing you were next to me? It was hard for me too, Brittany, but I didn't want to give up on us."
"It's easy for you to say though when you weren't the one left behind. It hurt thinking that maybe you'd get bored of me, while you were off meeting all these interesting people, and I was just…teaching math. I was afraid."
"So why didn't you ever tell me that?"
"Because I didn't think you were going through what I was, and I felt like an idiot."
"Imagine how I felt when I came back from LA and half of our apartment was packed up. I didn't see it coming, not for one single second. I never stopped loving you, in all the time we were separated with my tour, and when I came back, it felt like you stopped loving me."
"I never stopped loving you." She reaches out and touches your hand, and you jolt, not sure if she means just while you were gone, or ever. "I didn't leave you because I wasn't in love with you, I left you because I was."
"I thought we were having a drink to catch up on everything we missed out on in fifteen years, not to rehash our breakup." You desperately try to change the subject, though you know it's futile.
"Didn't our breakup create the last fifteen years of our lives? Had you asked me then where I'd be, I'd have said that we'd be married, with two or three kids, and we'd be happy."
"I would have thought that too…" You confess. "Looking at you, your eyes look the same as I remember them, and I'm just wondering now what could have been."
"We could have been great. We were great. Do you know how many times I've regretted the day I left?"
"Probably not as many as I've regretted it, to be honest."
"I don't know, Santana. Asha tried, she really did, but she could just…never be you, and it's been hard. I've done marriage counseling, we talked about having a baby, but there was just nothing either of us could do to erase my regret over you."
"Does she know about me?" You chance to ask, and she nods slowly.
"How could she not? The ghost of you…of us has just impacted everything."
"If it means anything, it's impacted everything I've done too."
You sit in silence for a long while, finishing your second beer. The air feels heavy around you, her breath feels heavy, and you wonder if you shouldn't get out of the car. You wonder if you shouldn't go home and pretend this never happened. But you can't. You're here, and she's told you that your long-gone relationship has affected her marriage to the point that she's getting divorced. That's not nothing, and you find yourself hoping, wanting, for something that's in the past. This isn't a Hallmark movie where you see the girl you used to love, and suddenly the years disappear and things are the way they once were. This is real life, a life that hasn't been kind to you in terms of love, and you can't dare to hope. Christmas miracles aren't real. They can't be, because magic isn't.
"Remember the first Christmas we came back from New York?" She asks suddenly.
"The Christmas I proposed." You swallow hard at the memory.
"You didn't really mean it though."
"I got caught up in Christmas, and we were only nineteen. But…I thought it was practice for the real thing. I had a ring for you, you know, a few years later."
"You did?" Her eyes widen, and you nod slowly.
"I always planned to marry you. I thought I'd make it, and we'd settle down. I didn't plan to travel like this forever. Now I do, because I'm…lonely, I guess."
"You never found anyone?"
"I never wanted to. You know how I am…I don't let people in. After you, it got worse. I was heartbroken and sick for months. You were my great love, there was never going to be anyone else."
"It's weird we ran into each other, isn't it? After all this time…"
"I've only been home for one Christmas since. This whole place is too painful for me. New York was where we lived, but this is where we fell in love, so pretty much every place is a reminder of being sixteen and pretending I wasn't head over heels for you."
"I just…can't even believe with everything that's gone on in your life, you still have these…feelings about me."
"You're not just someone in my past, you're the person who was supposed to be my future. God, it's killing me to look at your blue eyes right now, and know they've spent the last decade and a half looking at someone else. I'm just…this is really messing me up, okay?"
"You think it's not messing me up, Santana?" She shakes her head, clearly frustrated with herself. "A month and a half after I filed for divorce, and now I run into you, after all this time…It's like, some kind of sign or something."
"I don't believe in signs." You tell her. "We're just two old lovers who met in a grocery store. It doesn't have to mean anything."
"What if I want it to?"
You freeze. These are words you've been wishing to hear for years, and here she is saying them. Do they mean what you think they mean? Does she want to give it a second go, after all this time? Do you really want to put your heart on the line like that? She hurt you once, what's to stop her from doing it again? How can you risk that? You barely survived the first breakup, how could you survive another? You study her face, and you feel like even in all the years you've missed, you haven't lost a moment with her. She's Brittany. Your first love. Your forever love. And because you don't know what else to do, you nod slowly.
"I'm going to kiss you now." She leans in, pressing her hand to your cheek and her lips brush yours. It feels like the last kiss you've replayed in your mind a million times. It feels like a new first kiss, it feels like…everything.
"Wow." It escapes your lips, and you flush.
"Wow." She repeats. "I missed that."
"What are we doing?"
"I think we're kissing."
"No, I mean…in life. Right now. You're not even divorced."
"I will be. I just have to get through Christmas, then I'm telling my parents. I'm not changing my mind about that."
"But what about us? We've seen each other for an hour in fifteen years."
"That doesn't make me love you any less. Do you still love me, Santana?"
"I never stopped." You tell her earnestly. "I probably never will. But…what about everything else?"
"You're living in New York, aren't you?"
"Yeah…"
"What if we saw each other again? When things settle down?"
"I'd really like that." You breathe. All of the hope flares up in your chest, and you find yourself somehow believing in Hallmark movies and Christmas magic, and the stupid snow keeps coating the windshield of her car, isolating you inside. "I really should go home…"
"I know. So should I. It's late, and everyone's waiting."
"But we'll see each other again?"
"In New York." She nods, telling you everything you need to hear with those words. Telling you it's not over, that it's never been over. "My number is still the same."
"Then I still remember it by heart."
"So, you'll call me?" She asks, leaning in to kiss you again.
"How could I not?" You kiss her more deeply this time, before you reach for the car door, half wishing you could cancel everything else and just stay right here, in her car, forever. "Merry Christmas, Brittany."
"Merry Christmas, Santana."