Amends: A Glee fanfic. Quinn/Santana. Chapter 3
Title: Amends
Chapter: 3/3
Rating: PG-13 (drama, angst, some language)
Summary: Santana is much nicer to boys than she is to girls, and it has everything to do with sexuality... but not in the way that people think.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own Glee. If I did, it would go a little something like this...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the last chapter. Thank you so much for reading! If you haven't already (or if you've been doing so all along), I would love to hear your thoughts on this story. Reviews mean a lot and help me grow as a writer!
If it weren't for the nosy hovering of Mrs. Lopez by the door after Quinn rang the bell, awkwardly gripping the blonde into a tight hug, and speaking a mile a minute in Spanglish about how much she missed having her around, Santana would have slung whatever kind of verbal punch it took to send her former friend away and regain a normal breathing pattern.
To make matters infinitely worse, the excitable woman insisted that the former head cheerleader stay for dinner, even offering to make her favorite dish. Santana tried frantically to signal to her mother to renege the invitation immediately, but she wasn't surprised that her efforts were to no avail. Mrs. Lopez had always seemed to take Quinn's disappearance from her daughter's life almost as hard as Santana, having always referred to the hazel-eyed girl as "familia." As the young Latina knew, familia was always welcome for dinner.
Mrs. Lopez shooed the girls out of the kitchen, otherwise known as her respite, while she cooked, and so the two girls trudged what felt like a day-long hike up the stairs to Santana's bedroom. The shorter girl quickened her pace once she reached the landing, shoving the door to her room open to see if there was any mess she needed to clean up, internally slapping her own wrist when she realized what she was doing.
She saw the now estranged girl silently scanning the room with her eyes, observing the few things that were the same since last they got together and the several things that had changed. As Quinn's gaze found the picture frames that used to house pictures of she and the Latina, Santana stepped over to the door, pulled it shut, and stood with her back against it.
Hearing the door close, Quinn turned to face Santana, words seeming to fail her as she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. The softness in the blonde's eyes scared her, and her heartbeat reached a new level of escalation when after several moments of silence, Quinn releases a deep breath and reaches forward to hug the smaller girl. The darker girl, whose arms were already folded tightly across her chest, stiffly maintained her stance. Internally, she pleaded that the blonde would unhand her, since even an innocent hug almost spurned a whimper from the girl who had craved her touch for so long. After a few awkward seconds of unrequited contact, Quinn did get the hint and pull away, mumbling a defeated "Okay..." under her breath.
Eyes darting back and forth at an alarming rate, like they always seemed to when she was talking to Quinn in recent days, Santana did everything to keep her guard securely in place. "So?" she asked.
Quinn leaned against Santana's dresser, her nervousness now apparent as she brought her voice down to a near-whisper. "Um, well... I've been doing a lot of thinking. Last semester, since I gave up the - my daughter," she corrected, swallowing hard and likewise twisting Santana's stomach, "and all throughout the summer, and I'm a different person now."
This wasn't news to Santana, who had more than noticed the positive changes in her fair-skinned counterpart. She had for her own sake turned a blind eye to the positive ways that Quinn had been changing, as all it did was make her long for the other girl infinitely more, not to mention reminded her of the way things used to be before each girl took a turn for the worse, which whether they admitted it or not, likely had to do with the other's absence.
"Yeah, you've finally lost some of that baby weight," Santana retorted, "what does that have to do with me?"
Discarding the queen bee within, the taller girl stopped fussing with the surface of Santana's dresser and looked her squarely in the eye. "I'm here to make amends. You and I have barely talked since I got kicked off the Cheerios and I was hoping we could change that."
There was a battle between rationality and vulnerability raging like rapids in the Latina's mind. The rational side knew that Quinn's proposition was genuine, thought-out, and with the best of intentions, and was urging Santana, who had missed the other girl every second since their falling out, to let her guard down and trust her. At this thought, however, her vulnerable side was cornered and terrified, unyielding in its inert need to protect herself.
"Oh, I see," she smirked haughtily, "this is about the Cheerios. Look, it's not really my place to say, but something tells me that the dartboard Coach Sylvester has with your face on it in her office knocks your chances down a peg or two."
Quinn startled Santana by laughing, an apparent mixture of amusement and frustration. "This has nothing to do with the Cheerios, and you don't need to be like this."
"Like what?" Santana quipped back, hoping to release the diva within.
"This whole... attitude. I know things have changed between us, but I'm still not convinced that this isn't an act," Quinn replied matter-of-factly.
The vulnerable side of Santana fumed, near-irate at how no matter what, the girl standing before her always seemed to get under her skin. "Whatever," was the best she could manage, proving that the normally sharp-tongued firecracker truly was thrown off her game. She stepped aside from the door only to hold it open, non-verbally urging Quinn to leave.
The blonde, however, used the break in her front as a foothold and refused to back down. She walked toward the door and pushed it shut, subsequently cornering Santana against the wooden surface.
Instead of anger, Quinn's voice was full of a desperation of sorts. "I want to go back to the day that changed everything between us. Why can't we?"
"Because what's done is done, Quinn, okay? I saw it in your eyes after your dad stormed out that things would never be the same," the darker girl replied, the defeat clear in her tone.
For a moment, the former "it" girl stood speechless, slightly confused, until a moment of realization visibly hit her. "I don't mean the day with my parents. I mean the day before that."
She wasn't sure which, but Santana was fairly certain that color was either draining from or rushing to her cheeks as she recalled the one instance she had left out of her memory montage to spare herself the pain of remembering:
Santana clutched the build-a-bear Quinn had made her two Christmases ago as the tears continued to fall steadily. The bear's white and pink fur was long since damp with liquid drops of emotion, as even the normally guarded tough girl was not immune to adolescent heartache.
She should have known enough to find it suspicious when Karofsky tirelessly insisted upon signing her yearbook. Not only that but he asked if he could take it to his last period class so he could "take his time" with it. Still, the tan-skinned girl obliged, and she and Quinn met up with Karofsky at the end of the day, eying his fellow baseball cronies, who were mysteriously huddled around the corner, peering on as he handed the book back to Santana.
Both girls' eyes quickly discovered what the jerk-from-birth was truly up to when they saw slurs and insults about the Santana written over her school picture and many surrounding faces, the arrows pointing toward the Latina making it painstakingly clear who the comments were about. Laughing from their post, the other boys high-tailed it out of there, and when Santana had realized just how badly she'd been duped, she threw her yearbook at the ground and took off, trying to push past the current of students all trying to make their way to their
respective buses. The tear-filled ride home was additionally humiliating, and the flow hadn't stopped since then.
She assumed the knock on her door was once again her mother, despite her several requests for privacy.
"I don't want to talk about it, Mom!" she barked at the piece of wood.
"Santi, it's me," came the reply, signifying to the crying girl that on the other side was the only person who called her that.
"Come in," Santana spoke quietly, and tried to ignore the escalation of her heartbeat when the ever-radiant blonde appeared in the doorway.
Quinn dropped her bag to the floor instantly, sitting beside Santana's feet and leaning forward to pull the smaller girl into a hug before halting, noticing the head-shaking that told Quinn she wasn't ready for whatever reason.
"I shouldn't have left the yearbook there. Now everyone else is going to see what he wrote about me. And my parents are going to kill me for spending $90 on a yearbook that I'll never get back. What am I supposed to tell them? That I'm a slutty bimbo who got put in her place?"
Quinn reached for her bag pulling out a familiar looking book, "Or you can show them this one," she said, sliding it across the mattress.
Brown eyes opened the yearbook, finding every page completely unscathed, including the one with her own picture on it. "I can't take yours, you paid for it," she said after a moment of contemplation.
"Oh, it's not mine," Quinn corrected, "It's that asshole, Karofsky's. I stole it from him after beating his stupid head in with yours."
The words poured so matter of factly out of the blonde's mouth that they reached Santana's ears with even more surprise.
"Wait - you what?" the bewildered girl asked.
"Oh, and I grabbed these while I was at it," Quinn continued, pulling out the pages signed by Santana's true friends that she had torn out of the book by hand. "I tore up the page he defaced, too, so don't worry. Goes to show that loser has no friends, no one even signed his book yet."
The smile that Quinn was aching to see broke out on Santana's face as she unexpectedly lunged at the other girl, granting her the hug she had initially denied in addition to expressing her overwhelmed gratitude. She hoped Quinn hadn't noticed the goosebumps that sprung up like flowers on her arms when the taller girl rubbed the very tips of her fingers over the Latina's back, and she gently pulled back before they formed everywhere else.
"I don't even know what to say," Santana relented, resting her hand appreciatively on her best friend's knee.
Quinn softly smiled. "So, you feel better now?"
"Yes," she sighed in relief, "I was so worried. I didn't know what people would say or think..." Santana's voice trailed off for a second before going against her better judgment and saying what was on her mind, "...and when you didn't come after me, I thought..." she lowered her voice once more, not sure how to phrase it, "I thought you maybe believed all those things he wrote."
The hazel eyes that were moments ago dormant grew wide before instantly narrowing. "How could you think that? I would never..."
"It's not even anything for you to take personally, I mean, it's not like I would've blamed you or thought any less of you even, I just..."
Quinn startled her shorter counterpart by laughing suddenly, "Oh my God, you are so stubborn! And crazy," she said, the affection still clear in her voice as she rested both hands on Santana's, which still rested on her own thigh, "I would never say or think any of that about you. I'm the one who knows you best out of everyone and you're the complete opposite of everything they wrote. And don't you forget it," she punctuated with an extra hand squeeze.
The words and touch of the girl beside her lit a fast-burning fuse whose heat consumed Santana's body from head to toe, and if she didn't pull focus from the eyes she was compelled to soon, she would inch dangerously closer toward breaking the "just friends" barrier once and for all.
She quickly darted her eyes downward, picking at the first loose fabric she could find as she tended to do when she was uncomfortable. "Well, I hope you don't get in trouble for knocking around Karofsky's thick skull," she attempted in half-humor.
"Please, he hasn't found a way to admit that he's been rejected by half the girls in the school, I can't see him owning up to little old me wailing on him," Quinn said, pausing for the laugh she knew would follow. She then purposely weaved her head downward to meet Santana's eye contact. "Besides, even if he does, at least now he knows to back off. No one messes with you."
And like a dam that was a mere few raindrops away from bursting, Santana's resolve completely dissipated as she freed her right hand from underneath Quinn's only to cup the blonde's cheek and pull her in for a slow, shaky kiss. She had never felt so safe, yet so terrified all at once, although her nerves calmed significantly when Quinn's hands met around her waist, pulling their bodies closer together. Three sloppy kisses interrupted only by harsh breathing were strung together before the two pulled away, locking eyes and agreeing, without words, that this long-awaited moment was perfection personified...
"I've lost so much. Hurt so many people. Made so many life-changing mistakes, and still what I regret the most is what happened between us."
Like a blow to the stomach, Santana exhaled sharply through gritted teeth and fronted a bitter grin. "So, is that it? Is telling me that I'm your biggest regret the last of 12 steps or something?"
That was it. The last straw. Fingers raking through then pulling down on her own blonde roots, Quinn growled furiously. "My God, you really are just as stubborn as ever, aren't you?"
Fearing she was about to get hit, Santana winced when Quinn's hands rapidly neared her face, only to feel them settle on her cheeks and then feel the lips she went without for 3 years earnestly pressed to her own. A whimper evaded the Latina, whose vulnerable side made one last attempt at resisting by pushing Quinn back by her shoulders, only for the rational side to take over completely, acknowledging how much she missed the other girl's mouth in the mere seconds she had gone without it. She quickly made up for it by gripping the back of Quinn's neck to protect her head and backing her into the dresser, savoring the taste of warm breath and nearly evaporating into nothing when the blonde's tongue found its way into her mouth. The feel of their contact had certainly changed in many ways, for the better, yet in ways it still felt like they were 13, no time having passed since the days of their blissful innocence and reverent joy of belonging to one another.
Like their first, the kiss eventually broke due to lack of breath, although the intensity was escalated to a boiling point of fervent intensity. Foreheads pressed together and panting at alternating intervals, a moment passed before Quinn was finally able to speak. "I want to get to know you again, Santi," she said, nuzzling the other girl's nose in an utter refusal to stop touching her.
Santana exhaled, nodding emphatically with shimmering, wide eyes before leaning forward into another breathless kiss. While she would have agreed to just about anything proposed to her while Quinn Fabray's lips were on her own, she knew by the use of her beloved former nickname, the way peach fingers interlocked with cinnamon, and how the tip of Quinn's shoe found the curve of her foot that they had truly never stopped knowing one another.
Chapter: 3/3
Rating: PG-13 (drama, angst, some language)
Summary: Santana is much nicer to boys than she is to girls, and it has everything to do with sexuality... but not in the way that people think.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own Glee. If I did, it would go a little something like this...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the last chapter. Thank you so much for reading! If you haven't already (or if you've been doing so all along), I would love to hear your thoughts on this story. Reviews mean a lot and help me grow as a writer!
If it weren't for the nosy hovering of Mrs. Lopez by the door after Quinn rang the bell, awkwardly gripping the blonde into a tight hug, and speaking a mile a minute in Spanglish about how much she missed having her around, Santana would have slung whatever kind of verbal punch it took to send her former friend away and regain a normal breathing pattern.
To make matters infinitely worse, the excitable woman insisted that the former head cheerleader stay for dinner, even offering to make her favorite dish. Santana tried frantically to signal to her mother to renege the invitation immediately, but she wasn't surprised that her efforts were to no avail. Mrs. Lopez had always seemed to take Quinn's disappearance from her daughter's life almost as hard as Santana, having always referred to the hazel-eyed girl as "familia." As the young Latina knew, familia was always welcome for dinner.
Mrs. Lopez shooed the girls out of the kitchen, otherwise known as her respite, while she cooked, and so the two girls trudged what felt like a day-long hike up the stairs to Santana's bedroom. The shorter girl quickened her pace once she reached the landing, shoving the door to her room open to see if there was any mess she needed to clean up, internally slapping her own wrist when she realized what she was doing.
She saw the now estranged girl silently scanning the room with her eyes, observing the few things that were the same since last they got together and the several things that had changed. As Quinn's gaze found the picture frames that used to house pictures of she and the Latina, Santana stepped over to the door, pulled it shut, and stood with her back against it.
Hearing the door close, Quinn turned to face Santana, words seeming to fail her as she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. The softness in the blonde's eyes scared her, and her heartbeat reached a new level of escalation when after several moments of silence, Quinn releases a deep breath and reaches forward to hug the smaller girl. The darker girl, whose arms were already folded tightly across her chest, stiffly maintained her stance. Internally, she pleaded that the blonde would unhand her, since even an innocent hug almost spurned a whimper from the girl who had craved her touch for so long. After a few awkward seconds of unrequited contact, Quinn did get the hint and pull away, mumbling a defeated "Okay..." under her breath.
Eyes darting back and forth at an alarming rate, like they always seemed to when she was talking to Quinn in recent days, Santana did everything to keep her guard securely in place. "So?" she asked.
Quinn leaned against Santana's dresser, her nervousness now apparent as she brought her voice down to a near-whisper. "Um, well... I've been doing a lot of thinking. Last semester, since I gave up the - my daughter," she corrected, swallowing hard and likewise twisting Santana's stomach, "and all throughout the summer, and I'm a different person now."
This wasn't news to Santana, who had more than noticed the positive changes in her fair-skinned counterpart. She had for her own sake turned a blind eye to the positive ways that Quinn had been changing, as all it did was make her long for the other girl infinitely more, not to mention reminded her of the way things used to be before each girl took a turn for the worse, which whether they admitted it or not, likely had to do with the other's absence.
"Yeah, you've finally lost some of that baby weight," Santana retorted, "what does that have to do with me?"
Discarding the queen bee within, the taller girl stopped fussing with the surface of Santana's dresser and looked her squarely in the eye. "I'm here to make amends. You and I have barely talked since I got kicked off the Cheerios and I was hoping we could change that."
There was a battle between rationality and vulnerability raging like rapids in the Latina's mind. The rational side knew that Quinn's proposition was genuine, thought-out, and with the best of intentions, and was urging Santana, who had missed the other girl every second since their falling out, to let her guard down and trust her. At this thought, however, her vulnerable side was cornered and terrified, unyielding in its inert need to protect herself.
"Oh, I see," she smirked haughtily, "this is about the Cheerios. Look, it's not really my place to say, but something tells me that the dartboard Coach Sylvester has with your face on it in her office knocks your chances down a peg or two."
Quinn startled Santana by laughing, an apparent mixture of amusement and frustration. "This has nothing to do with the Cheerios, and you don't need to be like this."
"Like what?" Santana quipped back, hoping to release the diva within.
"This whole... attitude. I know things have changed between us, but I'm still not convinced that this isn't an act," Quinn replied matter-of-factly.
The vulnerable side of Santana fumed, near-irate at how no matter what, the girl standing before her always seemed to get under her skin. "Whatever," was the best she could manage, proving that the normally sharp-tongued firecracker truly was thrown off her game. She stepped aside from the door only to hold it open, non-verbally urging Quinn to leave.
The blonde, however, used the break in her front as a foothold and refused to back down. She walked toward the door and pushed it shut, subsequently cornering Santana against the wooden surface.
Instead of anger, Quinn's voice was full of a desperation of sorts. "I want to go back to the day that changed everything between us. Why can't we?"
"Because what's done is done, Quinn, okay? I saw it in your eyes after your dad stormed out that things would never be the same," the darker girl replied, the defeat clear in her tone.
For a moment, the former "it" girl stood speechless, slightly confused, until a moment of realization visibly hit her. "I don't mean the day with my parents. I mean the day before that."
She wasn't sure which, but Santana was fairly certain that color was either draining from or rushing to her cheeks as she recalled the one instance she had left out of her memory montage to spare herself the pain of remembering:
Santana clutched the build-a-bear Quinn had made her two Christmases ago as the tears continued to fall steadily. The bear's white and pink fur was long since damp with liquid drops of emotion, as even the normally guarded tough girl was not immune to adolescent heartache.
She should have known enough to find it suspicious when Karofsky tirelessly insisted upon signing her yearbook. Not only that but he asked if he could take it to his last period class so he could "take his time" with it. Still, the tan-skinned girl obliged, and she and Quinn met up with Karofsky at the end of the day, eying his fellow baseball cronies, who were mysteriously huddled around the corner, peering on as he handed the book back to Santana.
Both girls' eyes quickly discovered what the jerk-from-birth was truly up to when they saw slurs and insults about the Santana written over her school picture and many surrounding faces, the arrows pointing toward the Latina making it painstakingly clear who the comments were about. Laughing from their post, the other boys high-tailed it out of there, and when Santana had realized just how badly she'd been duped, she threw her yearbook at the ground and took off, trying to push past the current of students all trying to make their way to their
respective buses. The tear-filled ride home was additionally humiliating, and the flow hadn't stopped since then.
She assumed the knock on her door was once again her mother, despite her several requests for privacy.
"I don't want to talk about it, Mom!" she barked at the piece of wood.
"Santi, it's me," came the reply, signifying to the crying girl that on the other side was the only person who called her that.
"Come in," Santana spoke quietly, and tried to ignore the escalation of her heartbeat when the ever-radiant blonde appeared in the doorway.
Quinn dropped her bag to the floor instantly, sitting beside Santana's feet and leaning forward to pull the smaller girl into a hug before halting, noticing the head-shaking that told Quinn she wasn't ready for whatever reason.
"I shouldn't have left the yearbook there. Now everyone else is going to see what he wrote about me. And my parents are going to kill me for spending $90 on a yearbook that I'll never get back. What am I supposed to tell them? That I'm a slutty bimbo who got put in her place?"
Quinn reached for her bag pulling out a familiar looking book, "Or you can show them this one," she said, sliding it across the mattress.
Brown eyes opened the yearbook, finding every page completely unscathed, including the one with her own picture on it. "I can't take yours, you paid for it," she said after a moment of contemplation.
"Oh, it's not mine," Quinn corrected, "It's that asshole, Karofsky's. I stole it from him after beating his stupid head in with yours."
The words poured so matter of factly out of the blonde's mouth that they reached Santana's ears with even more surprise.
"Wait - you what?" the bewildered girl asked.
"Oh, and I grabbed these while I was at it," Quinn continued, pulling out the pages signed by Santana's true friends that she had torn out of the book by hand. "I tore up the page he defaced, too, so don't worry. Goes to show that loser has no friends, no one even signed his book yet."
The smile that Quinn was aching to see broke out on Santana's face as she unexpectedly lunged at the other girl, granting her the hug she had initially denied in addition to expressing her overwhelmed gratitude. She hoped Quinn hadn't noticed the goosebumps that sprung up like flowers on her arms when the taller girl rubbed the very tips of her fingers over the Latina's back, and she gently pulled back before they formed everywhere else.
"I don't even know what to say," Santana relented, resting her hand appreciatively on her best friend's knee.
Quinn softly smiled. "So, you feel better now?"
"Yes," she sighed in relief, "I was so worried. I didn't know what people would say or think..." Santana's voice trailed off for a second before going against her better judgment and saying what was on her mind, "...and when you didn't come after me, I thought..." she lowered her voice once more, not sure how to phrase it, "I thought you maybe believed all those things he wrote."
The hazel eyes that were moments ago dormant grew wide before instantly narrowing. "How could you think that? I would never..."
"It's not even anything for you to take personally, I mean, it's not like I would've blamed you or thought any less of you even, I just..."
Quinn startled her shorter counterpart by laughing suddenly, "Oh my God, you are so stubborn! And crazy," she said, the affection still clear in her voice as she rested both hands on Santana's, which still rested on her own thigh, "I would never say or think any of that about you. I'm the one who knows you best out of everyone and you're the complete opposite of everything they wrote. And don't you forget it," she punctuated with an extra hand squeeze.
The words and touch of the girl beside her lit a fast-burning fuse whose heat consumed Santana's body from head to toe, and if she didn't pull focus from the eyes she was compelled to soon, she would inch dangerously closer toward breaking the "just friends" barrier once and for all.
She quickly darted her eyes downward, picking at the first loose fabric she could find as she tended to do when she was uncomfortable. "Well, I hope you don't get in trouble for knocking around Karofsky's thick skull," she attempted in half-humor.
"Please, he hasn't found a way to admit that he's been rejected by half the girls in the school, I can't see him owning up to little old me wailing on him," Quinn said, pausing for the laugh she knew would follow. She then purposely weaved her head downward to meet Santana's eye contact. "Besides, even if he does, at least now he knows to back off. No one messes with you."
And like a dam that was a mere few raindrops away from bursting, Santana's resolve completely dissipated as she freed her right hand from underneath Quinn's only to cup the blonde's cheek and pull her in for a slow, shaky kiss. She had never felt so safe, yet so terrified all at once, although her nerves calmed significantly when Quinn's hands met around her waist, pulling their bodies closer together. Three sloppy kisses interrupted only by harsh breathing were strung together before the two pulled away, locking eyes and agreeing, without words, that this long-awaited moment was perfection personified...
"I've lost so much. Hurt so many people. Made so many life-changing mistakes, and still what I regret the most is what happened between us."
Like a blow to the stomach, Santana exhaled sharply through gritted teeth and fronted a bitter grin. "So, is that it? Is telling me that I'm your biggest regret the last of 12 steps or something?"
That was it. The last straw. Fingers raking through then pulling down on her own blonde roots, Quinn growled furiously. "My God, you really are just as stubborn as ever, aren't you?"
Fearing she was about to get hit, Santana winced when Quinn's hands rapidly neared her face, only to feel them settle on her cheeks and then feel the lips she went without for 3 years earnestly pressed to her own. A whimper evaded the Latina, whose vulnerable side made one last attempt at resisting by pushing Quinn back by her shoulders, only for the rational side to take over completely, acknowledging how much she missed the other girl's mouth in the mere seconds she had gone without it. She quickly made up for it by gripping the back of Quinn's neck to protect her head and backing her into the dresser, savoring the taste of warm breath and nearly evaporating into nothing when the blonde's tongue found its way into her mouth. The feel of their contact had certainly changed in many ways, for the better, yet in ways it still felt like they were 13, no time having passed since the days of their blissful innocence and reverent joy of belonging to one another.
Like their first, the kiss eventually broke due to lack of breath, although the intensity was escalated to a boiling point of fervent intensity. Foreheads pressed together and panting at alternating intervals, a moment passed before Quinn was finally able to speak. "I want to get to know you again, Santi," she said, nuzzling the other girl's nose in an utter refusal to stop touching her.
Santana exhaled, nodding emphatically with shimmering, wide eyes before leaning forward into another breathless kiss. While she would have agreed to just about anything proposed to her while Quinn Fabray's lips were on her own, she knew by the use of her beloved former nickname, the way peach fingers interlocked with cinnamon, and how the tip of Quinn's shoe found the curve of her foot that they had truly never stopped knowing one another.