a system of touch (5/6)
masterpost
August 2010
“I’m pretty sure Thea thinks I’m crazy,” Blaine whispers, hand up by Kurt’s ear where they’re lying, tangled up together, on a blanket fashioned out of beach towels. The rest of everyone is around them, spread out across the sand-some lounging lazily, a group of the boys boogey boarding in the swell of the tide. Kurt can feel the sun beating hot above his head, the heat beginning to freckle the skin of his shoulders, though Blaine had spent nearly ten minutes lathering them with sun cream earlier. Once he gets back to school he is so not going to wear anything off the shoulder until these go away-he looks ridiculous.
Though Blaine, assumedly, thinks otherwise, as he’s been alternating between whispering, warm, into Kurt’s ear and dotting kisses to the cusp of his shoulder for the past twenty minutes. It feels-nice-if a little silly.
“Hey Kurt!” some guy is shouting, and when Kurt looks up it’s the guy he’s pretty sure is Meg’s neighbor, leaning forward from his spot by the cooler to talk to him. “Who’s your friend?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know-“ he calls back, sitting up with his hand still steady where it rests on Blaine’s thigh, and at that Blaine stirs, lifting himself up and perching his chin on the curve of Kurt’s neck.
“Mmm, is he talking about me?” he speaks it soft into Kurt’s ear, his warm breath tickling all the way into Kurt’s insides. Kurt turns his head to the side so that his chin collides with the skin of Blaine’s cheek and answers him a quick ‘yes he is’ as Blaine thumbs up and down his arm.
“So, how many booty calls is that this summer then, anyway?” the boy shouts back, unprompted, and where Kurt would usually laugh, he visibly tenses instead. He can feel Blaine beside him go stiff and then slump relaxed again like he’s not sure which is the better reaction of the two.
“Pretty sure I’m number three!” Kurt feels Blaine’s chest vibrate as he raises his voice and he watches the guy sink back to his previous conversation, strange and clearly un-deterred. After a moment, the pause continues to drag on and Kurt prays that the thick, heavy feeling in the air won’t stay. He’d like to escape this summer without having to cut his social tension through with a few dozen knives.
To abate it, he smacks Blaine lightly on the arm with a half-hearted “shut up” and follows the lock of his hand on Blaine’s arm down until he’s got him pinned to the blankets, arms up in loose surrender. “Oh my god,” he continues, batting at Blaine’s chest and leaning his face down so they’re close-so close, “Do not egg him on.”
He looks up to look Blaine in the eye, narrowing his own in amusement, but Blaine isn’t even looking at him, eyes darting from side to side like he’s not sure what to focus on or why. “Hey,” Kurt nudges, placing fingers lightly on his chin and guiding it to face him, rubbing his thumb lightly over Blaine’s lip, “what’s up?”
Blaine smiles at him, but Kurt can’t even see his teeth and that stabs him through somehow, a weird twist like Blaine Anderson’s teeth are the one and only key to gauging his happiness and how stupid is that. “Nothing,” he says, quiet and looking Kurt in the eyes now, his glinting moss-colored and far away, and Kurt leans down and kisses his mouth, but it feels empty and weird.
It’s like a full 180, Kurt thinks-like they went from hot to cold except Blaine’s not really cold he’s just lukewarm, like they’re standing in the middle of the arctic and it’s raining Midwestern summer rain and no one knows how to speak or think or what to do in the first place. He presses down harder on Blaine’s mouth, takes his upper lip in between his own the way Blaine had done to him a few nights ago, slick and stinging, but it only proves to feel like he’s mashing his mouth against a smooth replica of this guy he knows-like Blaine’s tongue is on his lips and in his mouth but it’s just his imagination somehow.
When he pulls back, Blaine is looking right through him even though his mouth is lifted up, like he’d practiced this very same move for the strict deans of his elementary private school four times a day. Sit, smile, be courteous, be absent.
“We should go,” Blaine says, smooth and unaffected, though Kurt senses the slight waver in his tone. Kurt looks around at the boys out in the water and Thea spinning a girl he doesn’t know around by the knees and wonders if they can get away unnoticed. Blaine just picks at the threads on his jeans.
“Okay, yeah-“ he says, feeling strangely like they’re about to embark on a very strange journey, “let’s go.”
--
“What the hell was that about, Blaine?” Kurt rounds on him as soon as they’ve shut the door, brain running a mile a minute from the time it’d had to stew on their veritably silent walk from the beach to the condo, “did you really feel it necessary to egg him on?”
Blaine just paces for a second, back and forth in a small box of space he’s mentally cordoned off for himself before settling on leaning against the back of the couch, arms stiff. “It’s not as if I don’t know how you usually spend your summer, okay.”
“Excuse me?” Kurt is literally reeling right now, hands freaking out in the pockets of his shorts and frantically reaching up to smooth at his bangs out of nervous, anxious habit.
Blaine retracts, “No, I mean-I just mean that you,” he pulls at his own hair, grinding out a sharp groan of frustration, “I just don’t know what to think okay.”
Kurt twitches with his fingers, watches Blaine tap tap tap with the toe of his shoe, watches his arms cross and uncross over his chest. He wants to go over there and grab his arms and press him into the couch cushions and taste his mouth, the dip of his neck, sing to him, anything. What he doesn’t want to do is stand here so far away, like they’re two stupid, separate people-which they are, but it still hurts and he can’t understand why. “So you’re letting one measly comment made by some asshole about my-my exploits, turn you into some jealous-”
“Just answer me this-” Blaine says, calculating, “am I just another number to you?”
Kurt can’t speak, but Blaine won’t look away. He wants him to-wants Blaine to look at him with dark eyes that aren’t empty and a smile that doesn’t taste like recycled chalk but he won’t and he can’t and ouch. “I never said you were a booty call Blaine, christ!”
“You never said I was anything!” Blaine’s voice is almost quiet, subdued but sharp, and it cuts through Kurt so hard that he thinks about staggering back for a moment, is endlessly glad that the walls in the condo are stone block because if he’d said that in the same volume as Kurt had let it affect him then they’d probably have all four neighbors on the doorstep in thirty seconds.
Kurt is almost dumbstruck, unsure of what to say though the back of his head is screaming at him, so he just says, “Blaine I-“ with a choke, watching Blaine’s eyes go glassy and his lip go bitten raw in a way that stretches the skin of his jaw tight over the bone. Kurt almost wishes he would just-unravel, wishes that he might fall to his knees and scream or push Kurt up against the wall or anything he could pull from any of the musicals he’s spent his entire childhood memorizing. Anything is better than this stilted, buttoned up silence that is hitting him like gigantic waves against the cusp of the midmorning shore.
Blaine just rubs a free hand across his forehead, pushing it up and into his hair. “I should just-I should go,” he says, pacing around again like he’d been in some state of disarray that he’d have to fix, as if that could distract him-no such luck. His shoes are still tied, his shirt still in place. Kurt just wants to reach over and unbutton the top buttons of his shirt, push up his hair, give him some excuse to stay longer, to stall so that maybe Kurt can think of something, anything to say.
“Blaine-,” he reaches out a hand, as if he could at all stop him, but Blaine seems almost not to notice.
“I have work-I should,” Kurt’s got his hand on Blaine’s arm, fingernails digging in almost the barest amount-though some hidden part of his subconscious is trying to make a mark. It’s as if he’s got some messed up idea that if Blaine walks out the door and he never sees him again, he’ll at least spend the next week scratching at the indented marks left in his wrist-like that’s all Kurt amounts to, in the end. Stupid, really.
In the end, Blaine’s arm slips from his grasp of it’s own accord and he just watches, so calm and almost outside of himself as Blaine looks back at him and closes the door. He wants to say something-knows he has more to say, but though the weirdly pained look in Blaine’s eyes burns him right through the middle, he just stands there and doesn’t.
--
Kurt wakes up later and the sun is nearly down. His pants are itching uncomfortably against his legs where they’re curled up, the corner of the couch resting uncomfortably against the bone of his ankles and a thin hand carding through his hair. “Kurt, honey?” he hears his grandma’s voice say, her thumb stroking against the skin behind his ear, “you okay?” Kurt at first wonders what it is he could have to be un-okay about and then he remembers all at once the empty look Blaine had given him when they’d kissed, the way Kurt couldn’t look anywhere but straight ahead as Blaine had walked past him and clicked the door shut.
Kurt doesn’t answer her, smacks his lips tightly together like he’s afraid it might leak out onto the fabric of the sofa, but he does scoot over to let her sit down gently beside his head. “Do you need me to get you anything?” she asks, and Kurt burrows his head further into the touch of her palm, “tea? A blanket?”
“I’m not sick, gram,” he looks up at her and her brows are sewn together-concerned, “I’ll be fine.” He sighs out the word, not sure he believes it himself.
“I’ll be here all weekend this time, kiddo,” she strokes a hand over his hair one more time, through his bangs, and where he’d usually reach up to fix them immediately, he can’t bring himself to bother, “if you need me.” She gets up from the couch then, allowing him to lay back out in full, and he watches her faintly from the spot as she walks to the back hallway, glancing back at him with tired eyes until he drops her gaze and shuts his own.
--
By the next morning, he feels particularly less heavy. He sends a text to Blaine around nine am, a quick i’d like to talk to you, please call me -kurt that he hopes doesn’t come off as too desperate. By the time Thea comes by to invite him to the night’s party, he’s had his breakfast and his lunch and his afternoon snack and Blaine still hasn’t called him or texted him or even, god forbid, run his bike into the front gate, so Kurt relents and goes.
The house is loud when he gets there, almost insufferably so, people and cups and clothing littered around the couches and balconies and out in the backyard and it’s not even nine o’ clock yet. A girl with a bright red ponytail shoves a drink in his hand when he passes the kitchen and he downs it in one breath, feeling the burn spread through his insides like wildfire. It feels strange to be here alone, in the midst of all of these people, which is almost stupid because he’d only been here not alone for a month at best, but he keeps walking around and every time he slides by a pair of kids making out into a couch or against a corner or a door, all he can taste is Blaine’s tongue in his mouth and the skin of his collar beneath his lips, so used to Blaine’s running commentary hot in his ear as they weave their way through the throngs.
Eventually he makes it out to the back porch where quite a number of people are dancing, swirling back and forth to the sounds of a radio set up in the corner. Kurt wouldn’t usually be one to dance, more apt to spend his time inside being straddled into the corner of the couch or swinging swishily back and forth with Thea over the drink bar. As it stands, he gets tossed into the crowd almost the moment he steps outside by a group of girls who box him in until he’s got three of them pressed up against his front, giggling, and another at his back. “You’re adorable!” one of them is saying to him, shimmying up against him in a way that is forcing him to shimmy back lest he get knocked down, but he’s pretty sure they’re drunker than he’s ever been at any of these parties because the girl behind him is noisily having a one sided conversation with his ass and, ok, no.
He’s about to plan an escape route when a firm arm grabs onto his and suddenly he’s being shimmied up against a chest covered in soft cotton and strong arms and thankfully the body attached is not screeching at him. “Thank god, thank you,” he says, and the guy just laughs a deep laugh, keeps them moving in time with the music.
“It’s not a problem,” Kurt looks at him for real and his smile is winsome, flirty and charming, and he’s as tall as Finn except without the bumbling awkwardness that Finn seems to have picked up in droves. He fits against the guy just fine, the tips of his hair hitting against the guy’s chin, but as they move, Kurt can’t help but think that having Blaine tucked up into him might be better, the way that their mouths might just barely line up, or how Kurt could grind down a few inches at most and be brushing eyelashes. Right now he’s breathing hot into this guy’s neck, which yes, is nice and yes, smells like the good kind of cologne and sweat and salt, but it’s largely impersonal-though he knows it’s stupid to be comparing the two.
The stupidity of it all makes him bold, though, makes his hips twist down and his arms come up to lock around the guy’s neck like Brittany had taught him to do last year when he’d been helping her in her ongoing plan to usurp the glee club throne through the power of ‘sexy dancing.’ At the time he’d mostly found it amusing-and a way to get back at Rachel, had it actually worked-but now he’s finding it incredibly useful.
After five, ten, fifteen minutes, the guy is like putty in his lap. They’ve shifted from the center to the outer edge of the group, but Kurt feels like he’s about to get swimmer’s legs from how much he’s been swaying his hips and his heartbeat is going fast from the feeling of the guy’s dick growing more and more interested against his thigh. It feels like power, like he’s someone special like Santana or Brittany, or, god, even Quinn, who can bat their eyes and flick their hips and all the world is at their feet in an instant.
It’s almost sickening to him sometimes how much that entire scenario actually works.
Before he knows it he’s being tugged around by the waist, pulled behind and in front of the guy in a startling dance until the curve of his spine is pressed flat against the wall and he’s being crowded in by a pair of spicy-sweet smelling arms. He’s trapped, feeling dizzy and claustrophobic all of a sudden because he imagines himself as Blaine, and he’s this stupid kid getting backed up against a stone wall in the middle of the night and it’s not this guy’s body but his own that’s pressing him in.
The guy presses even further, mashing his lips against Kurt’s and thrusting his tongue into his mouth and Kurt is thinking aimlessly that there used to be something so freeing about this, so raw and real and stupid, but now it just feels awkward, like he’s trying on a shoe of the wrong size, wherein this guy with big arms and a rough, pushing tongue is apparently the size five, and stupid, frustrating, gorgeous Blaine is the slide-in perfect size eleven.
Except now that the guy is into it, Kurt’s not sure how to stop the whole ordeal. He pushes with his palms against the guy’s warm chest, a “hey, hey-stop,” muffled into his mouth, but he neither registers it nor relents and Kurt is losing his ground quickly as the guy’s hands become more and more acquainted with the skin just inside the waist of his pants.
It’s as if by magic, then, that he feels the guy’s body being tugged away from him. When he rights his vision, it’s Thea tugging at the back of the guy’s t-shirt with fisted hands and giving him a sassed, “do not-next time you fucking listen when a boy says no,” as she presses him, staggering, into the crowd. He doesn’t so much as glance back and Kurt pauses to catch his breath. As he steps forward, though, he feels his balance falter and Thea reaches out to steady him. “Slow, slow there baby-don’t outdo yourself,” she’s saying, voice like a mother’s.
“Mm, I guess I had a bit more to drink than I thought-“ Kurt’s head is swirling, and how did he not notice that earlier, “thanks, though.”
Thea pats him affectionately on the side as she leads them down into a small hill of sand just under the deck. The moon shines on the space in slats from through the deck rails and it makes Kurt want to stare forever, but he plops down anyway. “So are you gonna tell me what’s up with you?” Thea prods, nosing at his upper arm and looking up at him through her lashes.
“Mmm, maybe,” he says, snuggling his head further into her shoulder, digging his toes into the wet sand, “I don’t know.” Thea just continues to look at him, calculated like she’s trying to read his mind through the haze of his boozy eyes, trying to open him up and unwrap his secrets. After a few minutes he sighs and relents, “He thinks I’m using him.”
“Who thinks-Blaine?” Kurt’s not looking at her when she looks over again, but she feels him nod into her shoulder, soft but sure. “Are you?”
“Can’t-“ Kurt makes an exasperated motion and sighs into his own hands, “he’s so nice Thea.” She pets sweetly at his hair, his neck, his back-anything to rub away the mounds of tension visible under his skin. Above them, chattering and the knocking of shoes against the wood plank reigns, but Kurt just listens to the sound of his own breath going in and out, in and out as Thea brushes her hand across his back a few times before using his shoulder as leverage to push to her feet.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” Kurt can feel her hawking him, like she’s worried he might curl in on himself and disappear, which, he’s certain he’s not quite that pathetic yet, “you want anything?” He just shrugs in response, slow, and watches her round back to the stairs and go inside.
In the interim, he mostly sits and breathes, lets the salt of the air collect in his lungs and fill him up-pointedly doesn’t let it remind him of the salt of Blaine’s mouth or the time he’d been pinned and covered in sand at the base of the tide swell, if only because he’s at the point where his anger is less of an anger and more of a hurt. He thinks stupidly about how it feels so different to be this isolated part of an equation now-so strange after years of being such a useful part of the ever-bubbling throng of life on the island. It’s weird, the thought that when you get a focused purpose, suddenly your meaning becomes almost null and void in the grander scheme of things-though it doesn’t make him feel empty as much as he thought it would.
When Thea finally rounds the corner again, she’s got a cup in one hand and a small, square palm in the other. Kurt follows the palm up to an arm and a shoulder and neck that’s connected to none other than Blaine Anderson, who’s got a small dazed smile on his face and wide, searching eyes and Kurt feels his chest tighten in response. He doesn’t speak, but watches Blaine’s mouth slack open instead.
“Look who I found guarding the drink cooler-“ Thea is saying, nudging at Blaine to move in front of her, “small world, eh?” She smirks, pressing Blaine’s shoulder to sit him down mere inches from where Kurt’s arm is resting, and Kurt almost hates her right now, or would if his heart wasn’t busy prattling against the skin of his chest. Blaine isn’t looking at him, but at his hands. “My assistance is needed indoors though, so-“ she inches backward, watching them for seconds as if to make sure that Kurt doesn’t stab Blaine to death with a coral strip or something.
Kurt looks to his own hands, and by the time he looks back up, she’s gone, only her footprints in the sand remaining. Blaine still sits in reticent silence, twirling his fingers around each other and looking for all the world like his hair had just been put in a very aggressive blender.
“Sorry,” Blaine says, quick and quiet and almost out of thin air. Kurt doesn’t reply, just keeps his gaze down. Both of them do, as if a third party had uttered the word entirely.
“Look, Blaine I just-“ Kurt is saying then, except Blaine cuts him off near immediately.
“No, let me--,” his voice is soft like a child’s, cool and calm in the night air, “it was stupid of me to-to assume those things about you, okay?” Kurt doesn’t reply, but he spares a glance at Blaine’s face for the first time since they’d been sat down together and it feels like confirmation. “I just didn’t know what to-I was just feeling stupid about the whole thing, really.”
“Yeah,” Kurt says, slow, “I shouldn’t have-I do like you, Blaine, I’ve just-“ he cuts off, unsure as to whether he should subject himself to say what comes next.
“I’ve never had a boyfriend-“ they both say, at near the exact same time, Kurt just going for the kill and Blaine filling in his assumed gap, and after they’ve realized, they just laugh.
“Well, we’re idiots,” Blaine says between laughs into his hand, eyes crinkled up and looking at Kurt over the bridge of his forearm. Kurt laughs back and it makes him feel dizzy, but in a good way.
In the end, it just makes him feel positively silly, like he made the whole thing up in his head somehow, even though he knows he didn’t. But he relaxes, breaths out a heavy sigh as Blaine leans his head down into Kurt’s neck for a moment and says, “Mm, you smell like lemons.” It’s almost assuredly the Limoncello margarita slushie concoction he’d been mixed earlier, but he doesn’t tell Blaine that, least of all when he’s nosing lazily in the curve of Kurt’s collarbone.
“I hear you like that,” he says instead, smirking around the words.
--
“You know, I refuse to believe that you and your grandmother are related,” Kurt laughs into his cup of coffee, rounding past Blaine on the sidewalk. Blaine gives him a look.
“What? Why?”
“She’s just far too nice,” Kurt is aware he’s being a brat right now, but it’s all out of want for fun, really. Blaine can take it. He snickers down into his coffee lip, the liquid bubbling into his open mouth as Blaine swats at his arm.
“I don’t know why I put up with you,” Blaine says, nudging into Kurt’s shoulder with his own, but laughing softly around it, his eyes sleepy and warm. They’ve been walking for the past half of an hour or so, in quiet lulls interrupted by sharp bursts of conversation as the sun climbs lazily in the sky. They’d gotten coffee at some free trade place by the bay bridge, waited by the door until it had opened and then stepped inside just as the whir of the espresso machines had been building into a quiet lull. Blaine had kissed him, light and soft and then with increasing force against someone’s back fence and Kurt had squirmed, hot, at the soft itch in his brain that anyone could just walk out right now and see them, their tongues stained with heavy latte and mingling warm and wet between their mouths.
Now, they just keep walking, winding their way back to Kurt’s condo with hands that slip occasionally into pockets because Kurt’s grandmother is gone until five and they can touch in the kitchen or the entryway or Kurt’s bedroom uninterrupted for as long as they want and the thought of it feels so open and refreshing-like they have all the time in the world, though Kurt knows they don’t at all.
Once they get through the gate and up the stairs, Kurt’s coffee has gone lukewarm, but Blaine’s drinking it, pressed up against his back as he turns the key and lets them both inside. What Kurt forgets, or forgets until Blaine stops and looks at it, is the stack of open suitcases he has piled on the couch. “What’s that for?” he asks, standing still but keeping his voice steady like he’s unaffected, calm like the idea is conversational. Kurt wants to wrap him up and turn his head and forget about it instead, like he’d been doing until last night, as if his impending return to Lima, Ohio won’t happen if he doesn’t acknowledge it.
Kurt scratches nervously at the back of his neck, “I’m, uh-I’m leaving on Saturday, actually.” Blaine doesn’t speak for a second afterward and it makes heat twist uncomfortably in Kurt’s gut.
When Blaine does speak, all he says is a quiet ‘oh,’ and Kurt just wants to take it all back, to stay out until Blaine had to go to work. He walks up behind Blaine instead, takes his stiff shoulders in long fingered hands and twists him gently around until their noses nearly touch. “Hey,” he says, smile small and reassuring, even when he feels slightly queasy underneath, “c’mon, happy thoughts.” At that, Kurt leans forward and presses his nose to Blaine’s, smiling broader with their mouths so close and he hears Blaine begin to hum lightly under his breath-a tune that he recognizes immediately from Peter Pan and he just erupts into a quick fit of giggles.
“Oh my god,” he’s saying, leaning against the couch as laughter bubbles through him, “you can’t just-.“ Blaine just smirks softly and sings in full now, a rousing any happy little thought as he pivot spins on the ball of his foot. “I was trying to be sweet and you just ruined it, oh my god,” Blaine pivots into his space, then, and tips a hand under Kurt’s quivering chin.
“Mm, you’ll just have to get over that then, won’t you-“ he says, eyes like sparks and mouth quirked up before he spins away again and swings off in the direction of Kurt’s bedroom.
“I cannot believe you just-“ Kurt says before he notices the tick-tock of Blaine’s hips moving away from him, “hey, where are you going?”
“Well since we don’t have much time--,” he hears Blaine call as he’s striding after him and down the hall, though Blaine doesn’t look back, not that Kurt would notice if he turned his head, anyway, since his eyes follow the swaying line of his hips. Once he gets to the doorway of Kurt’s room, though, Blaine stops and leans himself against the doorframe by his elbow, looking at Kurt coquettishly through thick lashes and a boyish grin, “I just figured we could make the most of it.” Kurt figures that he could feel the underlying implication a mile away, and in this moment, looking at Blaine-gorgeous and stupid and young, like a curious fire that Kurt hasn’t yet had to watch go out-he wholeheartedly agrees.
--
“I am severely questioning your idea of making the most of it,” Kurt is saying, brushing his bangs from where they’ve fallen into his eyes again. His ankles are cold from standing in the bay for the past half hour, but Blaine is laughing sweetly in front of him and it makes Kurt’s insides feel warm, even if he does feel nominally ridiculous flitting around Blaine’s backyard in just his high waists.
Blaine just keeps steadily moving around him with his camera raised, motioning softly for him to shift his arm to the side when it catches a strange angle. “Mm, are you now?” he says, and Kurt can hear the teasing in his voice, wants to lunge forward and push him to the dock and kiss the stupid grin right off of his face. He can’t though without messing up the shots, so he resigns himself to flirting his eyes just that much more through Blaine’s lens. It’s a triumphant moment when he lowers his lashes and hears Blaine’s breath catch on an inhale.
“Definitely,” he says, not moving except for his mouth around the edge of the word, “I’d much rather be making out right now.”
Blaine stops at that, lowers his camera and smirks at Kurt with the side of his lip, “With anyone in particular?”
Kurt just shrugs noncommittally, and then moves from the spot he’s standing and up onto the grass, passing Blaine who’s got his hand rested still on his hip, eyes following Kurt’s motion. “You know what, I have to uh-“ he says, smiling through words that mean probably nothing at all, and saunters off towards the unlocked back door, laughing to himself when Blaine catches him just inside the frame.
“You’re ridiculous,” Blaine is saying, mouth and body close, nearly pinning Kurt to the doorframe. Kurt leans in at first like he’s going to kiss him, but stops just short of it.
“You mean ridiculously good looking,” Blaine rolls his eyes good-naturedly at that, grinning into Kurt’s mouth as Kurt captures his lips in a short, sharp burst of a kiss. Blaine’s grandmother is just outside the front door, could look inside and see them flirting warm against the wood of the back entryway, mouths moving against each other, but he can’t bring himself to care much at all at this point. When he moves in for another, Blaine cups a hand against his bent elbows and tugs them forward until Kurt’s torso is pressed along his own and for the moments that follow, Kurt stumbles clumsily over Blaine’s feet as Blaine drags them further into the house and locks the door without breaking their kiss.
Kurt pulls away when Blaine laughs, watching Blaine’s eyes crinkle up with childish amusement, proud of his own accomplishment of his devious mid-afternoon plans. And then Blaine is shushing his mouth and grabbing his wrists and they’re tripping over each other again until Blaine pulls him deftly into an unlocked room. A slight shiver runs through him at the touch of the fan’s circulation against his bare skin and Kurt cups his arms around his waist, watching as Blaine pulls his shirt over his head from the bottom.
“C’mere,” Blaine quirks a finger at him and Kurt follows his retreating figure until his knees are thumping softly into the edge of Blaine’s bed and he’s following Blaine down onto it, kneeling, unbalanced, between Blaine’s legs as he scoots himself backward, stopping only when his back hits the cool plaster of the wall. Kurt keeps dipping further into him, though, bringing his head and his hands and his chest down until he’s sucking at Blaine’s lip and his hands are cupping against the stiff of Blaine’s jaw. It’s sweet and rough at the same time, laced with a fierce intent that Kurt lets consume him somewhere deep in the pit of his gut, the feeling swirling him warm with arousal.
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” Blaine says, and Kurt wants to shut him up before he starts, because if this becomes ‘I miss you preemptively’ sex, he’s going to spend the rest of his life jerking off to the idea of Blaine crying, even if he knows that the former in inevitable. He’s leaving. It happens.
He can pretend to forget for a while, though, when Blaine edges up so his hands are like wings against Kurt’s back, his tongue swiping the roof of Kurt’s mouth in quick strokes. “Don’t-shh,” Kurt gives him, hushing digits pressed against his neck, and at that Blaine opens his eyes wide, as if he was trying to let as much into them as possible-like storage for later days. His pupils are so wide that Kurt can see himself reflected back in the space and sheen of them and it makes him want to hang on and never let go, but he kisses back into Blaine again instead, looping their lips together like tiny pink ribbons.
They kiss like that for a while, two minutes that turn into five that turn into ten, sweet and soppy enough that Kurt longs to mop the floor with a paper napkin just to see if it’d come up pink. Blaine cuts into them with a faintly muttered ‘fuck it,’ and edges Kurt around until he’s staring up at Blaine from where he’s shoved into the haphazard pile of bed-pillows at the head of the bed. “I want to try something,” Blaine hesitates around the words, running his thumbs just under the hem of Kurt’s shorts until the top button begins to loosen.
Kurt melts back-he’d said near-exactly those words to the first straight boy he’d ever jerked off at a party, the feeling of a dick in his hand buzzy and hot and thrilling in a way that made him feel rebellious, though he probably wasn’t. He’d said it soft and, if he’s being honest, mostly to himself, but the way Blaine says it is focused and juts straight through him, the feeling sharp like an invisible knife that spreads blood warm from the wound out to the tips of his toes and fingers.
He doesn’t say anything back, but he does tip his head, baring his neck, and reaches down to fumble along with Blaine on the buttons of his shorts. Eventually Blaine gives up on Kurt’s and goes for his own, pulling the zip down quickly and wiggling them down past his ankles and off the bed in the time it takes Kurt to get the final three buttons undone. Once they’re undone, Blaine hooks warm hands against Kurt’s hips and pulls at his shorts, leaving Kurt’s underwear ajar and held up mostly by the bulge of his dick once they’ve joined Blaine’s own at the foot of the bed.
When Blaine gets back to him, he presses his mouth straight to the stretch of skin above Kurt’s arousal, mouth hot as he looks up at him from under his crop-duster eyelashes. Kurt pets a soft thumb across his hairline and Blaine leans into it, his smile contented and momentarily distracted from where it’s pressed loose against his stomach.
“Mm, so what is this something?” Kurt asks, fingers slipping through Blaine’s hair as Blaine tugs his waistband down over his hips, and he can’t help but notice that Blaine’s eyes don’t so much as stray from their open-eyed latch on his cock.
“You’ll see--” Blaine says, ducking to suck a line up the underside of him and Kurt feels all the tingling in his limbs centralize itself until all he can think of is the overwhelming urge to grind down against Blaine’s wet mouth. Blaine just mouths around him like he’s teasing, moving up just momentarily to suck on the head once before pulling his mouth back and stumbling off the side of the bed by way of his arms.
Kurt has a momentary gut reaction of ‘hey, hey no, come back’, and he reaches a quick grabby hand out to Blaine along with a groan of frustration as Blaine trips over his own feet on his way away from the bed and over to the adjacent bathroom of sorts.
“One sec, one sec,” Blaine keeps repeating, like a record that scratches but won’t stop, as he rummages stiffly through a deep-face drawer under the sink. Kurt tingles hot all over and barely resists reaching down to rub the heel of his palm over his cock before Blaine trips back in his direction, small pot of something clear firmly in hand.
When he pushes himself back over Kurt he holds the pot out to him like a prize and Kurt backs his head up for a moment to make out the words ‘petroleum jelly’ etched on the side in a swirling, feminine script. Blaine’s accompanying smirk is clearly lascivious and the sight of it makes Kurt’s insides curl up tight and hot with possibility.
“Mess with this,” Blaine says, dropping the jelly on his stomach and sitting back on his haunches to take his underwear off. Kurt isn’t really sure what he means by that, so he settles mostly for opening the lid and dipping his fingers in a few times, his mind too preoccupied with the visual of Blaine slowly peeling the red of his briefs down the cream of his thighs until he’s left completely and utterly and stupidly naked and all Kurt can think to do is fit hands around his waist and pull him down so they’re flush chest to chest, limbs and cocks and wrists lined up all the way down to their toes.
Kurt kisses him once, twice-- sloppy pepper kisses on his chin and his jaw that taste like sun cream and Kurt’s violet gum-- before grabbing Blaine’s wrists in a slick shift and flipping them so he’s leaning over Blaine, knees bent and the jelly pot smashed uncomfortably between their thighs. “Mm, how about we do it my way,” he toys, taking his still slightly wet fingers and dragging them down the length of Blaine’s sternum, watching as the light path from the windows illuminates the sheen in his wake. Blaine looks gorgeous like this, spread out, arms slack and up, and Kurt wants to climb him and crawl into him and just conveniently forget that he has glee club and family and his stupid junior year to attend to back in Lima, Ohio.
He takes the pot of jelly in his hand instead and smears a good bit on a hand that he brings down between them to Blaine’s cock, taking it in his grasp and dragging his slick fingers up and down a few times for emphasis as he bends his spine down until his mouth is exhaling hot over Blaine’s.
After mere moments of Kurt swallowing the mid-pitched whine of Blaine’s groans into his throat and down into his whole body, all of it happens at once. Kurt pulls his hand back, leverages himself up onto his hands, and slides so that the line of his ass is directly nestled over Blaine’s petroleum slick cock.
Then he moves.
All at once he rips a long moan out of Blaine’s throat, warm and sharp with his mouth dropped open in a gorgeous ‘o’ and a repeated muttering of ‘fuck, Kurt, fuck fuck--’ spilling out from behind his teeth. Kurt’s rocking his hips back and forth in a syrupy rhythm-- can feel the slick drag of Blaine’s cock pulsing between his cheeks-- and he feels so in control he’s nearly drunk with it, like all those times he’d let boys push him into dark corners and then turned them around and climbed on top and just claimed them, made them some semblance of a property of his own.
The difference is that Blaine is feels like his. He doesn’t look captured, not like Kurt’s broken his wings or forced him down, but he looks content to be so claimed, content to lie back and whisper curse words into his arm and grip his hands in the sheets and just feel. Kurt wonders how much different this would feel if he were actually riding Blaine right now, and at the thought of it he almost can’t speak, so he doesn’t.
What he does do is lean down to Blaine’s collarbone and latch on with the suction of his teeth, nipping at the bone with the rhythm of his hips and listening to Blaine breathe out ‘Kurt, I-- Kurt I can’t’ as he grinds down harder, the end of it coming out on a particularly loud moan that leaves Blaine gripping to Kurt’s arms with blunt fingernails that are sure to leave a mark.
“Ungh--” Blaine is blissed, voice rough around the sounds, “I wish we could stay like this forever.” Kurt’s insides knot up around the sound of the words, his brain going cloudy because yes-- yes-- but he knows he can’t.
He imagines Blaine as if he hadn’t met him here, then-- imagines him in stupid, tiny Lima Ohio-- maybe he’d work at the bookshop, a mall kiosk, the Lima Bean. Maybe Kurt would meet him over the heat of a french roast, the air outside crisp and chill and both of them none the wiser, maybe Blaine would still be young, maybe he’d go to McKinley High and be one of the few who’d talk to Kurt in french class, maybe he’d join the glee club.
“Forever is an awfully long time,” he says, punctuating the words with a nip along Blaine’s jaw and a particularly slow thrust backward, feeling the heat building and building still in the pit of his gut, threatening to consume him, his own cock leaking red in between their stomachs.
“It is,” Blaine whispers, voice steady in the chaotic air, “It really is.”
--
“So three of these are packed, and then I have to do my flight check in this afternoon,” Kurt is saying, running his list down to Thea who’s making vague noises of understanding at him over the phone. He’s been packing all afternoon, neatly folding shirts and ties and button-ups into his three full-size suitcases laid out on the living room floor. Somehow he feels like he’s packed more clothes this year than any other year previous, which cannot be possible because he knows for a fact that he spent a lot more money on dry cleaning the slushie stain out of his clothes this year than he did on actually purchasing new ones, but who knows.
“Mm, so how’s Blaine doing?” Kurt checks off a few more points on his list before speaking.
“Um, fine?”
“No, I mean how is he doing with the--,” she prods, trailing off, though Kurt can imagine the hand gesture she makes. He drops the shirt he’s folded into the smallest suitcase and shoves it over slightly, sitting down in the space it makes.
“It’s-I don’t know,” he isn’t really sure what to say because, in the end, he isn’t really sure what to think. He has no real obligation to Blaine, but he does, stupidly enough-and at this point he’s become these two separate people that are at the point of being way too difficult to keep separate, especially around Blaine with his almond paste eyes and his warm hands and the stupid things he says sometimes and Kurt just wants him to exist for real in Kurt’s other life-to be some sweet, idiotic dreamboat of a boy who says nice things to him and waits for him in the halls instead of this guy on vacation who makes Kurt forget that there’s anything more to life than being kissed at four o’ clock in the afternoon, but who Kurt ultimately has to leave behind. “It’s just hard, Thea-“ he ends up deciding on, “I’m not sure how else to think of it.”
“Yeah,” she says, faraway like she understands, but Kurt figures she probably doesn’t, even if that’s a bitter thing to assume, “don’t forget about the party tonight, though, boo-last one.”
“We’ll be there,” Kurt is busying his free hand with the frays on the fabric of the suitcase next to him absently, for something to do.
“I’ll see you, okay?” Thea says after the wait of a few empty seconds, “and Kurt?”
“Yeah?” the condo is empty, his grandmother out at a brunch. From outside the slat blinds the sun shines in in long stripes but the room feels so ominous and cold, even though he’s warm.
“He’ll miss you too.”
--
By the time he and Blaine get to Thea’s house that night, they look an utter mess. Blaine had met him at the front gate just before sunset and he’d soon found himself in a game of who could press the other against the stone of the condo gate wall harder or longer or whatever stakes Blaine was playing for. At this point, his neck is thoroughly bruised, a peppering of bites under the span of his chin and even more just under the mussed up hairline on the back of Blaine’s neck.
In Thea’s front room, people are swarming all around them, half naked and half drunk and a few sleeping booze-induced on the edges of the adjacent staircase in a way that makes Kurt definitely not want to venture to any of the rooms upstairs, even if Thea had cheekily offered him her own last weekend. Really, though, he’s fairly sure that he’s desperate enough for the taste of the inside of Blaine’s mouth that he’d try for it over the sticky slat of the kitchen table if no one was objecting to it too loudly. Blaine’s hand sandwiched in the back pocket of his jeans as they shove through the crowd is telling him that it’s highly likely that he feels the exact same.
When they pass the counter on the way to the basement, Blaine grabs an uncapped bottle of rum, presses his thumb over it as they smuggle it down the stair in a fit of soft laughter and at the foot of the stairs, presses a warm finger to Kurt’s lips with an exaggerated ‘shh’ and takes a quick swig, passing it lazily into Kurt’s dropped open mouth as soon as he pulls the digit back. Quickly enough, the sharing turns to actual kissing, and Kurt can feel the sticky substance drip onto the front of his shirt, but he can’t bring himself to care even a little bit.
“You’re getting me messy,” he says instead, pouting mockingly.
“Mm, this?” Blaine asks, licking a sharp line up his throat, “I just call it improvement.”
--
Much later on, Kurt finds himself shucking off his own pants, watching with lowered gaze as Blaine strips off his own t-shirt and unbuttons his shorts, throwing them in a haphazard pile at Kurt’s feet and taking a running leap into the tide in underwear that come out soaked through and dark red where they were once bright.
“You’re insane!” Kurt laughs, folding his pants and setting them on the pile, tucking his arms around himself as his bare skin gets used to the evening breeze, “I can’t believe I like you!”
Blaine just splashes himself around, throwing his body into the water like an over-exuberant fish before swimming out a little further so he can float, weightless, in the din. Kurt walks hesitantly forward on bare feet that sink, heavy, into the sand, stopping only when he hits the lips of the water, letting the fronts of his feet wash with the swell of water that encompasses them. After a few swells in and out, Blaine shows up close to where he stands, beaming up at him with teeth big and white and eyes that would make Kurt press him down into the sand were they anywhere else. “C’mon,” he says, soft, reaching up to touch at Kurt’s toes.
Through his tipsy haze, Kurt fancies him some sort of merman, this stupid, beautiful thing who enticed him, latched onto him until he couldn’t even remember how to let go. Kurt wants to drown himself-to kiss Blaine under the water’s edge until they can’t even take a breath.
Eventually, he lets himself walk further in, one foot in front of the other until the water hits his thighs and he slides down to sit with his knees brushing Blaine’s. It’s cold, the water a shock to his exposed legs and arms and stomach, but Blaine reaches forward and rests warm palms against the undersides of Kurt’s ribs and Kurt feels suddenly seeping warm all over.
“We’re missing the party,” Kurt says, teeth chattering around the words as Blaine rubs his palms up and down Kurt’s sides, shifts closer so that their noses brush between them.
“Maybe we are the party,” Blaine’s eyes are hot and wide, his limbs warming the cool water and Kurt is suddenly unaware that he’s wrapped in a thousand layers of nothing out here in the tide of some beach backyard, “I just want to sit here and miss you.”
The words pang like a stab to Kurt’s gut and Kurt looks down at the water swirling around his hands instead, watching it ebb in and out from clear to black as it hits the shards of the moon’s midnight pattern. He feels drunk with it-- is kind of drunk anyway-- enough to fancy himself some misplaced merman who’d grown land legs for far too long. He imagines himself with the gleaming hint of a tail, the wiles of a scorned temptress, wonders if maybe that would make the whole truth of it hurt less.
And as Blaine kisses him, reaches wet, sopping hands under his chin and pulls Kurt’s pinked bottom lip in between his own, Kurt isn’t just a little boy from the stupid Midwest, he’s a moon goddess, a sun catcher, a swirling mixture of all the kids who ever wanted to be something somewhere at some point in history.
And if he lets Blaine believe that the hot drop of his tears is just the mingling spread of water on his cheekbones, no one will ever know.
--
The following morning is bright against Kurt’s face as he loads suitcases into his grandmother’s trunk. For some undetermined reason, the headache that usually follows rum and noise and whatever else he took in last night isn’t there, but he’s not complaining because waking up at seven this morning to get showered and dressed for the flight home was strenuous enough for one day.
His grandmother is just starting up the car when Blaine shows up at the end of the driveway. Kurt’s breath jerks in his chest when he sees him, hair loose and face sleepy against the mid-morning sun, and he finds himself smiling and calling out a quick ‘hi’ as Blaine walks over.
“Hi, yourself,” Blaine says, grinning sheepishly with his hands fidgeting at his sides, at first reaching out to touch at Kurt’s waist and then withdrawing when he realizes they have company. Kurt keeps his own hands on his bag strap, running them up and down, imagines himself doing the same thing come fall-imagines this whole scenario somehow transported to the steps of the McKinley courtyard and then mentally smacks himself at how idiotic the whole idea is. Instead, he focuses on the long tips of Blaine’s eyelashes and the flush of his cheeks as if he’s been running here all morning, the skin blooming with color.
“Kurt? I forgot my travel card inside,” his grandmother moves from where she’d been setting up the car’s functions and steps out onto the cement, “when I get back we have to head out, okay?” She gives them a pointed look, swapping between the two for a moment before turning and walking back up the stairwell. It leaves them alone-alone enough that Blaine’s fingers find their way to the dip of Kurt’s waist almost immediately. Kurt turns his head back and Blaine is so close, his mouth slack and pink.
“I’ll be back next year,” Blaine says, and Kurt tries not to think ‘I miss you’ or ‘I need you’ or ‘I might not be’ because they only have so much time left in this tiny square of cement, so many seconds that make up bare minutes. Kurt just wants to kiss him and forget about it, so he leans forward and presses his lips to Blaine’s open mouth, tasting the sharp sensation of coffee and the warmth of sleep on Blaine’s tongue.
They kiss sweetly like that for a few minutes more, Kurt leaning back into the hand Blaine rests on his back, letting his carryon slide slowly off of his shoulder until they fail to register the small thud of it hitting the ground beneath their feet. Only the click of Kurt’s grandmother’s heels nearby breaks them apart, and Blaine clutches reluctantly to Kurt’s hand as Kurt pulls away. Half of Kurt expects him to do something rash like scream or cry or sing of his undying devotion as Kurt is climbing into the passenger’s seat, but Kurt watches him with sharp-trained eyes and all he can see are lowered eyelashes and legs that look leaden to their spot, as if the soles of his shoes had been super-glued there.
The whir of the engine makes his stomach flip as he stares openly at Blaine through the windshield glass. Blaine’s face is turned towards his phone, and Kurt kind of wishes he would look up again, so Kurt could see more than just the looping curls at his forehead and the jittering motion of his thumbs across the keypad. Maybe Kurt should text him so, but he doesn’t.
It isn’t until they’re fully out of the drive, ready to take the toll over the bridge, that Kurt’s phone buzzes softly in his lap. He opens it to find a text from Blaine. It just says <3.
--
“Kurt, why do you have to have so many clothes?” Finn is asking, dutifully hanging up the shirts Kurt hangs him in a move that is both sort of annoying and not something Kurt thought Finn would ever do, “I mean, dude-I totally get by on like five clean shirts.” Kurt looks up at him, eyebrow quirked-because, no. “Ok, so-mostly clean,” Finn finishes, turning back to his task like a dog who’s just admitted he sleeps on the kitchen table.
“Finn, please-“ Kurt hands him another shirt, and then a stack of shorts, neatly folded, “just accept that I’m superior to you in all sartorial ways. It’s not even a question anymore. You will lose.” He’s finished unpacking the third of his larger cases, then, and he moves to the small pile of bagged luggage, taking the largest of the four and up-turning it on the bed so its contents empty out-since he’s pretty sure all that’s in it is a vast collection of summer scarves. It’s to his surprise that as he gives the bag a final shake, a small woven shell bracelet falls out onto the heap.
His breath catches in his throat for a moment, stilling, and he reaches down to pick it up, turn it over and over again in his palm. He wonders absently when Blaine had really had the chance to lose this in the midst of his things, if he’d maybe let it fall off that time Kurt had pinned him to the edge of the dresser or if by some strange chance he’d planted it in Kurt’s luggage on purpose. Either way, it just makes his body chill, limbs tingling with the memory of cool water lapping at his chest, of Blaine’s hot breath against the curve of his neck, the faint bruise he’d left that last night and how Kurt had touched it stupidly the entire plan ride home, as if it had been some magic button that could somehow bring Blaine back to his time and his place.
But that was just the thing-Blaine was stuck like he was stuck. It wasn’t something he’d let himself realize all summer, the idea that it wasn’t him alone that had become this strange combination of two separate people, and maybe that’s what gets them through, maybe that’s what fucks it up-who knows.
“Um, Kurt?” Finn is saying, and suddenly his voice is so much more in focus. Kurt looks over at him, his expression slightly bemused, “um, are you okay?”
“Huh?” Kurt says, dropping the bracelet back on the heap where he’d grabbed it from and hastily moving to fold a shirt, “no, no-yeah I’m fine.”
part six