a system of touch (6/6)
masterpost
Epilogue: November 2010
Sectionals is both hectic and exciting-as usual. Rachel is running around doing vocal exercises, Finn is spaced out next to her, Brittany is doing what Kurt thinks is some weird form of a French braid on Quinn’s hair and Quinn is, for all intents and purposes, mostly ignoring her. As much as Kurt loves these people sometimes, they kind of drive him up a wall-specifically a wall that makes him need excess caffeine-which is why he finds himself currently on the hunt for wherever the planners of this year’s event had placed the ever-sought after coffee table.
He spots the familiar line of brushed steel coffee urns out by the main lobby and makes a beeline for it-shoving his way through the ever moving throng of show choir students and directors and parents in a way that makes him glad he’s wearing a costume and not some outfit of his own personal choosing-not that he doesn’t look good in it.
Surrounding the coffee table is a group of boys in matching blue blazers, the cut of which Kurt is not at all impressed with. They look like buttoned up church choir boys, except with animated hand gestures and much more laughter than Kurt ever imagined choir boys to have. Kurt pushes his way around a few of them to collect a cup before moving to fill it up at the nearest of the urns, careful not to let any of it drip onto his fingers. While he’s busy meticulously opening and adding packets of low-grade creamer to his decidedly abysmal looking coffee, an elbow throws into his side and knocks him off balance to the point that his flying fingers almost knock over his cup of semi-cream coffee.
“Hey, watch where you’re-“ he rounds around on the idiot who though it smart to throw limbs around near a coffee station, except when he turns around to fully bitch face at him, he looks up and it’s-Blaine, “uh-hi.”
Blaine looks frozen on the spot, and different in a way that reminds Kurt of how he’d apparently correctly assessed him as a buttoned up private school boy. Kurt just stares, running his eyes up and down because he’s not sure what to say or what to think at all-his contact with Blaine in the past couple of months has been limited mostly to offhand texts asking about his day-or the time he’d gotten so tired he’d thought it a good idea to send off I really want to kiss you right now. He definitely wants to now.
“You look--,” Blaine chokes out, “wow, you look good.” Blaine keeps running his eyes up and down and Kurt feels like he’s completely and utterly naked.
He can’t remember how to think. “Nice-tie,” he says instead, noting the slightly ribbed blue and red of Blaine’s tie, folded crisp into his jacket with it’s hideous red piping. The tie isn’t spectacular, not even noteworthy, really, but he doubts Blaine is even thinking about the lie.
Blaine shifts a step closer, saying a short, ‘thanks’ under his breath and reaching up with hands Kurt’s tried so hard to forget to grab the ends of Kurt’s collar and pull him down into a soft kiss. From behind them, Blaine’s blazer clad friends go silent, but the crowd around them continues on, not that Kurt notices. Blaine’s tongue is sweet against his lips and Kurt thinks that he tastes like salt even though he probably tastes like toothpaste and coffee.
It’s funny, really, and kind of surreal-the idea of it. Kurt remembers being thirteen and knowing that no boy would ever want to kiss him, being tossed into walls and jeered at in gym class. He remembers the tang of summer alcohol and the blending taste of all the boys he’s ever kissed against couches and all of those, at the time, seemed so intense, so immensely important to his entire world view, but none of them amounted to this-to him, Kurt Hummel, in the lobby at his junior year show choir sectionals being kissed by Blaine Anderson, former and current choir boy with a penchant for clumsy bike riding and sweet summer smiles, the warm taste of water and sand and sea salt ever present in the catch of his throat.