Glee fic, 8700 words, part II
The love songs of Blaine Anderson (or Five crushes that didn't work out the way Blaine had hoped they would, and, finally, one that did), Part II (link to part I)
Alex J. Petersen
At the beginning of his sophomore year, Blaine has a shelf for his sports trophies above his desk. He has a diploma from the debate team hanging over his bed, along with a framed picture of him and Sienna Lambert as Rolf and Liesl in the school production of The Sound of Music.
During summer break he's been thinking a lot about Ricky and Jacob and Julian, and what he felt for Carrie Brickle.
He went out to Triunfo Creek Park alone and spent his days mountain biking with his iPod blasting music into his ears. He stopped when his calf muscles started trembling. He lay back in the dry grass, gasping, and in the silence he thought about Ricky Abrams dancing, brave and sure and beautiful.
He's trying to figure it out. He doesn't talk to anyone about it, but underneath his bed, in a shoebox, he has a couple of issues of Out magazine, and a small collection of gay themed movies that he bought online.
There is nowhere to go with those kinds of questions in his town, but he finds out that there's a gay-straight alliance youth choir in the Santa Monica Community Center. It's a forty minute drive from Westlake Village, so he has to ask to borrow a car.
“Another choir?” his dad asks when Blaine proposes it at dinner one night.
Blaine swallows nervously. “I like to sing.”
His father takes drink of water, and Blaine waits, his hands carefully folded in his lap so he won't fiddle with his knife and fork.
“And your other extracurricular activities?”
“Soccer is Wednesdays and Sunday evenings, the school choir is Mondays, debate team is Tuesdays. This is Friday.”
“Will you still have time to do your homework?”
“I'll make sure it doesn't interfere with my grades,” Blaine says, breathing out.
“Okay, then.”
The first time he goes there, he stands outside the center on the other side of the road for 20 minutes before going in. It gets easier after that. There are 16 girls and seven guys in the choir. Blaine's the youngest one there. He sings tenor along with Darryl, Kenji and Josh.
Alex sings bass. After six weeks, Blaine is pretty sure that he is not just imagining it when he catches Alex looking at him from the other side of the stage.
Eventually, during a break, Alex stops himself from ranting about Rufus Wainwright, and casts a furtive glance at the others standing a few feet away before saying, “By the way, do you, like, want to hang out sometime?” and when Blaine hesitates for a second, he adds in a rush: “You are gay, right?”
Alex is not smooth, but that doesn't matter so much to Blaine. Alex is goofy and kind, and really good-looking.
It takes them three dates and half of Beautiful Thing, sitting together on Alex's couch, before Alex leans in and kisses him. Blaine's heart is dancing around in his chest.
He skips the debate team every Tuesday afternoon to drive to Santa Monica and spend three hours alone with Alex in his house while his mom is still at work. They mess around. A lot. Alex kisses him eagerly and slips a hand up under his shirt to stroke over his sides. Sometimes all Blaine can do is lie there and gasp, and want so much that he doesn't know what to do with himself. He goes bright red the first time Alex pulls him on top so their hips are nestled against each other and moving in tight little thrusts while they kiss.
He never figures out whether someone's seen him at the youth center or how it happens, but this is around the time when the rumors start at school.
He and Katie are doing their homework, sitting cross-legged on the thick living room carpet with the coffee table and a pile of mini marshmallows between them. Katie, who is in freshman year, looks up from her homework. “Blaine... are you gay?”
“What?”
She looks away, fidgeting with the pen in her hand. “I don't mind if you are, just, some girl at school said she thought you might be.”
That's how he finds out that people are talking.
He laughs at first, because he doesn't know how else to react. But then Katie stretches out her leg under the table to tug at the fabric of his pants with her bare toes, and he just nods.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
He hesitates. ”Sort of.”
He and Alex have never called each other that, and somehow Blaine doesn't really feel like they are.
Katie smiles. “You're my favorite big brother, you know.”
She's grown ridiculously pretty the last couple of years, especially when she smiles.
“In this state, at least,” she adds with a laugh, playing it safe since Will's at Georgetown.
The guys from the debate team have been short with him ever since he quit without explanation. Jimmy and Trey from soccer try to set him up with Trey's sister and get annoyed when he refuses. He starts noticing that some of the jocks are looking at him kind of hostile.
He doesn't mind too much. He's always really happy when he's at Alex's place. Jacob Choi made his heart clench up, but mostly Alex just makes him laugh a lot. They don't talk much. They play computer games and jam on Alex's guitars and watch TV. Alex has a massive couch. Blaine can lie stretched out on his back on it with no problem. Alex slides his shirt up and kisses his belly, slides an awkward hand into his trousers, and Blaine doesn't want to think about anything else but the two of them, right there on the couch with MTV on mute.
He tries not to think about how the hostility at school slowly progresses from someone sticking used gum on his locker, to trash dumped on his car, to someone spitting him on the neck as he walks through the crowd in the hallway.
The thing is, he kind of knows who they are, the instigators: Seniors Jared and Pete, and sometimes three or four of the guys from football who're probably thrilled to get a chance to give someone from the soccer team crap, since there's a not entirely friendly competition going on between them. But that's not what hurts him the most.
It's like everybody else don't even see it happening. Like they don't care. He's never felt so alone before in his life.
He knows that Katie must hear about some of it, but she doesn't say anything until he involuntarily flinches away from being touched, one day, when she pounces on him in the hall. His reaction makes the smile fall off her face. She lets go of him.
“Blaine, please tell Mom and Dad,” she says in a low voice.
Blaine thinks of Ricky Abrams walking down the hall with his head held high. “No, I just have to stick it out, until they forget about me.”
He sticks it out until the day someone throws a gym shoe at him while he is walking across the yard on his way to choir practice. It hits him right in the mouth. His breath is knocked out of him, and he's on his knees all of a sudden. Somewhere there's a couple of guys hooting, but he can't tell where.
Just keep dancing, he thinks grimly to himself, trying to get back on his feet. But then he sees blood dripping on the ground in fat splotches.
He checks clean for concussion, but his lip needs two stitches.
“Oh,” the school nurse says, “I'm sure it was just an accident.”
The principal says the same thing.
It makes him so angry. He's been teased once in a while - like everyone else - for being an overachiever, being on the debate team, or in the choir, or that one embarrassing time when his music teacher insisted that he performed his homework composition for the entire class. But no one has ever really given him a hard time about anything, because he's never done anything wrong. And he still hasn't.
“I haven't done anything wrong,” he says to his parents, feeling like a child, when he has to explain the stitches that evening.
“But I don't understand, why are they bullying you all of a sudden?”
Across the table, Katie's eyes are shining with tears. Blaine can't look at any of them, so he looks down at his open hands on the table. They're a little scratched from where he braced himself on the pavement.
“I think... Because... Because I'm gay.” His voice breaks a little. The whole situation is excruciating. They never talk about these kinds of things.
“Oh, sweetie.” His mom reaches across the table and covers his hand with her own. The last time he cried in front of her, he was nine years old.
That night, his parents come into his room just as he is going to bed. His father is carrying a fat manila folder. His mother is smiling gently. They sit him down, and his mother puts a hand on his knee and says: “Your dad and I have been talking and we think we have a solution.”
It turns out that they had been discussing putting him and Katie in private schools next year. They'd already been gathering information and estimating the costs, ever since his mother got a promotion two months back.
“The Westlake schools aren't bad, but we think you kids deserve better,” his mother says.
They have brought material on a couple of schools that have expansive harassment policies and ask him to look it over.
As they stand to leave, his dad hesitates before touching him briefly on the shoulder. “We don't have a problem with this. It's okay, Blaine. You know that, don't you?”
It doesn't feel okay. Blaine nods anyway.
He tells Alex the next Tuesday. He waits until he is standing outside Alex's door, ready to leave. Alex's lips are red and a little swollen. He smoothed down Blaine's hair with his fingers, laughing, before he let Blaine get out the door. He's just about to close it when Blaine says: “So. I'm going to go... to another school. In Ohio.”
Alex stops himself mid-movement. “What? When?”
“Next Monday.”
Alex looks stricken.“Why didn't you tell me before?”
Blaine doesn't quite know the answer to that, himself.
“I guess was trying to forget about it,” he says eventually.
He shifts on his feet, uncomfortable. He feels hopelessly clueless. He hadn't thought that Alex would care so much. But Alex is biting his lips, and then he steps out on the cold concrete in his socks to pull Blaine into a tight embrace.
He can feel Alex taking deep, shaky breaths against him, and he realizes that there are probably a lot of things that he never knew about him.
They hug for a long time. Blaine's cold and he's sure that Alex must be too, but he doesn't want to say anything to make them break apart.
A week later, he leaves for Dalton Academy in Westerville, Ohio.
His parents hug him and tell him to be good and to do well. Katie holds on to him for the longest time, and when she finally pulls away she is crying.
Kurt Hummel
Blaine is home from Dalton for summer break.
It's been a year and a half since he came out to the entire student body at Dalton Academy and a year and five months since Wes and David headhunted him for the Warblers, insisting that he was exactly the kind of guy they needed in the group.
He is still in the choir. He plays soccer with the Dalton Academy Eagles. He still struggles with chemistry and physics. He no longer flinches when people shout his name across the hall or playfully punch him in the shoulder when they think he's being stupid.
He's been on five dates with three different guys, and when he came back from them, the other guys at school actually wanted to hear how it went (which varied from pretty good to catastrophic, but hey).
Now, he is standing at domestic arrivals in LAX, twirling his car keys around his index finger, waiting for Kurt Hummel to arrive from Ohio.
It's been nine months since Kurt Hummel transferred to Dalton. He came into the Warblers and auditioned for a solo with a show tune. He makes inappropriate jokes. He sometimes throws hissy fits that he has to make awkward apologies for afterward. He makes Blaine say stupid things sometimes, but only because Blaine is struggling to express ideas that he's never been able to discuss with anyone, before.
He's been making Blaine come home with him most weekends, and has forced him to learn how to cook Kurumi-ae and how to change the oil on his car. He hums softly under his breath when he's concentrating on something.
Right before summer break, Kurt went on two dates with Benjamin Whyte, and Blaine very secretly hated it. It's been dawning on him that maybe his feelings for Kurt aren't quite as fraternally friendly as he wanted them to be.
The plane's arrival is announced on the speakers, and soon people start milling out into the terminal lobby. Blaine spots Kurt long before Kurt sees him.
Noone who's just spent six hours crammed into a domestic airplane should be able to look as neat and unruffled as Kurt does. Among all the suited businessmen and brightly dressed tourists he looks lost and alien - and startlingly handsome - in his cherry blossom shirt and checkered trousers. He is carrying one suitcase and trailing a trolley after him that Blaine guesses he must have paid some pretty heavy overweight fees for.
Kurt's eyes actually drift over him twice without recognition. Once they finally lock eyes across the lobby, Kurt mouth falls open, obviously surprised.
Blaine looks down at himself, and realizes why. His two uniform jackets and two pairs of trousers and five white shirts are hanging pressed and ready for next school year in his closet. He pretty much hasn't been out of the house all week, lazing around with Katie and her friends, so he is in his flip flops and board shorts, and his old choir shirt that has a tear by the collar.
He had been so preoccupied with getting to the airport in time, and worrying about finding his way and navigating the freeway traffic, that he'd completely forgotten to change clothes. He runs a hand through his hair - he was in the pool this morning and he didn't fix his hair, after. He tries to straighten it out a little, but it's too late to be embarrassed now.
Kurt walks over, and Blaine pulls him into an embrace. His clothes and skin are still cool from the airplane AC.
“Hey,” he says, giggling softly in Blaine's ear before pulling away.
Blaine can almost hear the 100 sarcastic comments regarding his clothes that Kurt is tactfully repressing.
He pulls at the hem of the faded t-shirt and looks pointedly at him. “No comment? None at all?”
Kurt is smirking, but he mimes zipping his lips shut, and doesn't say a word.
When they talked about the possibility of Kurt visiting during break, Kurt confessed that he hadn't been out of Ohio since he was twelve - so once they're in the car, Blaine lets him look his fill while he gets them away from airport traffic and back on the freeway. Kurt's eyes are bright in the California sun as he leans this way and that, trying to see everything on their way.
Blaine keeps stealing glances. It feels so surreal to see Kurt here, away from Dalton. It's not even that Blaine hasn't had any of his Ohio friends visit before. David had flown out, earlier in the summer. But Blaine doesn't have a growing crush on David, so maybe that's why it seems so different.
He feels a little uncomfortable about Kurt's open-mouthed expression as they pull into the driveway. He has spent so many weekends at Kurt's family's house that he knows about the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom, the draft from the upstairs windows, and the damp, concrete basement where Burt and Carole are keeping the last unopened boxes from the move. Suddenly his own family's three-car garage, the neatly-coiffed front lawn with its palm trees, and the wide terracotta stairs leading up to the arched double doors seem pompous and excessive. He cringes a little in his car seat.
But Kurt just slides him an amused look.
“Ooh. Very 90210,” he says with a crooked smile, and Blaine laughs.
Katie and her friends are in the kitchen, listening to Katy Perry and making an unfathomable amount of sandwiches. Blaine introduces Kurt to everyone, and Katie shakes his hand with a bright, almost scarily pleased smile. Blaine cringes a little. If he had known that Katie would actually end up meeting Kurt, maybe he wouldn't have gushed about him on the phone so much.
His parents, who are oblivious most of the time, did make sure to have a bed made up for Kurt in Willard's old room, even though Katie's friends are sleeping on mattresses in hers. Blaine helps him up the stairs with the two suitcases.
Afterward, he takes him on a tour of the house. When they reach the living room, Kurt walks straight over to the Steinway. Blaine holds his breath while Kurt reaches down, skimming his fingers lightly over a couple of keys. He's told Kurt about his short career as a classical pianist - one time when they were alone in Burt's auto shop fixing a tire - and he's told him about Julian Bell.
Kurt reaches up to brush his hair out of his eyes.
“Julian.” His voice is soft and pensive.
“Yeah.”
They stare at each other for a long moment.
It took a while (and, embarrassingly, Kurt reminding him) for Blaine to realize that they're actually the same age. Since Blaine dropped his botched attempt at being a mentor, they've kissed twice. Once, chastely, for a stupid repeat game of spin the bottle, and once, this time both illegally tipsy, in the backyard of Sam Evan's house. Back then, they had both agreed that the kiss had been a mistake. Lately, Blaine hasn't felt so sure about that.
“Anyway... That way's the atrium. Most useless room ever.” Blaine points, needing to break the tension.
The atrium is sweltering. It looks out onto the backyard pool. Kurt stares longingly out the windows.
“Gosh, I haven't gone swimming since Speedos were actually considered acceptable swimwear.”
“Really? I love swimming.”
“Me too, but the public pool wasn't exactly the friendliest of settings.” He pulls a face, and Blaine gets where he's coming from. Kurt has told him about his childhood, too.
They're in the middle of a California heatwave. In the sun, the temperature is in the hundreds.
“Hey, let's go swimming right now,” Blaine says, pleased to be able to offer this.
Kurt seems a little hesitant - like maybe he doesn't think it's the awesome idea that Blaine does - but he agrees. Blaine finds him a swimsuit and shows him where to change.
When Kurt emerges from the house, Blaine is sitting by the pool with his feet in the water. It becomes suddenly very clear to Blaine that he maybe hadn't thought this through. They don't have gym together at Dalton, and Kurt looks shy and insecure as he steps out onto the tiles in bare feet, Blaine's swim trunks and a t-shirt.
“Hi,” he says, needlessly.
“Hi,” Blaine echoes, trying hard for casual, while Kurt walks over to deposit his t-shirt on one of the lounge chairs lined up on the patio.
Kurt looks a little bugeyed.
Blaine already stripped out of his shirt, and now he feels ridiculously self-conscious about his body, the sprinkling of hair across his chest and trailing down below his belly button that Kurt seems weirdly fixated on.
Kurt on the other hand, is smooth and white and slender. He is more athletic looking than Blaine would have expected, although it shouldn't've come as a surprise since Kurt has been doing 5k runs every morning with the Dalton track team. No tan lines, no chest hair - he is pink and pale all over.
“You're going to need some waterproof sunscreen,” Blaine says awkwardly. Kurt looks down at himself and then back up. Blaine can see an uneven blush spreading across the pale skin of his chest.
He curses himself, once again, for being epically clueless.
Thankfully, the moment passes when Katie and her friends join them a few minutes later. This is how Blaine's been spending most of the last weeks: swimming, basking in the sun, and playing beach ball volley with Katie's friend Twila, who has a wicked serve.
Kurt slides cautiously into the water at first, but soon he is talking and laughing along with everybody else.
Blaine's aware that he keeps looking at Kurt's lips like a dork, but he loves the way Kurt smiles - the way it looks like he hasn't been used to it for a while, like he's a little surprised every time someone teases it out of him.
It's Katie's turn to set the tables for dinner before their parents come home, so when the sun starts setting the girls disappear inside.
Kurt is floating in one corner of the pool, clutching a boogie board across his chest and looking up at the sky. Blaine can't resist doing a couple of laps of the butterfly. When he finishes, grabbing the ledge with one hand and wiping his face with the other, he sees that Kurt is watching him from across the pool.
“Is there anything you're not good at?”
Blaine wants to protest, because there're so many things that he's not good at - this thing between them being right at the top of the list. He opens his mouth to say something, but then he catches Kurt's eye, and realizes that Kurt knows that, because Kurt knows him.
The sky is turning a warm pink, and the temperature has dropped so that the pool water with its stored heat seems almost warmer than the air.
Blaine swims over to grab hold of the other side of the boogie board. The sound of the water lapping up against their bodies is quiet and calming. Kurt's toes are brushing up against his under the water.
“Your parents are so laid back. I can't believe they just let you and Katie have all these people over.”
Kurt told him about what happened that time that Blaine spent the night in his bed and Burt found him there the next morning.
“Your parents let me come over almost every weekend,” Blaine interjects, “and mine aren't that laid back, either... They did make up a bed for you in Will's old room.” He cracks a smile. Kurt catches his drift and blushes a little.
“Actually, my dad gave me The Speech in the car on the way to the airport,” he admits.
It sets off a slow warm roll in Blaine's stomach. “But he knows we're just friends,” he protests weakly, “anyway, you're seeing someone...”
He doesn't mean for his voice to go up at the end of that sentence, making it sound like a question, but. Kurt's hands are wrapped around the edge of the board on either side of him, almost like an embrace, and their faces are maybe a foot apart - and somehow the moment seems pregnant with possibilities.
“Who, Benjamin?” Kurt shrugs, grimacing, “no... Way too much tweed.”
“Oh.”
It is quiet except for the distant sound of traffic. Katie and her friends can faintly be heard inside the house. Blaine and Kurt stare at each other.
There's a short, sweet moment of hesitation before they both lean forward. The board squeaks a little. Blaine has goosebumps. Kurt's right hand hovers over the skin on his arm, tickling against the raised hairs.
And then they're kissing.
It's soft and chaste. Kurt smells like summer skin and, faintly, like chlorine. They part after a second. Blaine can feel Kurt's breath skating over his face, and when he opens his eyes, Kurt is right there, eyes wide open, eyelashes dark from the water.
“I have the biggest crush on you,” Blaine blurts out, more honest than he has dared to be in a long time.
“I know. I mean--” Kurt's eyes widen; he blushes so easily. “Me too.”
This time he is not the only one blushing, though. Blaine is just about to say something more, but then he hears a car pulling into the driveway and Katie calls his name from inside the house. Dinner will be ready in 30 minutes and his parents will disapprove if they're not properly dressed to sit down at the table by then.
He pulls away with regret. “We need to get ready for dinner.”
Kurt blinks. Twice. “Oh. Okay.”
They don't speak, and they hardly look at each other while they quickly towel off and pull their t-shirts over their heads. There's a silent promise that they won't speak about this before they have the time and the privacy to do so.
They are on the stairs before Blaine has a moment of mild panic. He is looking at the back of Kurt's neck, long and graceful, a few licks of damp hair clinging to his skin. And suddenly he realizes that this time it's different, this time they are definitely moving beyond the safe, friendly zone that they've so carefully maintained ever since Kurt had his heart broken a little at the very start of their friendship.
He grabs Kurt’s hand briefly in the hallway before they can go to their separate rooms to shower and get dressed.
“Hey.”
He doesn't really know what to say, and he can hear his father right downstairs in the hallway, complaining to someone on the phone, but Kurt seems to get it, giving his hand a squeeze before turning away.
Blaine has 20 minutes to get ready for dinner, and he certainly doesn't want to make Kurt wait alone with his family. But he is also a teenager, and he just kissed the boy he is in love with for the third - but really, first - time. He takes a little longer in the shower than he meant to.
When he finally comes down the stairs, Kurt has been seated between his Mom and Dad, and he's looking a little wild-eyed. Katie is in the middle of some obscure story about competition hairdressing. Blaine can tell that she's been working hard to deflect the attention from Kurt. He shoots her a grateful look as he sits down as close to Kurt as possible.
Dinner takes forever, and Blaine cringes in sympathy as Kurt tries to navigate his parents' extensive interrogation.
Katie and her friends, being either obnoxious or (more likely) oblivious, drag them off for a six round Singstar tournament after they've finished with desert. It is fun though, and he and Kurt keep catching each others' eyes across the rest of the group in a way that makes Blaine skip notes and lose points. Blaine and Katie are competing for first place against Melissa and Twila when he notices that Kurt is nodding off in the sofa, and guiltily realizes that he'd forgotten about the time zone difference.
He walks him to Will's room, which feels kind of silly, since it's three doors down from his own. Kurt looks drowsy and confused. Blaine wants to reach out and brush his hair out of his eyes, but he's still anxious.
“Well. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
The door closes softly. Blaine stands still outside it until the sound of his mom or dad moving through the house downstairs startles him into walking away.
Two hours later, Blaine is lying on his back in his bed with the blankets kicked away, when there is a quiet knock on the door. He makes his way through the room in darkness.
Kurt is standing in the hallway in a pair of soft looking yoga pants and and a gray, torn-neck sweatshirt. He doesn't look so sleepy anymore.
“You know what, I don't think we're going to screw it up,” he says without preamble.
It takes Blaine a moment to mentally rewind to a conversation they had in a coffee shop, six months ago, and then revisited lying on the cool, damp grass in Sam's backyard a couple of months later.
“Oh.”
“Can I come in?”
Blaine's throat is dry and his pulse is going a thousand miles a minute. He wets his lips, and then he sees Kurt following the movement with his eyes, sees him blink slowly before looking back up.
It sends a quick wave of heat rushing through his chest and all the way down to his stomach, and God. Blaine's pretty much never been more nervous, but it's good. It's such a good thing, and no, they won't screw this up. He trusts Kurt on this, because Kurt is one of the people in the world who knows him best.
Blaine reaches out and puts a hand on Kurt's neck, pulling him in. Kurt tastes like toothpaste and his tongue is slick and sweet and tentative against Blaine's. They're both breathing shakily, and Blaine is hyperaware of Kurt's hand resting lightly on his hip. He spreads his fingers in Kurt's hair, letting them slide back to fist loosely in the hair at the nape of his neck. Kurt makes a tiny, soft little sound against his lips at that, and Blaine has to stop the kiss. He presses his forehead against Kurt's while he catches his breath.
And then he lets go completely, and steps aside, to let Kurt into his room.