I'm One Step Away (From Crashing To My Knees)
Title: I’m One Step Away (From Crashing To My Knees)
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany
Rating: PG
Spoilers: So, there are these cheerleaders...
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Summary: Not every first is a thing of fairy tales, but Brittany isn't complaining.
A/N: Title from Nickel's "Stupid Thing", mostly because it's been stuck in my head for a week. :)
When it happens, she is really, really uncomfortable.
It’s not a bad sort of uncomfortable; to be honest, it’s actually pretty awesome. Her system’s all over-charged, her skin buzzing complacently, her head filled with a pleasant sort of fluff. She hasn’t thought in anything less abstract than shapes and colors for whole minutes. It is the least uncomfortable sort of discomfort she’s ever experienced.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Brittany? Has never been less comfortable in her own body in her life.
When it happens, she is standing under the overhanging roof of her treehouse with her hands in her pockets, just out of reach of the moonlight. It’s her favorite place, this airborne porch; the thing is shoddy, practically crumbling under her sandals, but it is hers. Her sister won’t come up here, fully certain that it will one day come crashing down, but Brittany’s dad helped her put it together when she was eleven. She needs no better reason to trust in its stability than that.
She’s so caught up in her thoughts that she almost doesn’t hear the second party ascending the rickety rope ladder until a string of cross-cultural cursing drifts up to her ears. Smiling, Brittany shifts and glances over her shoulder.
At fourteen years old, Santana Lopez is just about the most interesting person Brittany knows. She is funny-albeit sometimes cruel-and loyal, and loves everything about Brittany’s home. She is the best friend Brittany has ever had.
She is also, they’ve discovered, kind of awful at climbing trees.
“Shit,” the Latina mutters, hooking her elbows through the hole in the treehouse’s floor and scrambling uneasily up. “You need to install a goddamn elevator in this thing.”
“If I did that, how would I learn new words to upset my mother with?” Brittany teases, eyes twinkling. Huffing with the exertion of lifting her small body through the entrance, Santana makes a face.
“Is that why she kept glaring at me last week? Shit, Britt, don’t convince your mom to hate me. No one makes cheesecake like her.”
Laughing, Brittany reaches down and easily pulls the dark-haired girl to her feet. “She could never hate you. You beat up the kids who make fun of her little girl. You’re like…her knight in shining basketball shorts, or something.”
Brown eyes light up. “A knight, huh? Knights are badass. Do I get a sword?”
“You get a horse,” Brittany informs her sagely, tucking an arm around the girl’s waist and pulling her close. She leans her head to rest against the top of Santana’s, chuckling when the Latina makes a displeased sound.
“Horses have teeth,” Santana mutters, close to her ear. “Big bitey teeth. Can’t I ride, like, one of those tauntaun things from Star Wars instead?”
“Only if you promise not to cut it open to keep somebody warm,” Brittany agrees. The smaller girl shrugs.
“Fair enough.”
They stand together in the warm summer air, breathing deep until Brittany feels more than a little light-headed. It is not an unusual state of affairs; Santana is always finding her way over to the treehouse when Brittany least expects her, and though conversation is more common than silence, they’ve grown comfortable enough not to force speech. This much is sort of a recent development, as if they’ve finally reached such intimate knowledge of one another than they no longer need to rely on mindless games of Twenty Questions and Would You Rather to get by.
Still, as comfortable as standing with her best friend in the dark is, Brittany can feel her chest beginning to grow heavy. This, too, happens often, especially when stars and balmy July winds are involved; with Santana’s weight resting against her hip, the whole package is overwhelming in some weird, unforeseen way.
Struggling not to call attention to herself, Brittany leans an elbow against the railing and inhales silently. Dark eyes flicker up, curious.
“You okay?” Santana asks, because Santana is the kind of person who always knows when something’s wrong. Not that anything is necessarily wrong now, Brittany thinks furtively. It’s just weird. Weird isn’t bad. She thinks.
“I’m good,” she breathes out when Santana’s worried eyes don’t drift back to the sky. “Totally fine.”
“You look like you’ve just seen Puck swallow three Twinkies at once,” Santana observes. Brittany can actually feel herself turn a little green at the memory.
“He’s so gross,” she mumbles, pleased when Santana tosses back her hair and laughs.
“He’s a tool. But at least he’s a tool with a trampoline.”
It should be enough to break the sheen of uneasiness that has fallen over her; Santana certainly looks satisfied enough with herself. Still, Brittany can’t help but feel stranger than ever. The treehouse has become too warm, and strangely cramped to boot, but she has the sense that moving away from Santana would shatter something dangerously near her heart. The softness of the girl’s arm against her own, the press of her head on Brittany’s shoulder-it is heady, intoxicating in a way Brittany does not (cannot) allow herself to dwell upon. She feels full, through and through, nearly drunk with their mutual nearness.
And, because Santana always knows, she can tell the other girl is equally aware of it.
When it happens, Brittany thinks she shouldn’t be entirely surprised. Later, she will look back and see all the signs there: Santana’s head turning slowly towards her, dark eyes going ever-darker, lips parting slightly. The signs are there, but they never have been before, and so Brittany is unprepared to read them for what they are. She trembles.
“You cold?” Santana asks, ghosting her palms lightly over the bared skin of Brittany’s too-pale arms. She shakes her head furiously, fixes her eyes on a point somewhere above Santana’s wind-mussed head, and says it again:
“I’m good.”
It’s stupid to lie to Santana-stupid to lie to anyone, since lying isn’t exactly Brittany’s thing. She doesn’t know why she’s even trying it now, especially with the way Santana is looking at her with absolute tunnel vision. Like Brittany’s the only person in the world who matters. Like she can see everything. Like they are, in some way beyond the typical, bound.
They’ve always been close, but in this moment, Brittany feels that closeness coming to a teetering, unyielding head.
Santana isn’t that much shorter than she is-they’ve only got a couple of inches, maybe three or four at most, between them-but she’s tilting her head all the way back like she’s trying to see straight into Brittany’s innermost self. Her lips curve, not in a smile, but in something more cautiously contained.
“Britt?”
She’s scared, she thinks, but not in a bad way. Actually, it’s the best kind of scared she has ever felt-even better than their trip to Cedar Point last month-and Santana hasn’t even done anything to incur that fear. She licks her lips.
“Yeah?”
Santana’s scared too, Brittany notes, although she’s taking great pains not to show it. It’s clear in the way her hand flexes rapidly against the railing, in the flicker of her eyes from one corner of Brittany’s face to the next without pause. This is the strangest part of all, because Santana is blustery, confident, unrestrained. And it isn’t that she is never, ever scared, because that would be stupid; everyone gets scared. It’s strange because, even when she is terrified out of her mind, Santana is practically allergic to letting other people know about it.
Still, Brittany can see it tonight, painted all over her face. Somehow, it makes her less nervous.
“I think…” Santana hesitates, shifting her weight from her left foot to her right. “Britt, can I kiss you?”
It’s weird that she’s asking, as Brittany will reflect later. It’s weird that she’s putting it out there in such an up-front, verbal fashion. Santana Lopez is all about taking what she wants, a personality comprised mainly of careless actions and I’ll-get-to-it-someday apologies. It isn’t weird that she wants this-somehow-but it’s very unusual that she’d ask for it.
She wants to answer, but her mouth isn’t lining up with her intentions just now. She settles for nodding, blonde hair coming loose from its scraggly ponytail and whipping into her eyes. Santana sets her jaw.
She moves before Brittany is ready for it, before she has had time to psychologically prepare, and suddenly everything feels bizarre. It’s not even the fact that her best friend is less than two seconds away from pressing their mouths together that’s getting to her, so much as how dry her own tongue feels right now. Her lips feel chapped-even Sahara-like-and she’s not sure whether or not she can convince that region of her face to behave the way people’s are supposed to according to the movies she’s seen. She knows she’s supposed to be pursing her lips-somehow-and angling her head-this way, or maybe that-but overall? It kind of feels like Santana’s doing all the work.
Which is hilarious, because she knows Santana, and that means knowing the girl has never done this before either.
It should get easier, she thinks, as Santana pulls back a fraction of an inch and comes in again, but it doesn’t. She has no idea what she’s doing; her head has gone completely blank, her vision kind of fuzzy around the edges, and though her hands itch to find Santana’s waist, she seems more or less paralyzed. It isn’t that she dislikes what is happening; on the contrary, it might well be the best thing she has ever experienced. It’s just that she can’t focus.
Her body has become this weird little grease trap for excitement and terror and some fevered, humming sensation she hasn’t yet found a name for, and Santana? Just keeps kissing her.
That’s the best part of all of this: not necessarily the act of kissing (or, she supposes, being kissed, since to kiss back would require a physical reaction her body is just not interested in pursuing at this moment), nor the feel of Santana pressed up close, but the mere fact that this is happening in the first place. She has never quite realized how long she’s waited for something like this, has never been able to put into words how desperately she wanted this exact sensation, until right now.
Although, she thinks when Santana backs off just enough to jump-start her brain again, if she had things her way, she’d be a little more badass about it. She’d be the one sweeping Santana off her feet, kissing her with everything she’s got, making her world spin.
After all, she thinks mildly, she is the taller one. She’s supposed to be in control, making the moves-all the movies say so. Standing stiffly in place, blushing to the tips of her ears and grinning like her face wants to split in half doesn’t exactly fit the usual bill.
But Santana is scuffing the toe of one sneaker against the half-rotted floorboards, biting her lip and casting anxious looks up through her eyelashes, and Brittany thinks it’s probably okay that her first kiss mostly consisted of just standing there and acting as a seemingly indifferent receptacle for Santana’s lips. It’s not the image little girls dream of, nor something she won’t eventually look back upon with some measure of self-contempt, but with the way Santana’s looking at her right now? It kind of doesn’t matter.
When it happens next, she will be better prepared. She will learn all the little maneuvers spoken of in hushed tones by girls even less experienced; she will grasp the tiny, important details-how to touch, where to grab, the intricacies of involving one’s tongue (which, as of this moment, is just too mind-blowing a concept to be anything less than horrifying). She will, in time, become a damn good kisser.
For now, she settles for smiling with the force of a sunbeam upon Santana’s blushing face and reaching out, looping an arm through the girl’s, and yanking her in close. Nestled beneath the glowing moon, she leans her cheek against wind-frazzled dark hair, and exhales shakily.
Santana does not ask if it was okay. Santana, being Santana, does not ask anything at all. She only slips one hand into Brittany’s, gaze placed firmly ahead, and sets her shoulders.
When Brittany gives that hand an experimental squeeze and watches her best friend’s face light up like Times Square on New Years, she thinks that it is so very okay that Santana made the first move.
Somebody had to.
Pairing: Santana Lopez/Brittany
Rating: PG
Spoilers: So, there are these cheerleaders...
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Summary: Not every first is a thing of fairy tales, but Brittany isn't complaining.
A/N: Title from Nickel's "Stupid Thing", mostly because it's been stuck in my head for a week. :)
When it happens, she is really, really uncomfortable.
It’s not a bad sort of uncomfortable; to be honest, it’s actually pretty awesome. Her system’s all over-charged, her skin buzzing complacently, her head filled with a pleasant sort of fluff. She hasn’t thought in anything less abstract than shapes and colors for whole minutes. It is the least uncomfortable sort of discomfort she’s ever experienced.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Brittany? Has never been less comfortable in her own body in her life.
When it happens, she is standing under the overhanging roof of her treehouse with her hands in her pockets, just out of reach of the moonlight. It’s her favorite place, this airborne porch; the thing is shoddy, practically crumbling under her sandals, but it is hers. Her sister won’t come up here, fully certain that it will one day come crashing down, but Brittany’s dad helped her put it together when she was eleven. She needs no better reason to trust in its stability than that.
She’s so caught up in her thoughts that she almost doesn’t hear the second party ascending the rickety rope ladder until a string of cross-cultural cursing drifts up to her ears. Smiling, Brittany shifts and glances over her shoulder.
At fourteen years old, Santana Lopez is just about the most interesting person Brittany knows. She is funny-albeit sometimes cruel-and loyal, and loves everything about Brittany’s home. She is the best friend Brittany has ever had.
She is also, they’ve discovered, kind of awful at climbing trees.
“Shit,” the Latina mutters, hooking her elbows through the hole in the treehouse’s floor and scrambling uneasily up. “You need to install a goddamn elevator in this thing.”
“If I did that, how would I learn new words to upset my mother with?” Brittany teases, eyes twinkling. Huffing with the exertion of lifting her small body through the entrance, Santana makes a face.
“Is that why she kept glaring at me last week? Shit, Britt, don’t convince your mom to hate me. No one makes cheesecake like her.”
Laughing, Brittany reaches down and easily pulls the dark-haired girl to her feet. “She could never hate you. You beat up the kids who make fun of her little girl. You’re like…her knight in shining basketball shorts, or something.”
Brown eyes light up. “A knight, huh? Knights are badass. Do I get a sword?”
“You get a horse,” Brittany informs her sagely, tucking an arm around the girl’s waist and pulling her close. She leans her head to rest against the top of Santana’s, chuckling when the Latina makes a displeased sound.
“Horses have teeth,” Santana mutters, close to her ear. “Big bitey teeth. Can’t I ride, like, one of those tauntaun things from Star Wars instead?”
“Only if you promise not to cut it open to keep somebody warm,” Brittany agrees. The smaller girl shrugs.
“Fair enough.”
They stand together in the warm summer air, breathing deep until Brittany feels more than a little light-headed. It is not an unusual state of affairs; Santana is always finding her way over to the treehouse when Brittany least expects her, and though conversation is more common than silence, they’ve grown comfortable enough not to force speech. This much is sort of a recent development, as if they’ve finally reached such intimate knowledge of one another than they no longer need to rely on mindless games of Twenty Questions and Would You Rather to get by.
Still, as comfortable as standing with her best friend in the dark is, Brittany can feel her chest beginning to grow heavy. This, too, happens often, especially when stars and balmy July winds are involved; with Santana’s weight resting against her hip, the whole package is overwhelming in some weird, unforeseen way.
Struggling not to call attention to herself, Brittany leans an elbow against the railing and inhales silently. Dark eyes flicker up, curious.
“You okay?” Santana asks, because Santana is the kind of person who always knows when something’s wrong. Not that anything is necessarily wrong now, Brittany thinks furtively. It’s just weird. Weird isn’t bad. She thinks.
“I’m good,” she breathes out when Santana’s worried eyes don’t drift back to the sky. “Totally fine.”
“You look like you’ve just seen Puck swallow three Twinkies at once,” Santana observes. Brittany can actually feel herself turn a little green at the memory.
“He’s so gross,” she mumbles, pleased when Santana tosses back her hair and laughs.
“He’s a tool. But at least he’s a tool with a trampoline.”
It should be enough to break the sheen of uneasiness that has fallen over her; Santana certainly looks satisfied enough with herself. Still, Brittany can’t help but feel stranger than ever. The treehouse has become too warm, and strangely cramped to boot, but she has the sense that moving away from Santana would shatter something dangerously near her heart. The softness of the girl’s arm against her own, the press of her head on Brittany’s shoulder-it is heady, intoxicating in a way Brittany does not (cannot) allow herself to dwell upon. She feels full, through and through, nearly drunk with their mutual nearness.
And, because Santana always knows, she can tell the other girl is equally aware of it.
When it happens, Brittany thinks she shouldn’t be entirely surprised. Later, she will look back and see all the signs there: Santana’s head turning slowly towards her, dark eyes going ever-darker, lips parting slightly. The signs are there, but they never have been before, and so Brittany is unprepared to read them for what they are. She trembles.
“You cold?” Santana asks, ghosting her palms lightly over the bared skin of Brittany’s too-pale arms. She shakes her head furiously, fixes her eyes on a point somewhere above Santana’s wind-mussed head, and says it again:
“I’m good.”
It’s stupid to lie to Santana-stupid to lie to anyone, since lying isn’t exactly Brittany’s thing. She doesn’t know why she’s even trying it now, especially with the way Santana is looking at her with absolute tunnel vision. Like Brittany’s the only person in the world who matters. Like she can see everything. Like they are, in some way beyond the typical, bound.
They’ve always been close, but in this moment, Brittany feels that closeness coming to a teetering, unyielding head.
Santana isn’t that much shorter than she is-they’ve only got a couple of inches, maybe three or four at most, between them-but she’s tilting her head all the way back like she’s trying to see straight into Brittany’s innermost self. Her lips curve, not in a smile, but in something more cautiously contained.
“Britt?”
She’s scared, she thinks, but not in a bad way. Actually, it’s the best kind of scared she has ever felt-even better than their trip to Cedar Point last month-and Santana hasn’t even done anything to incur that fear. She licks her lips.
“Yeah?”
Santana’s scared too, Brittany notes, although she’s taking great pains not to show it. It’s clear in the way her hand flexes rapidly against the railing, in the flicker of her eyes from one corner of Brittany’s face to the next without pause. This is the strangest part of all, because Santana is blustery, confident, unrestrained. And it isn’t that she is never, ever scared, because that would be stupid; everyone gets scared. It’s strange because, even when she is terrified out of her mind, Santana is practically allergic to letting other people know about it.
Still, Brittany can see it tonight, painted all over her face. Somehow, it makes her less nervous.
“I think…” Santana hesitates, shifting her weight from her left foot to her right. “Britt, can I kiss you?”
It’s weird that she’s asking, as Brittany will reflect later. It’s weird that she’s putting it out there in such an up-front, verbal fashion. Santana Lopez is all about taking what she wants, a personality comprised mainly of careless actions and I’ll-get-to-it-someday apologies. It isn’t weird that she wants this-somehow-but it’s very unusual that she’d ask for it.
She wants to answer, but her mouth isn’t lining up with her intentions just now. She settles for nodding, blonde hair coming loose from its scraggly ponytail and whipping into her eyes. Santana sets her jaw.
She moves before Brittany is ready for it, before she has had time to psychologically prepare, and suddenly everything feels bizarre. It’s not even the fact that her best friend is less than two seconds away from pressing their mouths together that’s getting to her, so much as how dry her own tongue feels right now. Her lips feel chapped-even Sahara-like-and she’s not sure whether or not she can convince that region of her face to behave the way people’s are supposed to according to the movies she’s seen. She knows she’s supposed to be pursing her lips-somehow-and angling her head-this way, or maybe that-but overall? It kind of feels like Santana’s doing all the work.
Which is hilarious, because she knows Santana, and that means knowing the girl has never done this before either.
It should get easier, she thinks, as Santana pulls back a fraction of an inch and comes in again, but it doesn’t. She has no idea what she’s doing; her head has gone completely blank, her vision kind of fuzzy around the edges, and though her hands itch to find Santana’s waist, she seems more or less paralyzed. It isn’t that she dislikes what is happening; on the contrary, it might well be the best thing she has ever experienced. It’s just that she can’t focus.
Her body has become this weird little grease trap for excitement and terror and some fevered, humming sensation she hasn’t yet found a name for, and Santana? Just keeps kissing her.
That’s the best part of all of this: not necessarily the act of kissing (or, she supposes, being kissed, since to kiss back would require a physical reaction her body is just not interested in pursuing at this moment), nor the feel of Santana pressed up close, but the mere fact that this is happening in the first place. She has never quite realized how long she’s waited for something like this, has never been able to put into words how desperately she wanted this exact sensation, until right now.
Although, she thinks when Santana backs off just enough to jump-start her brain again, if she had things her way, she’d be a little more badass about it. She’d be the one sweeping Santana off her feet, kissing her with everything she’s got, making her world spin.
After all, she thinks mildly, she is the taller one. She’s supposed to be in control, making the moves-all the movies say so. Standing stiffly in place, blushing to the tips of her ears and grinning like her face wants to split in half doesn’t exactly fit the usual bill.
But Santana is scuffing the toe of one sneaker against the half-rotted floorboards, biting her lip and casting anxious looks up through her eyelashes, and Brittany thinks it’s probably okay that her first kiss mostly consisted of just standing there and acting as a seemingly indifferent receptacle for Santana’s lips. It’s not the image little girls dream of, nor something she won’t eventually look back upon with some measure of self-contempt, but with the way Santana’s looking at her right now? It kind of doesn’t matter.
When it happens next, she will be better prepared. She will learn all the little maneuvers spoken of in hushed tones by girls even less experienced; she will grasp the tiny, important details-how to touch, where to grab, the intricacies of involving one’s tongue (which, as of this moment, is just too mind-blowing a concept to be anything less than horrifying). She will, in time, become a damn good kisser.
For now, she settles for smiling with the force of a sunbeam upon Santana’s blushing face and reaching out, looping an arm through the girl’s, and yanking her in close. Nestled beneath the glowing moon, she leans her cheek against wind-frazzled dark hair, and exhales shakily.
Santana does not ask if it was okay. Santana, being Santana, does not ask anything at all. She only slips one hand into Brittany’s, gaze placed firmly ahead, and sets her shoulders.
When Brittany gives that hand an experimental squeeze and watches her best friend’s face light up like Times Square on New Years, she thinks that it is so very okay that Santana made the first move.
Somebody had to.