A Study of Attraction
Chapter 3
The first thing Santana does before she rolls out of bed on Monday morning is check her phone. Still nothing. She's spent the entire weekend waiting for Brittany to reply to her text. It wasn't even that hard of a text to reply to. By this point Santana's worrying that she managed to fuck up hello.
She sighs and makes her way into the bathroom. It takes her sleepy self a few seconds to realise that she is now standing face to face with her totally naked, muscled and very much male housemate. She lets out a yelp.
Her naked, muscled, male housemate snaps his attention away from where he was pulling shapes in the full-length bathroom mirror to notice Santana's offensively horrified expression. "Oh- Hey Santana!" Mike greets with surprised chipperness, quickly grabbing a towel to cover his junk and blushing slightly - only slightly, because hey, when you look this good...
Santana spins on the spot. "Will you please learn how to lock the fucking door." She throws over her shoulder before heading towards the kitchen. "God."
Santana's leaning against the kitchen counter holding her coffee mug so close to her face she could probably have snorted it if she was that desperate, when Mike wanders in – still topless. Santana rolls her eyes. Mike notices, and makes sure to move in slow, rippling motion as he reaches up for a mug to get some coffee.
"Morning, Chang." She says, sounding much more alert than she usually does at this time in the morning – apparently, 'surprise penis' is way more efficient at waking her up than caffeine.
"Hi San." He greets. "Oh, by the way, I think I heard your phone ringing when I walked past your-" Santana doesn't hear the end of his sentence as she instantly dashes off towards her bedroom.
She returns a minute later holding her totally inactive phone looking mildly furious but also slightly embarrassed. "Asshole." She directs at Mike before reaching up to the cupboard to grab a bowl and the box of cereal.
Mike chuckles at Santana's expense – as if he hadn't noticed the way she was checking her phone every two minutes over the weekend, clearly waiting for someone. And not just anyone, apparently, judging by the way she tore into their friend Rachel for "wasting my fucking time" and "trying to fucking beaver-dam me" when she called on Sunday to ask about plans for next weekend. "Must be some chick." He says out loud, causing Santana to miss the bowl and spill cheerios across the counter as she instantly turns to glare at him.
"I don't know what you're talking about." She mutters restrainedly before reaching towards the fridge to grab the milk.
"Oh please, Santana. Yesterday you practically threw your phone across the livingroom because the text you literally jumped over the couch – very impressive, by the way – to read was from Quinn. Seriously, who is it?"
Santana pours the milk onto her cereal before turning around to size Mike up. When she doesn't see any real threat in sharing, she sighs, picks up a spoon, takes a huge bite of cereal and then speaks around it, hoping what she says will be way too muffled to sound cheesy.
"The girl of my dreams." she blushes slightly as she chews. Mike just smiles at her adoringly.
"Aww, that's cute." Then his face turns apologetically serious. "But if she hasn't gotten back to you, is she really worth all this worrying? Maybe it was just a fluke." Mike catches the way Santana's face falls, so he tries to lighten the mood. He slips on a fake frown. "Sometimes I think I catch the girls in my dance class staring at me, and then realise they were only into my abs."
Santana snorts, still chewing her cereal but then letting her mind wander. Was she really into me? She was flirting. And she did give me her number. I don't think she was drunk. But how hard is it to text back with 'hi'?
Santana shrugs and swallows her mouthful. "Yeah, maybe. I should probably stop obsessing over it." she agrees. Mike gives her a sympathetic smile before patting her on the shoulder and heading out.
Santana decides that Mike really does have point: a girl who can't find time to text her back on a weekend is probably not worth this many attentional resources. She quickly wolfs down the rest of her cereal and goes to finish getting ready.
She double checks the email her tutor sent her and makes sure she has the flash drive with the presentation for the lecture she has to give, and then heads to campus to get the day over with.
Santana arrives to the lecture theatre early to set everything up. Her tutor, Holly Holiday, had asked Santana to cover for her while she had to cover for somebody else because all of her colleagues and postgrads seemed to have better things to do – and also because she knew Santana would be, quote "too stubborn to be nervous and hot enough to keep their focus". Santana was way too stubborn and sexy to argue with that logic.
Santana's logging into the theatre computer when she hears a voice from the doorway ask "um...is this Holly's social psychology lecture?"
"Yeah," she turns to the students timidly waiting in the entrance and calls over. "I'm covering for Holly today." She keeps her attention on setting up the powerpoint as students begin to trickle in and by the time she's due to start most of the seats are full. She clears her throat and begins.
"Hi, I'm Santana and I'll be filling in for Holly today. This lecture is on the psychology of attraction..."
Twenty minutes later and Santana's teaching eighty second-year college students about the psychology of attraction as she just reads from the paper copy of the powerpoint she's been told to use. "Another thing that can influence who we're attracted to is actually the colour outfit they're wearing. One study found that we find people more attractive if they're wearing red."
As she speaks she casually unzips her jacket to reveal a red v-neck t-shirt – Holly had gone so far as to insist in the notes that Santana add in this little visual joke - winking up at the class as she gets wolf-whistled by a couple of people sitting further back. "Ladies, please, one at a time." She adds with mock cockiness. She gets a laugh and grins before draping her jacket over the back of her seat and continuing with the lecture.
"Okay, now you have five minutes to discuss with the person next to you how these studies could link to the evolutionary perspective we talked about earlier." She turns back to her desk to grab her water bottle as the class begins talking amongst themselves. Taking a sip of water she lets herself scan the group of students. It doesn't take her ten seconds to zone in on the pair of blue eyes staring at her intently from the middle of the lecture hall.
"Shit." she whispers. She's spent the entire weekend waiting on a text back from the girl and just this morning had decided to cut her losses when, whomp, there she is.
She pulls herself together. It's just one fucking girl, Santana. One absurdly hot girl. You can handle this. She thinks to herself, as she misses her face and spills water over herself. Hoping none of the other students noticed, she quickly grabs at some tissues and dabs away at her top, wondering where the fuck all of her game went.
"So that concludes everything for today. Holly will be back for next week. If you ave any questions on this material, please don't hesitate to email her about it because I don't really care." She finishes with a smirk and a shrug, getting one final laugh from the class before they all start to leave.
She's shutting down the projector when Brittany approaches her.
"Santana?"
Santana looks up, trying desperately to act cool.
"Oh hey. Brittany, right?" She enquires casually, as if she hadn't caught herself at one point over the weekend considering which order to double-barrel their surnames in the event of marriage. Brittany nods. "Did you have a question about the lecture?" She asks professionally, so far pleased that she's managed to stay on point.
"Well, not really. I mean yeah, I guess it's about attraction, but-"
"Why didn't you text me back?" Santana utters bluntly, her face instantly matching the surprised confusion she sees on Brittany's because she had no intention of actually vocalising that thought.
"You texted me? When?" Brittany asks.
"Uh, on Friday. It was kinda late. I said hey. Or something." Even Santana can't totally remember what she wrote, but she's pretty sure that was the gist of it. Yep.
A lightbulb goes off above Brittany's head as she reaches to draw her phone from her pocket. "Oh, you mean this?" She asks, going through her messages to find the text she'd ignored and showing it to Santana. Whose face instantly drops as she scrabbles to find her own phone, opens the text thread and groans loudly, facepalming herself.
"Uh...well it was supposed to say hey." She offers meekly. She's not even sure how much of 'Hnng, it's Saturn' could be blamed on autocorrect and how much was just down to her being so dog-tired that she couldn't even spell her own name. Luckily, Brittany seems to find it cute, as she giggles.
"Oh, well that's good. I guess." Brittany quickly saves Santana's number to her contacts. "Because I was really hoping you'd call so that we could go on that date." Brittany discreetly rakes her eyes up and down Santana's body, but Santana totally catches it.
"Uh...Sure. Yeah." Santana tries to make a joke to easy some of the light-headedness she's feeling at that moment. "So do all of the psych studies you sign up for end up with this?"
Brittany answers honestly but with a smile. "No, just yours. Actually, I've been thinking about you all weekend."
"Oh, really?" Santana asks teasingly, finally starting to take charge of the conversation as she puts her arm out to lean casually against the desk, accidentally tapping some keys with her hand. Santana then lets out a cry reminiscent to that of a wookie as she turns to face the computer screen and realises she has effortlessly deleted the entire folder of lecture notes from Holly's flashdrive.
Brittany swiftly leans over to the keyboard and undoes whatever Santana did, restoring the files, before turning back to a dumbstruck Santana with a confident smile. "Really. So, does Wednesday night work for you?"
Santana nods dumbly.
"Great. I'll call you." The blonde says before turning on her heel and heading out of the lecture theatre. "Red is totally your colour, by the way." She states, not bothering to turn around as she takes her leave, sure that Santana heard her.
Santana grabs for a chair – she suddenly finds her knees are a lot weaker than they were a minute ago. She takes a deep breath just as her phone buzzes, and then nearly falls off her chair at Brittany's delayed reply to her initial text.
"Saturn's nice but I'm way more into Uranus. ;)"
A/N: In the last month I have written about 1000 words for the research report I'm supposed to be getting on with. In the last week I have written about 10,000 words of fanfiction. Do you see the problem here.
But for real, I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of favourites and follows and reviews I got from the last chapter. This story now has more reviews and follows than all of my other stories combined!
I'm uploading this slightly earlier than planned firstly because it was ready, secondly to celebrate the amount of feedback I'm getting on this story and thirdly because I planned out the next chapter (or two, it might be in two parts) but I don't know when exactly I'll get around writing it up. Hopefully on schedule since there's about a third of it written already but just in case there's a delay, here's something to go on for now.
Shameless plug for you to ignore at your leisure: if you get bored in the mean time I've finally gotten back on track with my BTVS-style glee fic in which Santana's a vampire slayer *seductive wink*
As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed :)