Chapter 15 of I Need A Medic by Gorshenin
Now that she’s in your lap, her thighs clenched around your waist, about a head taller by the position, and looking down at you with those blue eyes, you think you can die happy. You’ll even let her be the one to do it. Her breath washes across your ballistic glasses and fogs the lens for a moment before it disappears again, giving you an unobstructed view of her face, hovering so close to yours.
The expression in her eyes is unreadable. Her face is as mysterious as it is memorizing and you lift your hands off of her waist and hold them out to the side, palms out in surrender.
“Please don’t shoot me in the foot,” you can’t help the smile that comes to your face, you’ll remember this moment for the rest of your life.
She studies your smile, or maybe she’s just looking at your lips, you don’t think you can handle the truth.
Slowly she says, “Please don’t shoot me in the foot..?”
She’s prompting you for something and you’re too lost in the smell of her, a lingering trace of peppermint and antiperspirants to know what she wants you to say. If you did, you’d say it.
You’d say anything.
The pistol in her hands taps at your vest, “Is that how you address a Non-Commissioned Officer?”
You’re sure she can feel you tremble under her. Her eyebrows twitch like she does. You want to grab her hips, roll her onto her back, and get her to address you by something other than Lopez. Instead, you lick your lips and offer, “Please, don’t shoot me in the foot, Sergeant.”
Her voice is just a trace huskier than its usual tone when she grins, “That’s more like it.”
QUITT BEING SO FIERCE.
Seriously, number one deviation from Brittana and Faberry.
Brittany knows how to get them bitches.
Also, hat.
In those lonely days between Abuela’s death and Papa’s, Santana spent her time cooped up in the bachelor cottage, hardly using her voice at all, with no one to keep her company at chores, except sometimes for Puck, who would smile his idiot smile at Santana through the windows while he washed them or as he trimmed the roses and Sweet Williams in the garden, grinning at Santana as she read her books, seeing her without comprehending her at all, always through a pane of glass and from some ways away.
On rare occasions, Santana would invite Puck inside the bachelor cottage and offer him lemonade or tea rolls just to have someone with whom she could make conversation until Papa arrived in the evenings. It wasn’t that she wanted to talk to Puck, in particular—just that she wanted someone around.
But even inviting Puck inside didn’t cure Santana’s loneliness.
Puck could talk to Santana for hours without ever saying anything to her. He could watch her read every book from the Grolier Club shelves and never see her once, no matter where she sat in the latticework light of late afternoon around the house.
He never knocked on the door for her and he never found her, though she hid in plain sight.
Even Papa never did.
Santana always just wanted someone to find her.
(Brittany always does.)
For so many months, Santana longed to feel anything but lonely, and the thing is that she hasn’t felt that—hasn’t felt lonely—since the circus stopped in Worthington and she sat down to sew riding habits at the trisection of tents.
Brittany fills every empty corner in Santana’s bachelor cottage heart.
(X)