(Author's Note: Thanks for your patience. I hope the length of this chapter makes amends for the long hiatus.
Thanks as always to my excellent first readers - who saw very little of this chapter due to my haste in posting - for their early directional affirmation. A particular note of acknowledgement for JJ's heartbreaking post on Brittany's hair in Fondue for Two, which figures in this version of events.
Next: The Only True Paradises, Chapter 18.)
By the time Brittany wakes up, San's side of the bed is empty. Through the drawn veil of the curtains, a cold shadow of light filters in. With a familiar ache, Brittany feels the place where Santana should be, like a starched ghost stretched along her side. She pulls the covers over her mouth and tries to sleep again.
A muffled buzz in her backpack shakes her from the haze. Artie's text chime.
Groaning, Brittany tosses off her covers, pads over to her backpack, and digs her phone from the pit. Snapping it open, she sees a screen full of sealed envelope icons. Artie. Artie. Artie. Artie. Artie. She starts with the oldest, stamped 6:22 pm the night before, when she and Santana were downstairs in the kitchen.
Hey baby want to chill tonight
7:04 pm. What r u up to
9:57 pm. Um u mad or something
11:31 pm. What did I do? Sorry for whatever it is
1:49 am. Getting worried babe at least tell me ur ok
And now this one:
9:23 am. Seriously Brittany r u alive?
She imagines Artie typing the texts. Checking his chunky watch. They'd chimed, unnoticed, unchecked, while Brittany held Santana and forgot that time or anything else existed. Kissing her mouth. Touching her warm skin. Moving inside her.
The last thought makes her shiver all over again. The image, the smell, the sensation of the moment when Santana opened her eyes and suddenly Brittany was completely inside her. It was like the moment when Santana brought her fingers to her lips after sliding them out of Brittany for the first time. Brittany feels just as sure that everything has changed.
What that means, though—well, Brittany's learning to be patient.
She taps out a quick reply to Artie.
im fine santana slept over phone still in my bag sry
After sending the text, she burrows back into bed, pulling Santana's pillow against her chest and breathing in the traces of scent San left behind.
Now that the Brainiacs are finished for the year, Brittany's brain feels like a balloon that's just been deflated after having been blown up to its full size for the first time. Wider. Looser. Like she's got stretch marks. She can't go back to nothing without feeling hungry somehow.
It's filming her little sister's softball game that gives her a new idea. One of her sister's teammates has a big sister in eighth grade who always brings one of about three rotating friends. The two girls spend the game at the top of the bleachers, dipping bits of soft snack bar pretzel into nacho cheese while gossiping about their classmates at Brittany's and San's old middle school. Brittany hears the unfamiliar names and wonders if she and San sounded as silly back then as these girls do now, swapping the latest news of this cute boy or that nerdy girl with such sticky pleasure.
Still, she thinks, training the lens briefly on the two giggling girls before panning back to her sister on second base, they always seem super happy: just two girls, together, sharing easy secrets like they're in the shelter of one of their bedrooms.
By the time she approaches Lauren Zizes to ask to borrow a cameraman from the AV club, Brittany's already picked out a name for her talk show.
"It'll be called 'Fondue for Two,'" she tells Lauren, "and I'm just going to put it up on YouTube, but it would look so much better if, like, someone was actually filming it. My cat is always knocking over my tripod."
"Yeah. No problem." Lauren looks her over. "I owe you after that solo you choreographed for me."
Brittany shrugs.
"Throw in a case of Almond Joys for the next AV Club meeting and I'll get someone on it."
"Deal."
The someone Lauren gets on it is a dark-haired girl with wide cheekbones and even wider eyes. She walks up to Brittany the next morning at her lockers with a digital camcorder in her hand.
"Hi," she bubbles. "I'm Mackensie. Zizes sent me." She nods toward the camcorder.
"Hey, Mackensie." Brittany smiles. "I'm Brittany Pierce."
"Yeah, I know who you are." She says it like it's obvious, like everyone knows who Brittany is. "Wow, you're really pretty up close."
"Thanks." Brittany smiles and shrugs.
"So, like, do you have a minute to talk about what you want to do with the show?"
"I don't know. I guess it's pretty simple, just… tape us talking."
"Oh, come on," coaxes Mackensie. "Let's at least do, like, a theme song."
Brittany gives in, and actually, it's super fun. They storyboard it over lunch and do a series of quick shots in various rooms of the school over the next couple of days. Mackensie promises to edit it together into something cool. She's nice enough, if a little too excited about their time together. A freshman, in about six clubs, obsessed with popularity, and lists becoming a Cheerio among her top five life ambitions.
"I can't believe you just quit," she confesses in the hallway as Brittany shuts her locker. "You and Santana Lopez and Quinn Fabray. Just like that."
"Well—Coach Sylvester isn't really that nice to her students," Brittany points out. She rummages for her car keys. "It can be—it's not easy, you know."
"Who cares?" Mackensie sighs. "When you're a Cheerio, nothing can touch you."
Across the hall, Brittany spots San threading her way through the crowd. She brushes a loose piece of hair behind her ear just before ducking out of the way of a darting boy. She used to spring through the halls, pronging like one of those stags in Bambi, the ringlets of her ponytail and the fringe of her skirt flouncing with each footfall. Now she picks among clusters of other students just like anyone else: dodging and being dodged, clutching a notebook to her chest like a shield.
Unaware that Brittany's attention has drifted away, Mackensie keeps talking.
"You know Coach Sylvester's starting up the school newspaper again? I signed up so I can get in good with her. You should join too. First meeting's this Thursday. Everyone's supposed to prepare a blind item pitch."
"Sure. Maybe." After Santana disappears into a classroom, Brittany smiles at Mackensie and jingles the keys hooked over her finger. "So. Ready to come to my place and shoot the real thing?"
The icon stares back at her. Mackensie's email attachment. There it is: the final cut of "Fondue for Two."
No subject line. No body.
Brittany's pulse drifts from her chest to her fingertips, her gullet, the tips of her ears. She feels almost dizzy, sick with anticipation, as she opens it and watches the opening sequence Mackensie cut together.
And suddenly, there she is, centered in Mackensie's handheld shot—Mackensie had insisted on setting up another camera on a tripod to get a different angle—speaking to the camera in her best radio voice. Mercedes and Tina are absorbed in twirling their forks in the fondue pot. They were quick to say yes to Brittany when she asked them to be her first guests.
It was so exciting, so homey, to have them there in her room at last, just the way she had imagined, spearing and dipping the cubed bread and evenly-cut vegetables Brittany had prepared the night before. Everything seemed to be going so perfectly.
The ease she felt must be why she let it slip—that one stupid phrase about Santana.
She realized how stupid it was as soon as it was out of her mouth. Even if she hadn't, the expressions that bloomed on the faces of all three of the other girls—Mercedes, Tina, Mackensie—would have told her. She felt her stomach twisting, tightening into a knot.
Scraping up Lord Tubbington and letting him bury his head in the fondue pot was the fastest distraction she could think of. It worked for a minute. But she tied off the episode fast—way faster than she'd planned. Her stomach was knotted too tight to ignore now. The feeling started to tug at her throat.
The bright face and soft voice on the video that close the program look like her. But behind her careful camera face, the real Brittany was already pulling herself into pieces. Stupid. Stupid.
"Seriously, that's it? That's all we're filming?" Mercedes had asked, scooting away her fondue plate. Tina tapped a floret of broccoli against her lip. Mackensie stopped the camera on the tripod. Three pairs of eyes, and silence.
Brittany shrugged. Keep it together. "The next one is going to be longer."
After Tina and Mercedes left, Brittany drove Mackensie home.
"I'll cut it all together and send it to you," she said.
"Great. Thanks for your help."
"Sure. It was fun."
The silence in the car was so stuffy that Brittany opened the driver and passenger windows to half-mast. Not much longer. Keep it together.
Finally, Mackensie cleared her throat.
"So is it really true? About Santana?"
Brittany gulped.
"Yeah. She—she isn't on the Cheerios anymore," she improvised. "She's on Glee. And we're a team because we're going to Nationals, like the Cheerios do. Well. Except this year, since… you know."
"Huh." Brittany could hear a sneaky smile in Mackensie's voice. She didn't buy it. Brittany felt sick.
Waiting for Mackensie to send the final cut was the longest three hours of her life. And now, watching her own face for any flicker of emotion that would betray what she really meant by "the other team" is torture. She watches that handful of seconds over and over and over. She lets almost none of it show. Almost.
That doesn't stop Mercedes and Tina's shocked faces when Mackensie cuts to their reaction shot. Brittany stops when she can't stand to watch those expressions one more time.
What should she do? She could just not post the video.
No, that won't work. She remembers Mackensie's hungry little look. The too-sharp, too eager edge to her voice when she asked whether it was true. She remembers the blind-item assignment for the first newspaper meeting. The way Mackensie would probably give a kidney to win Coach Sylvester's favor.
Not posting it would prove that Brittany—that Santana—had something to hide.
So it's for love that Brittany uploads the video that will out Santana. It's to keep San safe that she clicks submit.
But later, reading and re-reading San's text—britt wtf?—and feeling the weight of the fact that she can't take any of it back settle like a cinderblock on her ribs, she wonders, guiltily and secretly, whether something in her meant to do it.
In the end, Brittany does join the newspaper. Mostly she just wants to keep an eye on Mackensie.
Then again, as much as she hates to admit it, Brittany does miss Coach Sylvester sometimes. More, actually, after Mr. Schuester questioned her about the Brainiacs and made her feel so stupid in front of everyone in Glee Club. That'd punched a hole in her gut. She'd thought Mr. Schue believed in her. When Sue Sylvester yells at you, it may not be fair, but at least she's doing it because she thinks you're capable of doing better. Like Brittany's old ballet teacher.
It feels good to have someone expect more of her. Not just of her body—she gets plenty of that kind already—but of her mind.
She expected Santana to yell at her. To do something. But apart from the text, San hasn't said a word.
At least, not until the first Muckraker.
Brittany thought about throwing Mackensie off the scent, but she never thought about anyone else. For starters, Jacob Ben Israel—blogger gossip king of McKinley—who must have sucked that video clean for every possible rumor, like Lord Tubbington snout-deep in the fondue pot.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Whoever it was, someone said something. Brittany flips to the blind items right away, and there it is. Something about a cheerleader in the closet.
San is going to kill her.
When Santana charges at her in the choir room, a copy of the Muckraker in her fist, Brittany just repeats the story she made up for Mackensie. She can't begin to explain the truth. She doesn't know if San could forgive her if she did. She sees in San's eyes how scared she is. You could scrape her anger away with a fingernail and see that soft stiffened-doe fear.
In that moment, Brittany's cowardice and shame turns to longing. She wants to hold Santana and kiss her and make her not afraid anymore. She wants to point to everyone around and say, see? They don't mind.
When Santana storms away, that's the thought that clings to Brittany, clings uselessly and wordlessly to her lips.
The fantasy evaporates when she glances down to see Artie staring right at her.
"Hang out tonight?" asks Artie, rolling up to her locker after school.
Brittany swings the door shut. "Not tonight. I have—"
"Jazz. Modern. No, you're babysitting your sister." He pauses. "You have plans with Santana."
Brittany's heart leaps a little at her name.
"Recording another 'Fondue for Two,' actually," she says quietly.
"Well, what about tomorrow?"
"Muckraker."
Artie squeezes his eyes shut, adjusts his glasses, and looks back up at her.
"Just tell me."
Tell you what?"
"What I did."
She crouches down and takes his hands, running her thumbs over the palms of his gloves, as if she's about to tell him something important. She wants to badly to tell him—something—but she reaches in and scrapes every part of herself and emerges with nothing solid to give him.
"Nothing," she says, finally. "You did nothing."
She stays crouched for what feels like hours, her eyes at the level of his, trying to read something in his eyes through the cloudy, smudged lenses of his glasses. Finally, her haunches and the balls of her feet get sore. When her legs begin to quiver, she rises again, tottering, to her full height and leans against the lockers. Artie rubs the armrests of his wheelchair.
"Brittany, I'm not an idiot. Something's going on. Talk to me."
"Couldn't I just be busy?" He's pushing too hard. Her guilt begins to curdle into annoyance.
"Fine." He heaves a sigh and twists his wheels, nearly backing into the lockers. "See you tomorrow then."
As she watches him leave, Brittany feels that knot in her belly again. Is it guilt? Anger? Worry? For Artie, or for Santana? She can hardly tell the difference anymore—which feels worse than anything.
Brittany's second guest on "Fondue for Two" is Lauren Zizes, who isn't nearly as talkative as Mercedes and Tina, but who has a mean mouth on her and volleys gossip like a champ. Their cubes of meat sizzle in the fondue chocolate. It's a little rare in the middle but the grain splits, seared and warm and satisfying, between Brittany's teeth. Mackensie tries dipping in a chunk of steak after they film the segment and spits the bitten morsel into her napkin, cringing.
"This is disgusting," she says. "How can you guys, like, eat this?"
Brittany and Lauren exchange quick grins.
Even though it was probably Mackensie who submitted that stupid blind item, Brittany can't bring herself to confront her about it. She convinces herself it was Jacob Ben Israel. After all, the kid has made it his personal mission to unearth every dirty wriggling secret in the hot dirt bed of McKinley High. It's easy not to hate him for it. It's deep inside him, this instinct to dig and pry and hoard and reveal—like a badger, or a magpie. How can you hate someone for acting on natural instinct?
It's barely an hour this time before the final cut flashes into her inbox from Mackensie. Again: no subject, no body.
San texts her a few minutes after the upload.
haha britt good show
Brittany can't sort out how much of the churning of her insides is relief that San's not mad anymore and how much is guilt over her lie.
They haven't talked about what happened in Brittany's bed last week. It's still playing over and over inside Brittany, though, warming the contents of her chest from somewhere underneath the way the heating coil warms the contents of her fondue pot. It's threatening to boil over. She doesn't know what to do now. As the deep heartache Santana's eyes planted in her begins to sprout and flower, she's come to grips with what she really wants. The moment Santana came out, the moment she was ready to hold Brittany's hand in the hallways and kiss her by the lockers, Brittany would fly from Artie's side to hers like a streak of light.
But she knows that's not going to happen anytime soon. And she can't let herself sink back into that place she was in before Artie: tiptoeing, nervous, aching for something Santana refused to give her.
Still, something inside is telling her: keep waiting.
"What's going on with you and Santana?"
Brittany jolts. She hadn't even noticed Artie rolling up to her locker. Stopping at the same spot where he asked last week what he had done wrong.
Only this time, instead of digging for the problem, he's driven a pick deep into its core.
"Nothing." The word comes out like a cough after a blow to her solar plexus. She keeps her face straight. God, here it comes. This moment she didn't even realize she'd been dreading since the first "Fondue for Two."
No. Longer than that. Since she started sleeping with Santana behind Artie's back.
"That doesn't sound like nothing. It sounds like something, which is almost always more than nothing." His eyes are darting around. He's been nervous to ask her about this. But not nearly as nervous as Brittany is to be asked.
"Calm down, Artie," she says, meaning to sound soothing, but nerves pinch her voice high and sharp.
"Are you cheating on me with her?"
"No," she says, locking her mouth into a light smile, but she can't quite look at him. "Of course not. I mean—"
She's lying now. She knows it. And she's a terrible liar. But then—it comes to her. A way to tie off all the ends without anyone hating her for it. How could anyone hate her, when they thought she didn't understand? Knowing that loving Santana, loving with her body, form part of who she is? How could anyone hate her for acting on natural instinct?
"I can't. She's a girl. Fooling around with her isn't cheating; it's just friends talking with their tongues super-close." She shuts her locker as if an uglier, more painful truth were about to slip out of it.
"Who told you that?"
"Santana." Actually, she'd made it up on the spot. But it seemed simpler to tell him it was San—that way, he wouldn't grill her.
How Artie responds shocks her. As he tells her he doubts that what they had was ever real, that he can't imagine why the hottest girl in the school would date him, Brittany starts to feel sicker and sicker. How long has he felt this way? Does he only like being with her because she's hot and popular? She thinks back on all of those times it felt like he was indulging her. When he made her feel like a child.
"If I know you spend even a little time sharing yourself with someone else," he goes on, "that there's one other person in your life that can provide for you things that I'm supposed to provide, it's just too much for me to take." His face hardens. "And Santana knows that. She's taking advantage of it to break us up."
And then she sees it. How much he hates Santana. How little he understands Brittany. How little he understands about how much Santana means to her, and—worse—how little he wants to understand. All for the sake of his pride.
Brittany flares up—hard. He can't talk about Santana that way. He just can't.
"No," she snaps, "everybody thinks she's a bad person, but she's not."
"God, Brittany, why are you so stupid?"
Everything stops. Brittany's ears are ringing. She can't hear her own heartbeat. She feels emptied of everything inside her skin, down to the muscle and bone—so mothwing-thin that she feels like Artie's breath will crumple her. Then, everything fills again, with a hot liquid ache. For the first time in years, she feels herself beginning to cry.
"You're the only person in this school who never called me that," she says.
Then she flies, far, fast, into the arms of the only person in the school who she doesn't even need to mention never calls her stupid, because she's always Brittany's exception.
Santana.
San drives her home with only one hand on the steering wheel. The other traces the lines of Brittany's palm and wrist, resting open like a flower on the center console. Brittany lets her eyes flutter shut and focuses on the warmth of Santana's skimming fingertips. Every time San touches her now, she can feel love oozing through San's skin: hungry, lonely love that has been trapped inside her so long she can't help it from coming out now that she's split and revealed the vein.
Taking her by the hand, Santana unlocks Brittany's door and leads her up to her room. After sitting her down on the bed, slipping off her shoes, and kissing her temple, she tilts up Brittany's chin and looks her in the eyes.
"You're supposed to have modern today, right?"
"Yeah." Brittany's belly sinks. She'd forgotten about that.
"Don't worry," San tells her, stroking Brittany's temple with her thumb, as if she could read her thoughts. "I'll call in sick for you."
She pads downstairs, leaving Brittany's bedroom door open. Brittany hears her calling from the house phone and faking Brittany's mom's crispest phone voice: a voice San's heard so many times over the years that she can fake it as well as she can Brittany's mom's signature. She tells whoever's on the other line that Brittany has a touch of fever but should be well enough to attend the next class. Yes, of course they'll forfeit the class fee. Thanks for their understanding.
"Your mom never has to know," says San, returning to snuggle in beside Brittany on the bed and cradle Brittany's body into her own. She kisses the crown of Brittany's head, digs her nose into Brittany's hair, and then, as if remembering something, gives a sharp sigh and falls back on the pillow. Her fingers rake through the strands of Brittany's hair and sweep it back from her brow and neck.
"I'm done with him," Brittany whispers into San's chest. She can feel San's muscles twitch beneath her head as San nods.
They lie still, entwined, and say nothing. Brittany's mind drifts over the preceding hours and riffles through images and touches and words. The word stupid, fresh from Artie's lips, stinging her ears. Santana's love you in the hallway setting off a shiver through Brittany's body.
Part of her wants San to say something now. To declare herself. To claim Brittany. To ask what happens next. But another part—a bigger part—feels desperately tired for reasons she can't quite explain. Torn open in a way she didn't expect. She still feels like a rag doll between them, but instead of tugged in two directions, she feels like she's been dropped to the floor.
"Sleep now," whispers San into her hair. "I've got you."
Brittany lets San pull her deeper into her side. Lets San pick her up from the cold floor and press her to her heart. She lets herself fall asleep, safe, all thinking and dreaming forgotten in the familiar bed of Santana's arms.
Brittany wakes up in the middle of the night still in her clothes, tucked into her sheets. The street clothes scratch her skin and she wants to switch to a sleep shirt, but she feels the ridge of duvet pressed under her side and doesn't want to unravel this little thing Santana has done for her.
Her phone is on her bedside table, and when she pulls her arm out carefully to set an alarm for the morning, she finds that San has already done it. There's a text, too.
pick u up at 7. love you britt. s
It's so much at once. Brittany's throat is thick with love. And yet she feels a waxing soreness deep in her, a cavity, where Artie was plucked out. It hurts now. It really hurts. The way her whole mouth hurt after her cavities had been scraped clean at the dentist, once the anesthesia wore off.
After all—if fixing this mess were going to be easy, she'd have done it a long time ago.
Something's different about San when she comes to pick Brittany up the next morning. She hums a little, a few floating notes at a time, and then stops the melody in her throat with a small secret grin. They don't talk much, but San darts a couple of quick glances at her through the rearview mirror, and Brittany can't help the feeling swelling inside her that something is going to happen today.
Well—something besides the thing that has to happen. The thing that's pinning her, heavy, to her seat. She has to officially break up with Artie.
"Feeling okay, Britt Britt?" San asks her just after shifting into park in the school lot. She surveys the surrounding cars before pressing Brittany's palm to her lips. "Gonna make it today?"
"Yeah," she says. Her voice tugs at her throat. "I think so."
"Okay." San glides her hands uselessly over the steering wheel for a moment before continuing. "Will you do me a favor?"
"Yeah. Of course."
"Come to the choir room after school. We—I—I just need to show you something."
Approaching Artie at his locker after lunch—the longest she could put it off—Brittany feels like she's in one of those dreams where someone is chasing her and she's hobbled, or her feet are made of lead, and she can't move forward. But she has to. Finally, she's leaning against the next locker, waiting for him to pivot his chair.
He doesn't. Instead, he closes his locker and presses his hand over the vents.
"You're here to break up with me, aren't you?"
"Yes."
They stay still, waiting—waiting for nothing—as sound and footsteps and the dull bells of slamming lockers fly around them.
Finally, Artie pulls his hand from the locker and rests it in his lap. He glances at her—close to her eyes, but pointedly not meeting them.
"I'm sorry, you know. I shouldn't have—"
"I know," Brittany cuts him off.
"I guess that doesn't change anything."
"No." Silence.
"So I guess I was right," he says miserably. "It was too good to be true."
"It wouldn't have been," Brittany begins. "If only…" But the rest of her sentence hovers, half-formed, and disintegrates. What good would it do now to explain?
"Just tell me one thing. How long was it going on? Between you and her? I mean, after we started dating?"
Brittany hesitates. She grates her teeth over her lip. "Do you really want to know?"
He reflects for a moment, grows cold. Hard.
"No. I guess not." The way he twists his head away wrings Brittany's heart and throat into a dry hard knot.
For the rest of the day, Brittany bobs and wavers, to the point of seasickness, between the dull ache of her breakup with Artie and the soft fizzing anticipation of San's secret.
By the time she walks into the choir room after school, Santana and Brad are already there. San is bent over the corner of the piano, but she springs upright as soon as she sees Brittany in the doorway. She retreats to the end of the piano and runs her hand over the inner curve, inviting Brittany into the crook. Brittany comes to her and leans over the closed lid, resting her weight on it as if on the deck of a ship.
"How are you holding up, Britt?" San leans over her. Brittany can smell the perfume and sweat that cling to her thin white top. She closes her eyes for a moment and draws the scent in like a sip of warm milk.
"I'm so sad," she admits. "Like a sad little panda." And a little nervous—but she doesn't tell San that part.
"Well, that's why I brought you here." Brittany looks up at Santana, who holds her gaze. "To cheer you up." She takes Brittany's hand, and Brittany lets San lead her like a child—the way she did last night, when they were alone. "I've been going through that Rumours album," San continues, handing her into a chair, "and I found the best song that really goes one step past Landslide in expressing my feelings for you." She pauses. "My private feelings."
The old Brittany would've been careful not to glance at Brad. The new Brittany, though—she's braver than that.
"What about him?" she points out.
"He's just furniture," says San, glancing back at him. And Brittany's waiting heart is pounding too hard now to ask any more questions. She waits, still, as Santana, backed up against the piano, fidgets through the piano introduction as if summoning something from the air.
Then, she begins to sing.
From her perch in the crook of the piano, San searches the air until her eyes are locked into the deepest groove of Brittany's. Her hands are restless. Fluttering. She doesn't know what to do with them. Brittany, flushed with sudden fear, holds still. Santana is her little brown bird again, and Brittany is terrified of scaring her away.
But little by little, a miracle happens. As Brittany dampens her smile and softens her breath, Santana moves toward her. She's singing I love you, over and over, her honeyed voice rich and soft, and Brittany doesn't know how anything existed before this moment, how the world will go on after. Keeping still and quiet, Brittany wills this song to linger forever, for San to flit closer and closer until they fuse together into a single breath, a single heartbeat. Santana is so close—so close—and the flick of her shoulders as she sings a final I love you feels like complete surrender.
Then it's over. Santana has nothing to lean against, nothing to hide behind. Her eyes are deep, pleading, desperate. The room falls quiet. Brittany knows it is up to her to speak. But what is she supposed to say? Where does she start?
In the end, her deep, too-brave, too-hungry longing wins out.
"Wait—so why couldn't you sing that to me in front of everyone? Now that Artie and I aren't together?"
San blots a tear from her lower lashes with her fingertip. "No. Not yet." Her eyes dart away, and she turns to retreat to her perch in the crook of the piano. She tells Brittany she's not ready to deal with going public. When San confesses her pain and humiliation from the Muckraker fallout, Brittany feels a shudder of regret. It's her fault San feels like this. All from that first "Fondue for Two."
And then—she has another idea.
"Well, what if I went first?" She follows San to the shelter of the piano. "Come on 'Fondue for Two.'" Santana's face bares such trust and fear that Brittany feels her nerves fluttering all over and inside her, like feathers spreading out under her skin. "I'll… ask you out to the prom, and"—San's flash of a smile gives Brittany a little more courage—"I'll tell you how I feel. And all you have to do is say yes."
Now it's her turn to wait.
After just a moment, to Brittany's shock, Santana looks up and nods.
"Okay," she says, and pulls Brittany into her arms so hard that Brittany feels her feathery nerves retract and settle. She's reeling and punch drunk and wants to pause everything, hovering, at the point of this embrace—before something else comes to drag her under.
If "Fondue for Two" was where all the trouble started, it's going to be the place where the trouble is fixed. Right?
Brittany arranges with Mackensie to come over the next day after school—well, after AV club—and set up the cameras. She wears the new cardigan she bought last week. While she's waiting for San, she curls her hair and puts on a fresh coat of mascara. Her heart is racing. It feels a little like that afternoon sophomore year, when they made love—and it was making love, she knows now—in the sunlight for the first time. That too-tight beautiful terrible feeling.
She knows what she's going to say, of course. She scribbled it down and scratched out and added phrases and practiced it silently during her classes. She's going to tell Santana that she's been drawn to her since the moment she saw her in the fifth grade. That she started to fall for her that summer before high school. That last year, she finally realized she was in love with her. That she's never loved anyone or anything the way she loves Santana. And that she knows she'll love her forever.
When she hears San's text chime, she grabs her phone and glances out the window in case San's car has pulled up while she wasn't paying attention. Nothing to see. A strange dread squeezes her stomach as she opens Santana's text.
i cant
Brittany feels dizzy. Nauseated. She sits down at the edge of her bed, sets her phone next to her on the duvet, and stares at her knees. She's not coming. Santana's not coming.
What does she do now?
By the time Lauren drops off Mackensie, Brittany's spent the last god-knows-how-long volleying between anger and regret. One moment, she wants to slap Santana for humiliating her like this. For knocking her off a cloud and sending her plummeting into a rocky pit. The next moment, she feels like she deserves it for pushing Santana so hard, when all San had tried to do was sing to her how she feels. She hates herself for being so impatient. All she had to do was stay still and Santana would have come to her. Instead, she'd lunged and spooked her into flight.
Well, either way, it's done now.
When Mackensie comes, she interviews Lord Tubbington.
"This'll be the last show," Brittany tells Mackensie after they finish recording the show. She stirs the cheese with a breadstick while Mackensie licks a drip off the end of her own. "Thanks for your help."
"Yeah. Sure. Anytime."
When Brittany sees Santana at school the next day, a jolt goes through the quick of her, like someone stuck a needle into her molar root. She wants to shake her and ask why, why abandon her now? If she loves Brittany so much, what is so hard about being together? Isn't that what she said she wanted all along?
The article Brittany submitted to the Muckraker about Mr. Schuester blazes across the front page. Normally, she'd have had San or Artie look over something like this before she turned it in. Instead, this one has been cut apart and rearranged and ratcheted up two gears by Jacob Ben Israel. Brittany almost feels bad, but then she remembers the snide little way, in their interview, that Mr. Schue had told her he didn't think she was "the journalist type." How satisfying it was to outwit him and make him stutter. She only wishes she could share the triumph with someone.
Now, she has no one.
Brittany's applying a fresh layer of eyeshadow when a twinge in her heart alerts her to San's voice nearby. She glances over to the doorway of the classroom across the hall to see Santana in front of Jacob Ben Israel's microphone. Her eyes dart from Jacob to Brittany as she tells him she and Dave are going strong. The eyeshadow palette in her hand lowers, forgotten, as Brittany listens.
"So you two are in love?" drawls Jacob, clearly not buying it. "Soulmates, so to speak?"
Brittany is frozen to the floor. Her heartbeat muffles out every sound but the one she's waiting for: Santana's voice. San glances at her with the strangest eyes Brittany has ever seen—a swirling mess of love, regret, shame, fear, and pleading.
Pleading for what?
"Yeah," says Santana at last, and Brittany feels the word like a kick that finally breaks open her sore, sluggish, reeling heart. "Yeah. I'd say that's accurate."
When San turns on her heels with one last glance and flies out of sight, Brittany slowly shuts her locker and slumps against it. The vents press ridges into her back. She closes her eyes and tries to remember what she felt like just last week: loved—not abandoned—by two people at once.