A/N

So this story is coming towards the 's like about 4 chapters left.. i will try and finish it within next you guys enjoy this chapter.R&R

Santana spent the rest of the spring finishing up loose ends at the university and getting ready to move. She saw Brittany in the apartment foyer and thought about asking her out for pizza or something else mundane that wouldn't signal "date," but it seemed better to just keep nodding and moving past the blonde so that she wouldn't get caught up in the story again. Brittany was a hard habit to kick, she'd discovered, even after only three days. She was sloppy and annoying and uncontrolled, and she brought warmth and chaos into her life, and she was having a hard time forgetting the blonde and all the feelings that rose up every time she saw her. Especially in the middle of the night when she'd remember the motel room. Sometimes the only thing that got her through those middle-of-the-nights was the memory of how awful Brittany could be. She'd brought Santana more anxiety in the three days she'd spent with her than all the other women she'd ever known put together. But she'd also made her feel things no one has ever made her feel. She missed the gentle touches and the endearing names. She missed the way how Brittany's smile lit up her whole face. She missed how the blonde got so excited and passionate when she told her stories. She had more fun with Brittany in those three days then she did with all the other women combined. and importantly the blonde also brought her Prescott. Santana was very grateful for that and she knew that Brittany was the main reason she got the job. But she knew that the two of them would never work out so maybe it was time to leave that in the past and move on. She sent Brittany flowers to thank her before she left. Then she packed and moved to Ohio.

She bought a small Victorian house Julie suggested, which was about a mile from campus. Santana preferred a more modern looking house than what she bought but the place she got had been rented out to students for more than forty years and it was a little run down and was in need of a lot of repairs. so it was a huge bargain, or at least as much of a bargain as any house could be in a college town. But the structure was solid and the rooms were spacious and airy. There were a few holes in the walls but nothing serious that couldn't be fixed with a bit of speckle and paint.

"I can't thank you enough," she told Julie when she'd shown her through it. "You found me a great deal."

Julie beamed and patted the oak mantel.

"Isn't it darling? And I didn't find it. Brittany did. She will have such fun fixing it up." She leaned forward and whispered as if she was letting Santana in on a huge secret.

"I know you professors. You wouldn't care where you lived, but Brittany needs something sweet and pretty."

"Right," Santana said and felt a pang of guilt and pain in her hurt at the mention of the blonde's name. Although she wasn't ready to admit it, the first thought that crossed her mind when she saw the house was that Brittany would have a lot of fun fixing it. She kept constantly wondering what Brittany would think about the house when she was walking around it. She missed the blonde a lot and wondered if Brittany was missing her as well.

She shook herself out of her thoughts and turned around to notice Julie gazing at the oak woodwork again, obviously picturing Brittany dusting or doing other housewifely things. Santana felt immensely guilty for leading Julie on and letting her believing that she was getting a surrogate daughter. She knew how much the older woman adored Brittany. But Brittany would probably have been a great disappointment to Julie, since Santana was fairly sure she never dusted. And Santana winced when she realized that she'd have to eventually tell Julie that Brittany wasn't coming. She wondered how much it would upset the woman. She'd tell her closer to fall, when school started and she was more distracted, although she wasn't sure how that would work since Julie didn't have anything to do with school. In fact, as far as Santana could see, Julie's problem was that she didn't have anything to do at all.

Santana had a lot of work to do though. She hired a plumber to come in and fix the plumbing, and an electrician to come in and fix the wiring, and painters to paint the outside of the house ("Yellow with blue and white trim," Julie told her, "because that's what Brittany would want," and although she hated bright colours she wanted to make the house look exactly the way Brittany would've wanted it to. She knew that there's a chance that the blonde might not even get to see it but she didn't wanna dwell on that. Santana distracted herself from all the thoughts she had about Brittany by doing fixing everything else that needed to be fixed on her own, drawing on the years she'd spent trying to keep her mother's house from falling apart until there was enough money to move her to a better one. The irony occurred to her as she was sanding down a spackled patch: she'd finally gotten her two brothers through college and they had enough money to move her mom to a new home, but she'd refused to go. So Santana was still going back to Sidney—patching new cracks as they appeared, repainting and refinishing—only now in a giant leap forward, she had two old houses to keep going. That was not part of her plan at all, and it was all because of women: her mother who wouldn't move, Julie who had picked this house, and Brittany, who had inspired it.

But she didn't hate that fact. Simply because Brittany would have loved the house. As she worked patching and painting the walls, she could see Brittany trailing her long skirts across the gleaming living room floor, dropping that awful hat in the high-ceilinged hall, shooting her that face splitting smile from the arched doorway into the kitchen, sitting on the solid oak stairs and explaining the world to Santana through the ornate railing. Once Santana even found herself holding an imaginary argument with Brittany as she painted, trying to convince the blonde that it was practical to paint all the walls white. The really irritating thing about that hadn't so much been that she caught herself doing it as it was that Brittany had been winning. Julie didn't help; she dropped by regularly with notes about curtains and rugs and the best place to buy bread, all beginning "Dear Brittany." And it was all Santana's fault; she'd started it with that first dumb story she'd told about her fiancé. She knew that even she got lost in her own story. Everything Brittany had said about stories came back to her: the stories you told were unreal but not untrue; Brittany wasn't really there, but she was everywhere.

Santana sighed and kept on painting, and when she moved her chrome and leather furniture into the big old rooms, she knew what Brittany would say, and she had a feeling that the blonde was right, so it was a damn good thing she wasn't there to say it. Santana felt a tug in her heart and she dropped herself onto the couch. She closed her eyes and instantly saw Brittany in her mind. She sighed softly.

What have you done to me B

"Santana moved out yesterday," Quinn told Brittany early in June. "I know." Brittany nodded toward a huge vase of gladioli, birds of paradise, and cattails sitting on the wobbly table near her door. "She sent me flowers."

Quinn squinted at the arrangement. "Obviously chosen with you in mind, I don't think. Didn't she get to know you at all in Prescott?"

"No." Brittany tried to keep the miserable tone out of her voice. "I think she didn't want to. I think I made her teeth hurt."

"Oh?" Quinn shot her one of those Hello? glances. "Well, I guess that's ok. She's not exactly your type either, is she?"

"No." The miserable tone was there for sure, and Brittany gave up trying to hide it. "She makes me crazy, if you want to know the truth. I mean, she's just like my father, all orders and rules."

"But…" Quinn prompted.

"But I felt really good with her," Brittany finished. "I felt safe. And she's not exactly like my father. She never made me feel guilty or beholden or—well, okay, she did make me feel clueless, but not on purpose. Even though we were surrounded by all those people and telling that big story, I felt safe." She met Quinn's eyes. "I don't think I've ever felt safe, not since I caught on that my mother's grip on reality wasn't a good one. And I must have been about four, so it's been a while."

Quinn scrunched farther down in Brittany's old flowered armchair, staring into space as she thought. "You're right about Santana, but I think that's what I didn't like about her when I was with her. No challenge, no excitement. As long as Santana is around, nothing goes wrong."

"Yeah." Brittany thought about riding through the night beside Santana in her awful car, wrapped in darkness and safety. "I loved that."

"Just that?"

Well, no. There was her body. Brittany stood up and went to the kitchen to distract herself. "Yeah just that. Do you want some juice?"

"I'd rather have the truth Britt."

Brittany exhaled loudly and turned back to her. "Okay, it was not just that. I was tempted by her body. Really, really tempted. I'm still dreaming about her. But that body is attached to a mind that thinks I'm a nightmare, and I couldn't stand the constant disapproval even if she wanted to take me to Prescott, which she doesn't, since she won't even talk to me in the hall, and now she's gone, so it's not an issue, so do you want juice?" She blinked hard and realized there were tears coming, so she turned and went to the fridge without waiting for Quinn's answer.

It was just as well. Quinn went for the jugular. "Would you have gone to Prescott if she'd asked?"

Brittany pulled the juice from the fridge and shut the door carefully. "I don't know. Maybe." She turned and waved her hand at her apartment. "This isn't working for me. I need to reinvent myself if I'm going to grow as an artist. I can't hold on to the past, and I can't keep doing the same things. But it's so hard here, always scrambling for money and trying to convince myself I'm good even though nobody else thinks so—"

"I think so B."

"—and now even just painting is hard." Brittany slumped against the counter and tried to put into words the realization that had been growing in the back of her mind during the past year. "I'm stuck in the old me, and I don't know how to get out. I just know the old me isn't the real me anymore."

"And Prescott would have made you reinvent yourself." Quinn nodded. "Well, sure, but it would have made you reinvent yourself into a lie."

"Maybe not." Brittany closed her eyes and pictured herself in Prescott in that little Victorian house, something that was pretty easy since she'd been doing it ever since she and Julie had first driven down Tacoma Street. "The college is conservative, but the town isn't. There was an art gallery. And a house, a really, really darling house, not an apartment. Maybe I could have reinvented myself into something real there." The coffeemaker sputtered, and Prescott in the spring vanished back into her apartment: cluttered, stale, and everything her life was that she didn't want it to be.

"But it wouldn't have worked, and it's probably just a cop-out anyway."

"Maybe not," Quinn said. "Santana's a good person. Maybe it would have worked."

"Not in a million years," Brittany said. "Now, do you want juice or not?"

Quinn took the juice and tried to keep the conversation about Santana going, but Brittany had had enough. She stonewalled until Quinn gave up in exasperation and left, which was no improvement since that gave Brittany more time to think about Prescott and Santana, which made her breathe a little faster, which made her angry. Stop it, she told herself. Especially stop thinking about how nice and solid she was with her arms around you and how gorgeous she looks with her shirt off. She's probably sleeping with Little Gertrude by now, the incestuous jerk. That thought was a killer, and Brittany shoved Santana firmly out of her mind, telling herself that the last thing she needed in her life was another person disapproving of her, but as the summer wore on, it got harder and harder to paint, and she began to hate her apartment, feeling as if she were trapped in it with the corpse of her old life. Sometimes then, in the middle of the night, Santana would creep back into her thoughts, and she'd think, she wasn't disapproving when she had her arms around me. And then she'd kick herself and try to forget her again.

In September, Santana went to Harper's office for an early morning meeting to discuss the curriculum committee she had been assigned to, but the first thing Harper said when Santana was sitting across from him was,

"When's Brittany coming? Julie's driving me crazy, asking every day. What's the hold up?"

Santana took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. "She's not coming, sir. We had some problems over the summer, and we've decided it's best to just go our separate ways." It sounded lame and rehearsed, so Santana tried to look miserable, as if she missed Brittany dreadfully. When she thought about her, it wasn't that hard. Those imaginary conversations were taking their toll.

"What?" Harper leaned across his desk, glowering.

"It was just one of those things, sir." Santana shrugged. "She wasn't ready to get married. I lost her."

Harper thumped the desk. "Well, get her back, Lopez. A woman like that is one in a million."

Harper leaned away and hooked his thumbs in his vest. "You bring her back and marry her here. Julie wants to do the wedding in our backyard." Harper got a faraway smile on his face. It was ugly. "Brittany loved the gazebo, you know."

Santana immediately felt rage building inside her at the look on Harper's face. Julie was obviously not the only one fantasizing about Brittany. But she knew she possibly couldn't punch her new boss for fantasizing about Brittany. She had no right to do that, so she clenched her fists and answered through gritted teeth. "Yes, sir, she did, but I don't think—"

Harper shot her another slashing glare. "You sure don't, Lopez, or you'd never have let her go. Now, you get out of here this afternoon. You want to fly? I'll have Rachel make your reservations. One going out and two coming back." He pressed down on the intercom button.

"Rachel!"

"Uh," Santana began, and Harper glowered at her again and told his secretary to make plane reservations. He kept on glowering through the next ten minutes of Santana's increasingly frantic explanations as to why bringing Brittany back was impractical, implausible, and impossible, until his secretary interrupted them with the ticket information.

"One out and two back, Dayton International at eleven," she said, handing a memo with the ticket numbers to Santana. "Have a nice flight."

Harper glared at her. "Go."

Grey found Santana standing in the hall, trying to figure out what to do next. "You look like someone who needs a drink." Grey took her arm. "Come on."

Santana opened her mouth to argue and then realized that Grey hadn't said three words to her all summer. If he was offering a drink now, there was an agenda involved, so she shut up and followed the little man to his office.

Grey waved her to a chair and took a bottle from his bottom drawer. "How about Scotch."

"Yeah. Sure." Santana sank into the chair. "And a syringe."

"Straight into the vein, is it?" Grey chuckled. "Well, I can't say as I blame you. You've really got your-self in a mess Lopez." He pulled two glasses out of the same drawer and kicked it shut with his shin.

Santana instantly stopped thinking about how miserable she was. "Wait, how'd you know? I just got out of Harper's office."

Grey pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. "Let me guess. You told him your engagement has been broken off, and he's now sending you back to get—what's her name—Brenda."

"Brittany."

"Brittany." Grey nodded and poured. "Only you can't, because you were never engaged to her in the first place." He held out one of the glasses to Santana as he sat down in his desk chair.

Santana blinked once at him and took the glass from him.

"How long have you known about Brittany?"

"Since the first interview." Grey drank some Scotch, savouring it. "I asked you if you were married, and you said no, and Harper had a heart attack, and I watched your fiancé born right before my eyes." He looked at Santana over his horn-rimmed glasses. "You were pretty good, actually."

Oh, yeah. So good Grey had nailed her at the beginning. Santana sighed. "Why didn't you tell Harper?"

"Because I wanted to hire you." Grey set his glass down, exasperated. "I wanted a good teacher in the department, someone with research experience. Your publication is sterling and your teaching evaluations are even better. And you're working on a new book, aren't you?"

Santana gave up being surprised. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

Grey shrugged. "Anybody we hired, I was going to have to live with for a long time. I looked into you."

Santana went back to the obvious. "Then you knew I wasn't engaged when you asked me."

"I hadn't heard about a fiancé, but I wasn't asking about one either. I don't give a damn whether you're married or not. That's Harper's question. I just asked you about it because it makes him happy."

"You must have really enjoyed the weekend we spent here." Santana tried to remember how Grey had reacted.

"Almost as much as I enjoyed hearing what your book was about. Nineteenth-century birth control as subversive feminism. Harper's going to have a coronary when he finds out." Grey laughed. "I'm so going to enjoy that."

Santana thought about getting annoyed but decided that she's also gonna enjoy that. But not unless she can get Brittany back. She sighed loudly thinking about her predicament. "Not if I'm not here to write it."

Grey waved that off. "You'll be here. You signed a contract. And Harper will forgive all when you get what's-her-name, Brittany, back here."

Nobody was listening to her. "What's-her-name isn't coming back here."

"You won't make full professor without her." Grey leaned back in his chair. "Harper likes faculty wives. Especially attractive faculty wives. And he has grave suspicions about single people in their thirties."

Santana rolled her eyes.

"I know," Grey said. He stretched out his hand and snagged the bottle again.

"I told you, he's a fool. But he's a powerful fool. Get her back Lopez."

Suppose she did come back… Santana sipped her Scotch and let herself openly consider the idea for the first time, hating how much she liked it and wanted it. There were many good reasons why the whole thing was a bad idea, reasons that mainly featured Brittany's mouth, but the truth was the good outweighed the bad, Santana simply missed the blonde immensely. She wanted to show her Prescott and the house and watch her face and see her smile and—

Maybe it isn't such a bad idea after all

Grey surveyed the latina in front of him carefully. He noticed the small smile appearing on the girl's face and chuckled softly. He picked up the phone. "I'll call you a cab Lopez, Go get your girl."

Brittany carefully painted in the tiny pink dress that made Rosa Parks stand out like a beacon on the crowded bus. She moved the brush back to the china plate she was using as a palette and picked up a deeper rose to paint in the pleats in Rosa's skirt, and then she stopped and sighed. LT twitched an ear at her sigh, and Annie jerked her head around, but nothing else changed. Brittany stared at the painting, one she really believed in, one she really wanted to do, one she really didn't want to do. Part of her genius was her attention to detail, but it was the part of her genius that was starting to make her nuts. She suddenly wanted to paint Rosa large, in big, juicy slashes of paint, but that would have been ridiculous. She couldn't tell detailed stories in big, juicy slashes, and stories were her life. Except she didn't like her life anymore. I need a change, she cried silently, but it was the same old cry and there was no change coining, so she took a deep breath and painted the first pleat.

Then she heard the outer door slam shut, and seconds later somebody pounded on her door. LT and Annie both looked at her. "Maybe this is it." she said to them. "Maybe we're getting a new life." She put down her brush and went to answer the knock.

The person standing in front of her was thinner than she remembered, but they had the same handsome face, the same tapering hips, and the same stereo they'd stolen from her months before. "I don't believe this," she said, and slumped against the doorframe.

"Artie, what are you doing here?"

"Hello, baby." Artie beamed at her and held up the stereo with the two small speakers stacked on top. "I brought you this."