a system of touch (1/6)
masterpost
June 2010
“Scale of one to ten, hot or not- direct ahead with the mop top,” Thea suggests, throwing her wrist forward in a gesture that’s vaguely indicative of directly north, a guy rubbing sun-block into the meat of his ankles. Kurt looks longer, five seconds, fifteen, and yeah-he’s got the thing-tan arms, strong hands, fraying cutoff shorts instead of something hideous and synthetic and Hawaiian that Kurt has seen enough of, thank you, and would really like to burn. The guy reminds him of Finn, in a way, which, ok-potentially bad seeds waiting to be sown there, but more in the all- American boy kind of way than the vaguely stupid and confused child thing Finn’s had going for him lately. He’s got good arms, and wrists-Kurt can get behind that.
“Eight point five-probably,” Kurt says, sliding a strand of his bangs back into place, “higher if he can form a coherently intelligent sentence.”
“Eight point five, are you serious?” Kurt throws his sunglasses down his nose and peers at her over them.
“What, would you rate him higher?” His eyebrow is arched impeccably towards the sky, like a sun-baked prince in sailor shorts and slides. Thea arches a delicate eyebrow right back.
“Higher?” She says, adjusting her bathing suit top and staring pointedly at him a few seconds too long, “god, no-a five. No questions. You’re losing your touch, Kurt.” And ok, yeah-no.
“Don’t forget that those shades on your face are mine, and I will not hesitate to take them back-“ Thea slides them off of her face and dangles them away from Kurt with her far arm, “and they’re Dior-if you throw those in the pool, I’ll kill you.” Thea just giggles, sliding them back on her face and smoothing through the non-existent wrinkles in her cherry dotted swimsuit. He’s pretty sure that the wink she throws him is more of a laugh, anyhow, and he pokes his tongue out at her before turning his gaze back to the pool expanse where the rest of the complex’s residents are wandering about in various states of undress and ever-growing states of hideous sunburn and raucous laughter, the sun like a burning, singing deity overhead.
From beside him Thea makes a noise of distinct interest and taps Kurt against the break of his elbow with her fingertips to hold his attention. “Let’s test again, baby-“ she says, “street rat, 12 o’ clock.” Kurt laughs softly, amused at the names she manages to come up with, but then he looks up and oh, ok yeah, definitely street rat material. He’s got messy, mussed dark hair and a garishly striped t-shirt and lime green Havaianas that Kurt is almost sure he has stock of in about nine different colors. No doubt.
“Three-for sure,” Kurt is dismissive, quiet because he knows that if he stays out here any longer his brain is going to get a sunburn and he’s not sure he has the salve to properly handle that. “I mean, have you seen that outfit, T? He looks like a piece of overripe citrus.” Thea just looks at him like he’s grown a third eye or a fifth nipple, or like he’s an incredibly stupid child. “Just look at him!”
“Oh, I’m looking,” her voice drops as she says it and Kurt watches as she slots a fall of hair behind her ear and lowers her sunglasses, “clearly-clearly, you aren’t.”
Kurt looks, looks, and knows she’s probably baiting him on this-she’s got a type, all of them do, for the most part, and he’s learned singlehandedly how to deal with their preferences. And okay, street rat is kind of gorgeous in that odd ‘not a girl, not yet a woman’ kind of way-except for boys in summer shorts instead of misunderstood ingénues-deep set comic book eyes and a pink mouth and wavy curls that aren’t so much unkempt as in a boyish pile atop his head. A few curls at the back of his head glisten with sweat as he hops off the bike he’d been perched on and while Kurt would usually be recoiling in a bout of ‘ew, gross, do not’, on him it just looks kind of abjectly-normal. Kurt figures it just, along with the wide expanse of his pink stained shoulders and the leftover freckles of a tan across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, further emphasizes the fact that this boy is in serious need of some sunblock/aloe/combo therapy that Kurt would gladly provide for him. He’d like to pride himself on being kind of an expert-he’s been here every summer since he turned eleven and the only thing that’s gotten burnt has been a small circle on the bottom of his foot from where he’d stepped on a flattening iron.
“Fine,” Kurt concedes, watching as the boy rubs a hand through his hair and hops back up on his bike, “nine.” He huffs down into his beach chair again, but with a slight smile like he’s holding in an amusing secret.
Thea coos at him, laughing and adjusting the hips of her swim bottoms, “That’s what I like to hear.” She looks at him, fond and haughty at the same time, and Kurt rolls his eyes as he laughs in response, Thea’s hand reaching up to ruffle at his hair.
“Hey, hey!” Kurt swats at her with flailing hands as she reaches over with a second, ruffling in double time-and he can sense all of the damage that’s being done to the coif he’d pomp-ed his hair into this morning even as he’s giggling and kicking. He thinks, briefly, that they must look like strange over-grown children-a fey and a nearly legal pinup darling roughhousing by the community pool in their designer bathing suits, a clashing heap of stripes and garish summer print and raucous, annoying laughter, “I will personally burn every cute outfit you own, hey!” but these kinds of childish games are the overarching theme of their summers. Wet, hot American summer-no car oil, no big gulp, no extra precautionary alarm system on his house to make sure his dad’s car doesn’t get tattooed in pearl pink lipstick again-just sand, sky, and sea.
Kurt’s fairly certain that if he made out with himself, he’d probably even taste like the smart punch of a few thousand gallons of crystal blue salt water. Somehow, he can’t really bring himself to care.
--
Walking into the party a few nights later is like walking into a sweltering, technicolor tornado. He’s got his high-waists on, dark wash with buckled up cuffs at the knee, and as he pushes his way through the throng of pineapple scented party goers, he can feel the big gold buckles smacking a sharp rhythm against the sides of his thighs. Maneuvering around the huddle takes skill, block and sway movements he remembers from the endless stupidity of football practice finally being put to good use. Namely, he’s fairly certain he’s the only one in the vicinity using them-the scenery around him a mush of sloppy couples and boys with drinks hanging out of windows and off of porch railings, a few huddled off in the shadows of the hallway to his left and another large group playing a pots and pans rendition of ‘El Scorcho’ from out by the deck.
He’s scootching himself past a couple of girls laughing into a pitcher of margaritas at the corner of a futon when Thea’s arm grabs him around the chest and whisks him over to an adjacent makeshift bar they’ve got set up at the outset part of the kitchen island. “Hey maybe baby,” she drawls out, shimmying around to the other side of the counter while Kurt scoots himself onto possibly the only clean stool in the entire house. The table space in front of him is like a buffet for a man devoid of sustenance, a variable assortment of margarita mix and swill sticks and salt shakers and tons and tons of alcohol, and he wipes the sticky area in front of him with a semi-clean napkin before resting his elbows neatly on the linoleum, Thea laughing giddily at him from where she’s now leaning into the arms of her tipsily tactile boyfriend as he attempts to make her drink from his weird cup of purple-orange mixture.
“Mark! Mark!” she squeals, batting at his advancing hands with her own smaller ones as he tries to tip the glass into her mouth, and now it’s Kurt’s turn to laugh, amused.
“Mark,” Kurt’s tone is sharp, like a parent trying to hold the attention of a soon to be scolded child, “Mark, I am fairly certain I wouldn’t even feed whatever is in that glass to my neighbor’s ancient pit bull-“ Mark pauses and looks up at him, hair up in silly peaks from Thea’s batting hands, and Thea takes the reprieve to push his cup-holding arm farther away from her face. “C’mon, pup-spare the girl her taste buds,” Mark tips the cup up to his mouth, downs it, and crumples it into the bucket next to the counter in under ten seconds and Kurt reaches over the barrage of bottles to ruffle messily at his hair as he slops a kiss on Thea’s head and swings back into the main room.
“C’mon, c’mon,” she slurs, rushed and giddy as Mark makes his exit, and Kurt looks up to see her mixing about four label-less bottles of he’s not entirely sure what into a pink plastic cup with a flamingo drawn on the side, “We need to get some fun in you.” Kurt side-eyes her skeptically, but fondly-she’s half-point ridiculous but mostly she’s reminding him of the cutely stoned lab partner he had in Chemistry last year. He let her borrow a couple of his old hemp boleros and she went by Acorn, but he’s pretty sure her real name was Susie. “Last party I’m pretty sure you forgot to drink the fun-and we ended up playing Parcheesi in my brother’s closet for two hours, baby-“ she shuffles around the island with that stupid pink flamingo monstrosity of a cup and he spins slightly in his chair to acquiesce her cup-arm wrapping around him from behind-wow, okay, that smells rank, he’s in the mood for some alcohol but not whatever drain cleaner she just concocted, “borrrrrrrring.”
He takes the cup from her gingerly, careful not to touch his fingers to anything that could potentially render him incompetent and lethally poisonous because ugh ew, and she giggles and tugs his pant loops a few times until he looks down at her, the twinkling holiday lights strung up across the cabinets reflecting in the blown out black of her eyes. She’s looking at him expectantly and Kurt is racking his brain for some sort of covert cup-switching plan that gets him out of drinking this day-glo chemical and into drinking something warm and buzzy and potentially non-lethal. After a beat, two, he concedes, holding a free hand up in surrender. “Okay, okay-living-room, boys, fun-coming.”
Thea starts off to the sea of a thousand couches he’s sure constitutes as a living room, and Kurt slides neatly off his stool to follow, but not before pointedly glancing back to the counter, swapping his pink cup from his right hand to his left, and grabbing an unopened bottle of rum on his rush out.
“Ooh, double dipping,” Thea teases, winking, when he catches past her, “extra fun, I like.”
--
Thirty minutes later and he’s got himself in a sandwich on the left half of the main room’s L-couch, knees crossed and fingers curled around his now half empty bottle of rum. His insides feel hot, syrupy and electric at the same time like he fell in a big sticky puddle and then lit himself on fire with a half burnt out sparkler-the room still flashing and blinking and loud like someone turned up the volume on his eardrums.
Since he got plopped down here, the cream filling to two tall, warm, sweet-smelling blondes who’ve each got an arm slung across the back of Kurt’s neck, he’s mostly been half-watching what seems to be a rousing game of strip poker between a girl with blue dreadlocks and a guy who reminds Kurt of the Nancy half of Sid & Nancy for some reason, except he’s still pretty sure they’re not even using any cards. He takes an extra swig of rum every time the girl tries to prematurely unhook her bra-he may be sixteen and nominally uninterested, but he’s really not quite ready to see nipple.
“Dude, just drink it!” he hears, from the boy attached to the arm on his left who he hasn’t yet taken the time to quite remember the of. It might be Terry or like, maybe John. He’s not entirely certain. Mostly he’s been referring to them by their arm directionals all night, “I’m pretty sure Court spiked your drink with cat piss last time-piece of cake!” Kurt feels right arm move to punch left in the shoulder, the side of his arm ruffling the back of Kurt’s hair in the process, much to his chagrin.
“Are you serious?” Kurt ducks to swipe a hand over the messed up hair at the nape of his neck as they punch back and forth at each other above him in some odd twisted form of bro-fisting male dominance. He’s pretty sure he found them objectively much more attractive before they started reminding him of Finn and Puckerman punching it out over Quinn last Fall or like, his neighbor’s idiot dogs fighting over a naked bone, “Just for that dude, you deserve to drink this shit. It smells like my grandma’s asshole.”
“Boys, boys boys-“ Kurt throws his hands up, the rum slish-sloshing back and forth like a wave inside its bottle, “Please try to be civilized here-“ He can feel them both as they pause suddenly, black shot eyes trained on him like he’s the goddess of rain in the middle of the Sahara, or some idolized older sibling scolding his doting baby brothers into some dazed form of complacent submission. Once they’ve stilled for a whole beat, four, five, he gingerly lowers his arms and glances one by one at the both of them and then to their outspread hands still joined around the offending cup of liquid. “You get less and less attractive the more you remind me of the insipid cretins I’ve been forced to grow up with.”
Left arm takes his hand off the cup at that moment and Kurt watches with a smug satisfaction as right arm sets it slowly on the sticky-wet coffee table, calculated and aware of Kurt’s hawk-eyed amusement even through the tipsy stupor. Once they’re both sat back into their sweet-smelling space heater positions beside him, Kurt downs the last of his rum- still careful not to slosh any onto his shirt, and places his then empty hands on the boys’ knees. “Ok boys, this is what we’re going to do-“ he runs his hands up and down and can feel the warm scratch of new denim scraping across the smooth skin of his palms, “now, I understand your basic need to assert your manly dominance over one another,” Kurt is smirking to himself inside, warm and satisfied that even this dubiously arguable night is about to get a lot more under his control and a whole lot better, “but I can think of a much better method for settling this little-score.”
As Thea would boldly point out, were she privy, he’s turned into full on minx-Kurt by now, head full of rum and body full of brazen, boyish confidence as he brings a few delicate fingers to each of the boys’ chins and leans his body back into the warm circle that their bodies create, stroking his thumbs back and forth across the itch of stubble under each of their mouths. “What do you say-we settle this with a little,” he swipes a thumb across their rum stained mouths in unison, watching as their eyes blow black even further, wide and unblinking, “--kissing game.”
He hears them rumble their affirmation in some lazy, intrigued version of togetherness and Kurt laughs softly to himself. If only Lima, Ohio could see him now-he feels like a regular Santana Lopez-slick flirting his way in and out of every boy’s drunkenly experimental teenage dreams. “We kiss, I judge, loser drinks that shit I’ve been waiting to dump all night,” he pokes them both in the chest and watches as they stare, unmoving at his flushed, red mouth, “you leave with your manly-man-hoods undoubtedly intact.”
“Game,” they both drawl, stupid and affirmative and Kurt is reminded faintly of pointedly sitting out of subsequent rounds of ‘dare or dare’ in the boys’ football locker room post-win. Wearing someone else’s sweaty, fermented gym socks is really not his idea of a jovial Friday night activity. Ever.
Thankfully for him, swap-kissing two punch-drunk blondes on a couch in the heat of June’s party season is, and he revels in his own pleasing thoughts about it as the boy to his left raises a rough hand to the cusp of his jaw and takes Kurt’s bottom lip wetly between his own, surging in and out to grasp it lazily between the cut of his teeth in a way that Kurt knows will leave him with a faint tenderness well into morning. He tastes and smells like a heavy mix of rum and tequila and raspberry juice bombs, his tongue insistent and warm as it licks against the seam of Kurt’s mouth and his cheek slightly scratchy against the smooth skin of Kurt’s jaw. The boy behind him places a hot hand on the small curve of Kurt’s waist, anchoring him, and Kurt bites back into the kiss, stupid and slow and feeling his chest dip forward as he opens his mouth but hesitates to close his eyes, focusing instead on the blonde tipped dust of the boy’s lowered eyelashes until from out of the side of his vision he sees a startlingly familiar head of dark looping curls from over near the patio door.
It almost physically pains him to pull back from the kiss, but he does so with a soft smack of his lips, his body protesting as he extricates himself from his place between the boys’ twisted limbs, teetering to his feet. He hears them protest, muffled against the finger he holds up to each of their mouths, his eyes still glancing sharply back to the dark loops he can see through the throng of people.
“Please excuse me gentlemen,” he says, eyes in a half distracted flirt, watching momentarily as the boy he’d been kissing licks out at his reddened lower lip, and spitting the rest out in a rush, “the pleasure was all mine.” And then he’s scurrying over the mess with heavy legs, sidestepping passed out party-goers and discarded red cups and lost piles of playing cards with suspicious stains in his mission towards the patio wall so singlemindedly that he barely registers the boys from the couch protesting in confusion from behind him.
By the time he actually gets past his sectioned area of couch- strip poker- rum/tequila madness, he is what he feels like is some semblance of even more drunk than before, if he’s counting the seven total girls who knocked drinks into his bare forearm and the two that spilled beer on his shoe. The boy with the hair is still there, talking slow and handsy with a tall guy Kurt is fairly certain goes by ‘X’, and making Kurt’s shoulders itch with heat like he’s still in that deck chair by the pool a few mornings previous, shooting shit with Thea about their continual ratings game. New boys get it hard, especially from Thea and her sour-candy level scrutiny, but stupid street rat with his mop-top and his pink shoulders and his black cutoffs had definitely made the cut.
But when Kurt is within what he feels is ample range, he’s cut short by the disappointment of the guy finally turning around-where Kurt expects to see sunburnt freckles and a pink mouth, there are none. In their place is a sharp nose and grey eyes and a sad, sad pair of slotted red aviators that really really should have been left behind in 1985. And okay, he’s not really unattractive, but-he’s certainly not the boy with the bike. The guy moves left through the crowd and Kurt doesn’t watch, letting the crowd swallow him up for a feint second while the second half of his bottle of rum soaks into the pit of his brain for real. It’s all so colorful, the bodies so warm and rhythmic in their chaos, that he feels no inherent need to actually move forward one way or the other until small hands grab him around the wrist and tug him toward the patio door with a wild, jubilant, shriek of his name.
Once he’s out on the deck and mildly free of the hazy swarm of party goers, he realizes it’s only Thea, laughing and holding onto him still-her hair in a wild, wavy halo around her face and a number of half lit glow-sticks stuck into the flimsy cup of her bra. She looks a mess, crazy and open and all the stupid things Kurt wishes he were and pretends to be-it would be nice to be a beautifully glorified tornado of a person sometimes, instead of drinking a thermos of Chablis before school just to feel less wound or stepping barefoot into the condo complex pool under the haze of two cups of tequila and still feeling like he’s meticulously calculating just how many things can go wrong from point a to point b, still thinking of all the things he hopes his dad is keeping up with in his absence.
It’s easy, in some ways, though, to be here-like he’s two Kurt Hummels, or at least that’s what he would like to tell himself, on his best days. Mostly the lines get staggeringly blurry when he tries to pick the difference.
“C’mon!” Thea shouts, still drowning under the swell of clashing riffs heard from various points around the house and out on here on the deck, “Tides going out-let’s chase ‘em!” And he lets himself be dragged, running down the cracked wooden stairs to the sand below, spread out like a never-ending desert and filled with the glittering reflections of holiday lights and deck side tiki lanterns and the faint glow of the overhanging moon, the water a cool shimmering line up ahead. They trek out through the mass of it, stopping only to shuck off shoes in a flurried haste to reach the edge of the tide line, where the sand gets damp and cool and where Mark sits curled up, toes brushing the bubbling wave swells.
Thea only lets go of his hand when they get close enough for her to tumble dive onto Mark’s back, kissing at his cheeks and screeching with the same raw jubilance that Kurt knows he feels himself when he sings alone to his stereo, voice loud and cracked and stupidly perfect in its imperfection. He stands there, still and letting the wind and the water and the world soak into his skin, his shoes dropped next to him and his toes on the damp border of the tide line, until Mark swings Thea up and onto his back like a tiny precocious child and they both advance to do the same to Kurt. And then he is the one screeching-his mouth soaked in sea-salt and his insides soaked in rum and his head full of nothing but the stupid, unfettered ease of living.
--
“Kurt, honey-I talked to your father this morning-he says to call.”
Kurt feels like someone hit him over the side of his head with a twelve inch heel in his sleep, his brain throbbing and pulsing from behind his eyes that are fighting desperately to stay open as he absently watches his grandmother flit around the kitchen and the connecting living room in rapid step, tossing things into her open purse and reaching down to buckle a clasp on her shoe or over to fasten her watch. He’s watched this same routine most mornings, over and over for the past few weeks; he’s watched it so often he could probably recite it-coffee, news, sundress, breakfast, heels, purse contents, though she’d skipped the breakfast step today, if only because Kurt had practically hurled at even the sight of a carton of eggs. Instead, she’d slid him an aspirin tablet and a glass of juice and rubbed the back of his head soothingly on her way to her room.
At the current moment he’s sat himself face-first into the largest mug of coffee he could stand to make, though it smells utterly disgusting and he’s pretty sure he’d fallen asleep while pouring the sugar and added way too much. Spoils of war-he really needs to start moderating his own party habits, not that that will ever actually be accomplished.
“Mmkay-“ he half grunts in response, fairly certain she’s still within hearing range, even if all he’s doing right now is staring into the murky depths of his cup and contemplating nine different ways he can fake sick if Thea invites him out again tonight.
“I worry about you, Kurt,” he can hear the click of her heels on the tile as she rounds around behind him, placing a hand on his back and circling the dip of his spine with her thumb in a way that feels focused and familiar, “you gotta learn to be a morning person if you’re gonna make it in the world, baby. Jobs don’t start up at noon.” She kisses him softly on the crown of his head and her perfume smells like lilac and powder and honey-soap and even though he’d normally compliment the perfection of such a combination, all he wants to do is throw up all over the glass plate countertop in front of him. “I gotta go now, meeting with a client-“ she gives his back one more comforting swipe and squeezes his shoulder as she walks away, “eat something and call your father before he has an aneurysm!”
He listens softly until he hears the click of the door lock shutting and then drops his head down on his folded arms with a sigh. He is so totally a morning person-hangovers suck.
Flicking through the contacts on his phone, he thinks of his dad sitting in front of the Thursday morning sports news, happily devouring his fried eggs and two layer jam toast and decides that this Kurt is not the one his dad wants to talk to. He’ll call him when he’s awake and coherent and much more apt to worry about the actual state of all things Lima. For now, he just clicks back to his keypad screen and speed dials four. Thea picks up after the third ring, her voice all together far too cheery for nine am.
“Mmm-morning, baby!”
Kurt just groans down the line.
“I see someone is regretting that Bacardi they drank last night-“
“Not regretting-just,” Kurt mumbles swiping at his eyes with his free hand and setting the call to speakerphone. Thea tuts softly at him from down the line.
“Oh it’s regretting-,” she’s chuckling at him and even in his weakened, sleepy state he wants to smack smartly at her arms-his pain is not a source of amusement, “your cute ass doesn’t fool me.” He ends up telling her as much.
“The unfortunate effects of my very, very good night last night are not here for your well of-“ he pauses on a burning yawn that makes his eyes go black with ache, “amusement.” Thea just continues to laugh at him softly, giggles most probably muffled from behind her hand, and Kurt play-imagines all the stupid, impractical ways he could drown her later in the condo complex pool. Mostly the thinking just makes his temples hurt.
“Of course they aren’t, baby,” he can sense her mentally patting his head like a misled child from through the phone and it both irritates him and amuses him that he can tell, “of course they aren’t.” He just stays silent in response, more intently focused on the little power nap he’s having in his mug of sickeningly sweet coffee than on Thea’s prattle from beneath his folded wrists. “You are going to do something for me though, “ she starts again, commanding his attention if only because he can’t drown out the tapping throb in his left ear, “get your cute ass down to middle beach by noon,” his mouth opens in start of a protest and she stops him, “ah-ah-no ifs or ands, baby. Just butts.”
Kurt should laugh at that, and he mostly tries to, though it comes out raw and dry, “Oh fuck you,” he says, but only really means it in the half-hearted, teasing sort of sense. Mostly. His butt is pretty cute-he’ll give her that.
“Glad you’re so on board with this!” her tone is mocking, but this time he really does laugh, soft, “see you in three hours, sweets,” and then all he hears is the familiar click-snap of his iPhone disconnecting from the call and returning to the home screen and he sighs out a breath that makes his coffee slip over the lip of the mug.
He lays his head in his hands. This is going to be a long day.
--
“I refuse to let you bully me into submission, Thea-“ Kurt says, holding his fingers against the receiver end of his phone so his father, busily mumbling on the line, can’t hear him.
“But I totally called-,” she starts, but Kurt reaches a palm up to her mouth before she finishes, now balancing his body weight oddly on his stomach and hoping the weight of Meg straddling him is enough to keep him from rolling to the side. Thea goes to bite at his hand and he hesitantly pulls it back with a quick dismissal of ‘don’t know, don’t care,’ as he returns his attention to resting his cheek on the warm skin of his arms, phone tucked against his right ear. His dad’s calm voice has been drawling away in his ear and though the sound comforts him, he can’t seem to be bothered enough to listen intently to another of his car shop horror stories right now-not when he’s got Thea’s neighbor rubbing sun cream into the knots of his back in a coconut haze and Thea off to his side yelling encouragement or jabs or something at the boys doing whatever it is they decided to do with the volleyball they ran off with earlier. He can hear them laughing and the burning crunch of slipping sand under their feet but he’s not sure either of those things makes up an organized sport in any sense of the word.
“-Kurt?” Meg’s voice catches him, finally, close up to his ear and he can feel the synthetic weave of her swim top pressing up against his back. He makes a vague ‘hmm’ sound that he figures can be construed as both a what to her and a positive re-affirmation that he is in fact listening to his father, “You done, or you want me to keep going? The muscles back here look like a minefield of tension,” she kneads her hands into the sides of his spine once, twice, and he settles deeper into the blanket with an appreciative groan, “-I’m getting pains just looking at it.”
She kneads into him further, spreading her hands out across his shoulder blades in a vague representation of wings as she resettles herself and he readjusts his head on his arms so he’s no longer smashing his phone between his arm and his ear as he lets her to it. Once he looks up, blinking lightly against the sun’s glare from the change, he notices the waves rolling out down the tide in the same pattern that he can hear the boys off laughing to his left, a few of them shouting out ‘ow, shit!’ and ‘gotcha!’ and vague grunts of joy and frustration as Kurt half-listens to them and half to his dad’s rolling voice through the phone.
“I’ve been remembering to clean your room, bud,” his dad is saying, and good, good-Kurt just hopes he hasn’t actually attempted re-arranging in the midst of this cleaning spree. There is certainly enough to do in the couple weeks after he gets home that don’t include putting his room back into proper order.
“Good, good-“ he trails off as a particularly tough knot in his right shoulder causes him to turn his head to the left and he sees that the boys are playing-well, something that appears to be a mix between volleyball and soccer without a net, which right, okay. At least the way that their back muscles move as they dodge and kick is appealing because he’s beginning to realize that it’s not just the cornfields in Lima, like he’s always said-people really are this ridiculous everywhere.
One of them kicks the ball into the tide then, cursing as the lot of them run after it, except the one he thinks he heard Thea call ‘Trevor,’ who jogs over to their little sunbathing corner to answer Meg’s jibe that they’ll never get anything won playing like a bunch of crazy people. When he gets close enough, Meg hops off of Kurt’s back to swat at Trevor’s shoulder and throw a friendly punch into his chest on her way to the cooler on Thea’s other side. Trevor sidesteps her, but barely, and when Kurt moves himself to look up at him, he’s laughing and poking his tongue out at Meg who flips him off as she unscrews another tea and shuts the cooler lid.
Trevor pads over to stand in front of him and Kurt shifts on one arm until he’s sitting up, re-adjusting the phone against his ear. “Hey,” he says, sitting down criss cross at Kurt’s feet, and reaching forward to slide Kurt’s sunglasses off of his nose, “I didn’t see you come down this morning.” He toys with the glasses for a moment while Kurt mutters a soft ‘uh huh’ into his phone and covers the receiver with his hand, before folding them neatly and setting them down on Kurt’s towel.
“Mmm, that’s probably because I just got here,” Kurt watches as Trevor pushes a salty strand of hair from his forehead and climbs forward until he’s weaseled into Kurt’s space, bringing his palms to the undersides of Kurt’s jaw and then pressing his mouth against the space just above where his thumb rests. Kurt feels a warm wave settle across his body and down through his legs that he can’t much attribute to the late June heat and slips his neck off to the side until Trevor can easily fit himself and his mouth in the open juncture. And he does, takes the further invite and sucks under Kurt’s ear quick and sharp before trailing his mouth and teeth all along the warm muscle that runs down to the outer edge of Kurt’s collarbone that’s still exposed from when Meg had first pushed the straps off of his shoulders to coat them in sun cream earlier.
Kurt gasps out quick and startled when he bites down on the bone and he scrambles like an unsteady colt to keep from dropping his phone into the sand. He can hear his dad’s Kurt? Everything okay? on the line and he rushes out a stuttered, “everything’s fine-,” as he bats fruitlessly at Trevor’s shoulder with the back of his other hand, leaving the arm Trevor’s got plunked down behind his back to hold him up as he attempts to fiend him off. “I’m on the phone,” he holds the phone away from his mouth and whispers, trying to dislodge Trevor’s admittedly pleasant mouth with the angle of his neck, “he’s going to hear-.”
But he just gets this stupid glint in his eyes, wild and young like his irises are swelling up with surf, and ducks his head down to mouth lower and lower until he reaches Kurt’s chest, fitting large hands under his ribs in the way that makes Kurt shiver as he eases Kurt to lay down against the blanket, Thea and Meg laughing in whispers in the background.
It’s only a second more that he lets Trevor mouth at him, then, before Thea’s voice whoops into his ears with a loud, “oh my GOD, Kurt put your pants back on!” and shit, he really sometimes hates her, he thinks, as he presses a thumb against the receiver of his phone to block the noise from his father. God forbid if he’d been here to hear this. He presses the phone face down against the blanket.
“I am on the phone with my father, oh my god he does not need a heart attack to deal with,” and there’ve been enough deaths in the family, thank you not at all, Kurt thinks, “and I am very much wearing pants, thank you.”
She laughs, snorting lightly, and Meg topples into her in the wake of her own laughter with a hasty, “You never know!”
They fall over in a giggling, swirling heap, yelping at each other unaware. “And I am going to put this phone to my ear and speak to my father and you will all not utter one word to me until I hang up,” Kurt continues, despite, “I am not above tossing those clothes in the tide, no matter how much it would pain me to do so.” They ignore him, for the most part, but it’s been said, and he notes with an amused groan that Trevor is still intent on sucking a bruise into his chest when he turns back to the task at hand.
“Sorry, dad-you know friends,” he says, quietly, hoping his father heard slim to none of that or the slick sounds of Trevor’s mouth across his skin. And he thinks idly, that he should probably stop trying so hard to multitask 24/7 if this is where it’s getting him, just as his dad says You know, I probably do-but bud I gotta go. Customer-sounds like corked up brakes. He sounds genuinely excused, which is a good sign, and Kurt sighs thankfully as he mutters a short, “bye, dad,” and hangs up the call.
“I am going to kill you all,” he says once he’s thrown the phone in the vague direction of his bag and shuffled to rest on his elbows, “you’re insufferable.” He watches Trevor right himself, fold his legs up and ruffle the sand that’s caked itself into his hair, his knee resting warm against Kurt’s own. “Sunglasses,” he holds a hand out and Trevor reaches behind him to grab them from where he’d set them, placing them neatly on Kurt’s nose instead of in his empty hand. Once they’re firmly in place Kurt blinks open for real and stretches his toes out into the hot expanse of sand at his feet. He can’t even begin to chide himself on how stupidly silly it is that he’s so in love with this place every single summer he comes back, no matter how cliché it seems. All the million little postcards his grandmother used to mail him at Christmastime and on his birthday, even the select grouping he’d stuck in a rotating frame on his desk, had never amounted to the weirdly freeing feeling he gets from being surrounded by miles and miles of the edge of the world-as if the second he steps off of the plane or onto that first cement stone of the welcome center, big sign glaring at him in vivid blue proclaiming Welcome to Florida!, Lima is but a drab and mildly unsettling memory.
Strangely enough, it’s the actual people that keep him tied to the ground. At first he’d thought that they were what had made this place so odd and new, but after he’d grown through a few more years of Lima Public School District, held his head up through a few dozen more dumpster tosses, he’d realized that the people there and the people here, everyone was nominally the same. It was just him that turned different-like a body with it’s skin inside out except instead of being frightening and wrong it felt good, safe.
He looks around at them, stupid and young like he is, wild-like tiny stars shooting around a universe that’s made of sun and sand and endless, endless amounts of water. So much that he used to swear he’d never get wet again, though he’s grown to a point that he’s almost in love with it, watching it even when he’s nominally uninterested in actually getting in it himself. He watches the boys run through it, bare feet slapping the tide, running past a little girl in jelly sandals who gathers it up in two pails that she carries on heavy arms back to a cluster of blankets and a boy with a mop of dark hair, wearing a-
Oh.
The guy from the pool yard-the moppy brunette with the tiny ankles and the pink shoulders and why is Kurt so stopped in the head by such an ordinary looking person. This boy would probably get checked into a wall in the showers at McKinley too, if the roll ups on his jeans are any indication-but somehow Kurt can’t help but watch as he laughs, his mouth open and stretched wide in amusement as the girl packs sand into the water filled bucket in a way that he clearly knows is not going to make an adequate sand tower. He’s got a book set next to him, open and earmarked, and Kurt wonders idly if that’s what he’d been busying himself with before the girl came along, or, well, he assumes that’s what had happened since the intent way he’s speaking to her just now, hands leant forward on his butterfly knees, does not make him seem like the type of person to be an inattentive babysitter.
Kurt watches him, idly, the way his hands busy themselves with the buckles on the girl’s shoe, tightening them, and the way the lines in his shirt move as his waist twists around, small and trim beneath the thin layer of cotton fabric, his smile an infectious crinkling mess on his face that makes Kurt want to lift his own lips in return.
part two