@Santana; Two Seconds Flat
(Note: Backdated several months.)
"We should talk."
She hadn't meant it to come out that way, so jarring and sudden and cliche. She had hoped to build up to it, to casually come home and start a conversation, throw herself down on the couch like she had every other day and talk about auditions and work and the weather and everything else she'd seen that day. She had hoped to talk about Santana's life, about how things had been going there, if she had talked to Brittany lately or started seeing anyone new, if she had any new modeling gigs lined up she hadn't heard about yet. She had hoped to have a conversation, interrupted with an offer of takeout and a bottle of wine, and halfway through the food and fully into the wine to bring it up.
But it didn't happen that way.
It had been a week. Seven days had passed since Rachel came back home to the apartment they shared together, since she had broken up with Sam and retreated into her bedroom and cried for hours on end and prayed that she had made the right decision. Seven days had passed since Rachel had broken Sam's heart and affirmed her faith in Santana, since Rachel had abandoned the man she loved most for her best friend, since Rachel had come back.
And they hadn't talked about it. They hadn't spoken about it. It sat in the corner, watching them, waiting, mocking her for not having the guts to bring it up, the proverbial elephant in the room that neither of them wanted to mention. They returned to old routines, old dinners they would throw together when neither wanted to cook, old errands they would do for each other to pick up on their respective ways home, old tv schedules curled up on the couch together every night, though now with further distance between them. They retreated into old conversations, old topics and old stories, reiterated until they were ground into the rug they'd bought together. They retreated into the past until it built up inside Rachel, the frustration of not talking about it and the confusion of not knowing how they would deal with it, until it finally burst as soon as she walked in the door from an audition that had gone poorly and saw her roommate sitting on the couch.
She couldn't take it back, not now. Not with Santana sitting wide-eyed on the couch with a nameless reality show blaring from the television. Not with her cheeks already filling with red at the awkwardness she knew would come. Not with the words hanging in the air around them, thick and heavy.
So she tried to swallow her nervousness, slid off her purse, and moved to sit beside Santana on the couch, turning to face her, one leg tucked beneath her, and she said it again. "We need to talk about -- it."
