Disclaimers on Glee and Melissa Etheridge. Set during 2x04, the afternoon before Brittany asks Santana to do a duet.

On Monday, Brittany comes home from Cheerios practice to find her father alone on the couch, reading a battered Star Wars paperback. "Hi," she says, and he looks up with a grin.

"Hey, sweetheart," he answers, and his arm sags slightly under the weight of the book. "How was school?"

Brittany shrugs. "Fine." She crosses the room in stocking feet and curls up next to him. Her nose digs into his shoulder as she peeks at the page. "Whatcha readin'?"

He turns his wrist and reads off the cover. "The Clone Wars." He smiles at her. "I have no idea what order to read these in. I should've picked the Bond ones instead." She smiles back at him; he's been saying that since he started the project several months ago. He's given up on reading the series chronologically, since it's become apparent that the chronology lends no assistance to new readers.

He folds over the corner of the page and shuts the book, balancing it on the arm of the sofa. "How was practice?"

Brittany purses her lips and shrugs again. "It was okay." She messed up one of the tosses a few times, but despite Coach Sue screeching in the megaphone, she'd enjoyed her hands under Santana's falling body, and Santana's dark eyes glittering under their lashes as Brittany set her upright. "The new routine's pretty hard."

"I'm sure you'll get it," says her dad, his mustache bristling over his smile. He nudges her with his elbow, teasing and reassuring. She smiles back at him and he glances at the clock. "Well, Laura's practice will be over pretty soon. Wanna get started on dinner?"

Brittany grins and nods, and when he eases himself laboriously off the sunken cushions, she bursts up beside him and asks, "What're we making?"

As she follows him into the kitchen, he says, "Your mom didn't leave me any instructions, so I thought maybe we could do spaghetti." He glances at her, light eyes sparkling, and reaches for the cupboard door above the refrigerator. "You game?"

She nods and goes to the pantry, meeting her dad next to the stove with a jar of Rago. He arranges it with the box of dry yellow noodles and Tupperware container of defrosted ground beef while Brittany crouches to retrieve two pans, one big and one small. He sets the big pot in the sink and runs warm water from the faucet. "So," he says, "no Santana tonight?"

"No," answers Brittany as she turns the dials for the stovetop. "It's Monday. You know that's family dinner night."

"Right." He hefts the water out of the sink and dosidos around Brittany's back to set it on the back burner.

Brittany watches him open the green box and pour stiff strands of spaghetti into the heating water. "She said she might come over later, though," Brittany adds, as if she needs to ask permission. Santana always visits after family nights, breathing deep and staring long and heavy at the pictures by Brittany's front door. When she finally meets Brittany's eyes, she always opens her mouth to speak and then closes it so hard her teeth click together.

Then, before Brittany can guess what words just got bitten in half, Santana always pushes her upstairs and onto her bed, all hungry hands and sad sighs.

Brittany's dad just hums and reaches past her to grab a wooden spoon. She taps her fingers against the countertop. "Do you want me to do the sauce?" she asks, although she knows it will burn if they cook it as long as the noodles.

"You can mix it with the meat if you want," he offers, stirring the spaghetti as it softens. "Did you girls have Glee today? You get new assignments on Mondays, right?"

Brittany wrenches the lid from the sauce and pours it into the small pan on the counter. "Yeah," she says, a little proud that he's remembered. Between her and Laura, there are way too many activities for him to keep track of. She pops the Tupperware open and adds the meat, careful not to let it slop into the sauce and spray red everywhere. "We're doing duets this week."

"Yeah?" Her dad looks at her eagerly with his eyebrows raised. He loves that she does Glee; he can see how happy it makes her.

Brittany fidgets; she turns the handle of the pan away from her, then draws the half-empty jar toward her and wipes sauce from the outside lip. "Yeah." She sucks the sauce from her finger and twists the cap back on, tight. "I might sing this time," she says hesitantly. After the fallout from the Britney performance, that gush of confidence dribbled back into the old uneasiness. She finds herself again reluctant to step up to the microphone.

But a duet—where her voice would join another one, like Mr. Schuester said, instead of wavering out on its own—she thinks she could maybe handle. Especially if—

"That's great, honey!" her dad is saying, gripping and shaking her shoulder with his free hand. He stirs the noodles that now sway obediently under the current. "Who're you gonna sing with? Do you know what you wanna sing?"

Brittany bites her lip, thinking about Santana in that dream, voice hot in Brittany's ear and body just as close. That was a duet. But Brittany still wonders if it just sounded good because it was a dream, and everything that happens in dreams seems strangely right.

Still. The memory—warm like the sun beside the pool, warm like Santana's smooth skin—has nagged her all day.

"I might ask Santana," she admits, forcing herself to speak at a normal volume. She can barely glance at her dad, afraid to see whatever mysterious terrible terrifying thing makes Santana push her into empty rooms and dark corners and insist they tell no one.

But he's excited. "Super!" He fiddles with the dial for the back burner. "Have you decided on a song?" He says it more softly, and he's giving her that tender look he has sometimes when Brittany talks about picking Santana's birthday present or asks if Santana can come over on Christmas. When Brittany shakes her head, her dad abandons the spoon in the pot and walks around the counter. "Let's put some music on," he's deciding, walking just a few steps past the doorway to lean into the cabinet with the stereo.

"I didn't think that far ahead," Brittany says, watching him flick through a shelf of LPs before switching to the rows and rows of alphabetized CDs.

As he searches, like he has something in mind, he instructs, "Go ahead and put the sauce on." She listens, grabs a second spoon, and starts stirring both pots, watching his shifting shoulders. After a moment he freezes and the clack of CD cases stops; he straightens up slowly.

"What is it?" she asks, tilting her head a little. She can't see what he's looking at.

He turns his head partway—not far enough to look over his shoulder, but enough to acknowledge he's heard her—and she hears his nail flick the plastic case. "Nothing," he says, and she hears him open the case and the CD drive. While the player whirrs, he comes back to stand beside her at the stove, taking a spoon from her hand to resume stirring the spaghetti. He touches her shoulder again as he passes.

"What'd you pick?" she asks, right when slow, too-smooth notes break the quiet of the kitchen. She recognizes the song right away, an old favorite of her dad's, and she watches him uneasily. She's wondering so many things—why Melissa Etheridge? Isn't this the gay album, from when she came out? Does this mean he knows about her sneaking out, and Santana sneaking in, through the window in the middle of the night? Or does he mean—but the groan of the garage door opening cuts under the softness of the chords, and before she can say anything, her dad scoots out of the kitchen to greet her mother and sister.

She can hear her family talking at the other end of the house, but mostly she hears the song, and she wonders if she is that easy to read. It feels like it's sinking into her, the notes in her ears and the lyrics layering like paper mâché over the piece of her that is always thinking about Santana. Just to reach you, Melissa is crooning over and over, and Brittany's cheeks turn pink under the memory of Cheerios practice, only an hour ago, when she did just that, slipping by accident—or was it an accident?—and stretching out her hands to cradle the curve of Santana's spine and her sharp shoulder blades.

Does her father really see it—see them—so clearly?

She turns down the burners when she notices the water boiling, and soon Laura is tugging on her sleeve and asking to help. She decides that her dad was implying he knew about the broken latch on the window in Brittany's bedroom; she resists the temptation—and danger—of considering any other possibility.

Still, she's thinking, while she swats Laura away from the hot pans.

Still, she's thinking, and Melissa sings, I need you in my blood; I am forsaking all the rest.

She feels her heart thumping louder, like it's listening, and she sees Santana's pinkie seeking hers; her dark eyes darting away, then crawling back; her hesitant hands on Brittany's skin; her face, embarrassed and triumphant, as she clambers over Brittany's windowsill. And whatever it is that Santana is tucking away, when she looks to the side and puts her clothes back on and curls up into herself, when she draws away from Brittany after Glee or after they make out at a party—whatever it is, Brittany looks at the bracelet on her left wrist, dangling over the sauce pan, and can't believe it could really be more powerful than the force that binds her to Santana, and Santana back to her.

As if on cue, Melissa is insisting, I don't care what they think, I don't care what they say, and for once—just this once—Brittany decides to go all in.

She's going to ask, this time.