Brittany has no idea if these two things have anything to do with each other, but ever since the beginning of the school year when Santana got bumped to the bottom of the pyramid and Quinn took her place—stole her place, to hear San tell it—San's been on a dirty talk kick. Brittany's not so sure she likes this, since she's not really good at talking dirty.
"It's not that difficult, Britt," San tells her, raking over Brittany's shirt with her fingernails. "Just talk about what you're doing and feeling. Like." Her voice gets darker and softer. "I can feel your nipples getting hard. I want to rip off your shirt and suck on them."
"But San, I can't come up with that stuff on my own. Can't you just tell me what to say and I'll say it?"
Santana sighs. "Here. Just tell me"—she leans to whisper in Brittany's ear—"how wet I'm making you when I do this."
"Really wet."
"How much you want me to touch you."
"A lot."
"What you want me to do to you right this second."
"I want you to go down on me and make me come."
Santana grins. "Good girl."
It feels amazing when Santana gets her off with her fingers or scissoring, but Brittany thinks Santana going down on her might be the best ever. For one thing, there's nothing like the feeling of Santana's tongue—anywhere, but especially there. But it's more than that. It's the way San totally buries her whole self in making Brittany feel good. In the hallways and bathrooms at school, even at home sometimes, San's always fixing her lip gloss, but with her face planted firmly in Brittany's crotch, she doesn't care how she looks. More than almost anything else Santana does, it makes her feel loved and cared for.
She scoots up on the bed a little after Santana prepares her a little nest of pillows and lets San take off her clothes with such gentle skill that she feels like a queen being undressed by her maid. San shimmies down the bed and crosses her ankles in the air, the way Brittany finds so cute. She licks Brittany's knee playfully.
"We're going to play a little game," she tells her. "I can't really talk while I gets my tongue action on, but the more you talk to me—well, the more I'm going to make you happy about it." She winks and spreads Britt's knees with her hands. "Test run. Tell me exactly what you want me to do to you."
"Um." Brittany's having a hard time thinking, since San has lowered her head to breathe on Brittany right where she'd rather have something a lot more solid. She closes her eyes for a minute and concentrates. "I want you to tease me with your lips like you do. And then—"
"Hold up," interrupts San. "Tease you until?"
"Until… I can't stand it anymore. And I—I start begging you to use your tongue." Actually, this is getting fun.
"Mhm." San grins big and kisses Brittany's hipbone. Then she begins to do exactly what Brittany asks for. Exactly. And Brittany decides she likes this dirty talk thing—a lot.
Brittany's pretty sure that she and Santana have both stopped sleeping with other people. Lately, she just doesn't want to. She finds herself thinking about Santana all the time. It's like her off switch doesn't work anymore, and she's burning up from the middle with this hunger that won't go away. Santana only has to brush against her and she's hot, so hot she can smell it on herself, like a light bulb that's been left on for days.
It's way more than that, though. She remembers the way she felt that one time, the first time she went down on Santana, the way it made her feel that squeezing too-good pain in her chest. Now she feels it sometimes when she sees Santana coming towards her in the hallway, or when they link pinkies during Glee. And when they have sex, she feels it like something growing in her, with roots in the pit of her belly and vines stretching through her chest and throat and all the way through her, right to her fingertips.
She thinks she might be in love.
She wants to tell San, but she doesn't know how, and the last thing she wants is for Santana to shut her down the way she did last time she tried to say something. She thinks about doing it once, when she gets cramps so bad she skips modern dance, and San comes over with a fresh box of Advil and a bag of M&Ms and presses her warm hands against Brittany's belly until the pain dulls. But when Santana straddles her to massage the pain from her lower back, as she tries to think of what to say, she gets so muddled and nervous that her heart starts beating as fast as her cat's when she tries to bathe her. She doesn't do it after all.
When Mr. Schue tells them about the duet competition, Brittany thinks back to the ballads, when Santana opened her whole heart to Brittany and sang so that Brittany felt like the honey of San's voice was dripping, warm and sweet, all over her outsides and insides.
They're on Brittany's bed, Santana pressing soft kisses to her neck, smelling like Cheerios practice and that Santana-sweat-smell that makes Brittany's insides go soft, and Brittany decides that this is the time to do it.
"We should do a duet together," she says. Her heartbeat starts to race. "We should do Melissa Etheridge's 'Come To My Window.'" She thinks of the times San has snuck up through her window on school nights to steal kisses in the dark.
But Santana pulls away. Her eyes flash with that same strange look she got right before she fucked Brittany in that hard mean way after Sectionals. But Brittany feels San's heartbeat speed up faster than her own.
"First of all, there's a lot of talking going on, and I wants to get my mack on." Her voice is sharp. The voice she uses with other people, never with Brittany—not when they're alone.
"Well," Brittany starts again, softer. She feels her courage slipping from her again as San's lips dip back to her neck. "I don't know, I just think we should—"
"Second of all, I'm not making out with you because I'm in love with you and want to sing about making lady babies." She sits up so suddenly, moving to the edge of the bed, that Brittany feels her chest grow cold. "I'm only here because Puck's been in the slammer for about twelve hours now, and I'm like a lizard: I need something warm beneath me, or I can't digest my food."
That's a complete crock of shit, and Santana starts gathering her hair back into her tight Cheerios ponytail to avoid looking at Brittany. She must know Brittany doesn't believe her. But Brittany's cold chest feels so empty—like her heart and lungs and the growing thing inside her have been torn out—that she can't even be angry at Santana for lying to her.
"But who are you going to sing a duet with?" she asks.
Santana tugs her ponytail tight and doesn't answer. Brittany watches her, the lines of her neck, the way her arms curve over her head like dark wings.
"I've got to go," says Santana, finally. "I've got shit to do tonight. Homework."
Brittany just traces the pattern of her duvet. She's gone cold, the kind of cold that she would normally fix by squeezing Santana close. But she can't squeeze her this time, even though she's only a few feet away, pacing Brittany's floor to pick up her things and dig her car keys out of her backpack pouch.
"Later, Britt," she says, and doesn't even look back at the bed before she leaves and shuts the door behind her.
Brittany doesn't get off her bed for the rest of the night. She squeezes a pillow and can hardly find the energy to kick off her shoes. Her uniform is still on, stiff with salt and sweat, but the front panel smells like Santana and she can't take it off just yet.
Slowly, her chest fills back up, hot and itchy, and she realizes how angry she is. Santana lied to her just to make her feel bad and then left her heartsick.
She's tired of Santana putting fear ahead of love.
Artie isn't really Brittany's first choice as a duet partner, but all of the other guys were taken. And he does have a good voice. Besides, it's so easy to pick him up, right there in the hallway, that she remembers what it's like when someone feels lucky to have her.
Meanwhile, Santana sings her duet with Mercedes, a love song, and she doesn't look at Brittany at all. The whole time. She doesn't look at anybody. It makes Brittany's stomach fold in on itself over and over to hear Santana singing like that to no one.
When Brittany is practicing with Artie in her room and tells her he's not over Tina yet, she realizes she's seeing her own pain in someone else's eyes. It's too much for her. She sees that he wants to escape as much as she does. So she carries him into her bed—the same bed where Santana broke her heart, so short a time ago that she hasn't even changed the sheets—and straddles him the same way she's done to Santana a million times. He smells like Axe body spray and that dark bitter smell underneath that only boys have. Nothing like San.
Artie doesn't know what he's doing. She even has to put the condom on for him. Besides, he can't exactly move, so she has to do all of the work. Brittany's never slept with a virgin before, so she figures that's why he looks at her with that kind of wonder, like she's the most beautiful and mysterious thing he's ever seen.
Still, she can't help thinking, before she can stop herself, that this is how someone should look when they're in love.
She's not used to someone looking her in the eyes during sex, and she feels almost strange looking back into his. It doesn't feel natural. Like it's too close. When he comes, he grabs her waist so hard it feels like it's going to leave finger-shaped bruises. And then he looks at her with the softest eyes she's ever seen and tells her she's beautiful. He strokes back her hair from her sweaty neck and bites his lip like he wants to say a million more things. And then his eyes turn to glass, like he's about to cry, and Brittany rolls over onto her back and stares at the ceiling. The whole room seems way too quiet. They're both so empty their breath seems to echo, like dead shells sloshing at the bottom of a wave. And then she feels dragged along the bottom and filled with wet heavy sand.
"How do you feel?" she asks Artie. Silence again.
"I don't know," he answers, finally. "You?"
"I don't know."
Artie dumps Brittany before the duets competition, which she guesses she deserves. The way he talks about sex, like it's some kind of miracle, makes her feel cheap for just doing what feels good to her with those other boys. She thinks about that a lot over the next few weeks.
Which end up going pretty fast. Because even when she tries, she can't stay mad at San, who knows her better than anyone in the world. San swallows her next few weekends, taking her to all kinds of places: the zoo—which is an hour's drive away—bowling, even a bike ride with a picnic that San has packed with all of Brittany's favorite foods. If she didn't know better she'd swear they were dates. They start having sweet lady kisses again too, but Santana is extra careful not to look her in the eyes, and she's stopped talking, just like the old days. It's like she's trying to draw that line between friend-San and sex-Santana so hard that she's cutting through the page.
So Brittany takes her at her word, for once—that sex is not dating—and starts dating Artie.
It's weird: she's never been in a real relationship before—closest she ever got before was San, and god knows San made it clear that that wasn't a relationship—and it's totally like it's supposed to be in the movies. He takes her to dinner and movies and buys her coffee, and brought her a rose once at school, just because. Sure, the sex isn't like with San, and it sure doesn't feel as good. But she figures out after a while how to get herself off, and he's at least getting a little better with the kind of stuff you can do with your upper body. Best of all: he looks at her and talks to her. Not like the dirty talk Santana likes—well, sometimes—but mostly sweet things, like "You look so beautiful in the light like this," or "You make me feel so good."
It's like when Brittany was eight and got a marshmallow stuck in her ear. She couldn't hear right for weeks, and when they pulled it out, she realized how deaf she'd been. She never realized before what it could be like to have someone who wasn't afraid to show his feelings about her, right in front of everyone, without thinking twice.
Ever since Brittany and Artie are official news, it's like Santana has been trying to tear apart the whole male half of New Directions with her teeth. But it shows her how jealous San is, which kind of makes Brittany feel wanted—not the same way Artie makes her feel wanted, but she can't fall out of love with Santana either, no matter how hard she tries. Even though things would probably be a lot easier if they were just friends.
The truth is that they haven't been "just friends" since they were fourteen years old and Santana kissed her for the first time.
Maybe that's why it's so easy, when Santana catches Sam in her web, for her to convince Brittany to start sleeping with her again.
"Plumbing's different," she insists. "That means it doesn't count. Haven't we always agreed we're just best friends? That nothing else had to change?"
If Brittany had a jellybean for every time San has said something like that, she'd be as sick as her little sister on last Halloween.
It takes sleeping with her again for Brittany to realize how much she'd missed San's body.
The second San's mouth meets hers for the first time since she started dating Artie, it's just like coming home. She's wet and her heart is pounding as hard as it did that very first time Santana touched her. San can do all sorts of things Artie can't. Brittany especially loves scissoring now, since San is always on top, doing most of the work, which is a nice change. But even better than that is the fact that Santana knows Brittany's body as well as Brittany does. She knows Brittany's buttons, all the ways to get her off quick as a rabbit, and all the ways to work her slowly to the edge so she comes so hard she forgets her own name.
Sometimes she has a hard time making herself remember that it's not cheating.
Brittany learns never to mention Artie to Santana. Every time she does, San's face stops dead. When Santana invites her over the same day she has a date with Artie, she just tells her she has plans already. San learns not to ask more questions.
She wonders if Artie suspects anything. Santana said it wasn't a problem, that guys think the idea of two girls together is hot, but somehow Brittany knows it's not a good idea to tell Artie about what she does with San. She has a feeling he wouldn't be too happy to share.
It's like she's living two lives: one with Artie, and the other with San. When they're all in the same room, she feels like a rag doll and they're playing tug-of-war.
Most of the time, she sticks to Artie's side. He treats her like a little girl sometimes, in a way San has never treated her, but at least he always shows how proud he is to have her.