Happy Holidays Dinojay!
Title: Pristine and Sincere
Recipient: dinojay
Author/Artist: to be revealed January 3rd, 2012
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: (none really; I think 'NC-17 for sexual content' kind of covers it)
Word Count: 8800
Summary: In New York, where everything is so much impossibly harder than Kurt ever dreamed it would be, he takes time to stop and celebrate even the smallest of things on the most insignificant of days.
Notes: hope I hit your prompts in ways that deliver! They kind of ran away with me lol ♥
New York is hard. It's so much impossibly harder than Kurt ever thought it would be. At the end of high school in Lima, Ohio, nearly four months ago, Kurt felt so wonderfully older somehow, and more mature, and more powerful, looking back on the place that kept him trapped for the whole first two or three chapters of his life with not a small amount of condescension, because he was going to New York City. It wasn't until he got here that he realized just how truly young and small he is. It makes his jaw ache from clenching his teeth, from forcing smiles; it makes his heart ache, from not so much homesickness as familysickness and Blainesickness (that last one being its own animal entirely - Kurt thinks sometimes that it's half of his hurt all on its own). It means there are some days where he wants to cry himself to sleep and some days where he wants to slap his roommate in the face.
So whenever something goes right - whenever something becomes a little bit easier - Kurt takes those days to celebrate. They're his new holidays; they're his Labor Days and Halloweens and then some. A couple of times he's even written them in on his calendar, in fits of happiness and relief that he's worried might occasionally border on the manic. But with the crazy city whirling past him at the speed of light, Kurt will take any opportunity to slow down and smell the proverbial flowers that he can possibly get.
---
September 24th: Easy Stairs Day
He's on the last flight of stairs leading up to their small, third-floor apartment (past the broken elevator - the Big Bang Theory joke got old in week 1) when it occurs to Kurt: he's nearly at the top, has been hurrying even, and he hasn't even broken a sweat. He pauses, just two steps left between him and his floor, and takes a deep, satisfying breath in through his nose. He's not even breathing heavily. By the time he's keying into the apartment he can feel a smile stretching across his face.
Kurt can picture the day they moved him into this apartment, he and his father and his brother, just the three of them doing all the work, and how all three of them had lamented the busted elevator and cursed the narrowness of the stairwell and the stitches in their sides from carrying boxes and boxes of shoes (Kurt honestly can't be expected to censor himself - it's New York) in the sweltering mid-August heat. Even carrying so much as a double-armful of pillows had been exhausting when you were coming up from the half-floor that lay even with the back parking lot, past the first and the second to the third. Kurt distinctly remembers collapsing face-down on the futon the moment his family left, wishing his idiot boyfriend were there to massage the ache out of his feet and tell him everything was going to be okay.
Because apparently, everything was. Apparently a month and a half of taking these infuriating stairs two or three or more times a day has built up Kurt's stamina to a degree that they're hardly a big deal any more at all, and instead of falling straight onto the couch as he walks into the apartment, Kurt crosses to the chair by the lone window and slides his laptop out of his bag, because this sounds like a great blog post: It all feels like a metaphor, doesn't it? For his body finally getting used to the city, to being an adult? (Perhaps he'll throw in something about how he's finally had to start taking shaving seriously as well. Surely someone will get a kick out of that.)
He's still there, proofreading mostly interspersed with bouts of flipping to a tab with the men's new arrival items at H&M, when his roommate comes bustling loudly through the door, startling him back to reality by waving a package around in his face.
"You forgot to check the mail!"
"Oh, my apologies," says Kurt, rolling his eyes but keeping it light. "Just because my boyfriend isn't constantly sending me weird care packages that hover somewhere between saccharine and pornographic every other week - "
"Wait - did you just insinuate that Tina was my boyfriend?" Mike pulls a face at him and crosses through the kitchen area to grab the scissors out of the junk drawer before darting over and flopping across from Kurt on the sofa. He's so excited to slit the packing tape open he nearly cuts through the cord connecting his right ear bud to his iPod, still dangling around his neck.
"Maybe a little," says Kurt, smirking.
"Whatever, dude." He finally wrestles aside the oversized address label and pops the box open, peering inside. Kurt gives up on his blog post - if there are any typos he's still overlooking by his fourth read, he deserves the mockery they'll bring him - and goes ahead and submits it. When he glances back over Mike has pulled out two tupperwares full of some kind of spicy noodles that he goes through like Kurt goes through hair spray, Tina's standard envelope-an-inch-thick letter, and a smaller box, about the size of a box of cereal but a vivid, eye-shocking purple. It almost looks like cosmetics, and Kurt leans in closer as Mike turns it over in his hands.
"Scensationalize is a unified line of products formulized in our ScentLabs - TM," he points out with a laugh - "to match as exactly as possible with the unique personal scent of someone's...romantic partner." His voice starts to trail off as he finishes, and he turns the package over and over in his hands, staring at it. "It's a starter kit?"
"I imagine with something like that it'd be quite expensive to get anything more," says Kurt, trying to get a good glimpse of it as Mike keeps flipping and turning it. "Who even comes up with this?"
"There's like a little pouch like those lavender ones you put in the closet," says Mike, "and then some stuff you can put in laundry - oh, sweet, because I think I snuggled most of the Tina out of that tank top she left - "
"Gross," says Kurt blithely, but Mike just frowns and is nice enough not to mention the grungy zip-up sweatshirt hung primly in the back of Kurt's wardrobe that Kurt himself wouldn't be caught dead in.
" - and...some bath oil type stuff. At least I think that's - oh. Uh." Mike's ears go a little red and his shoulders hunch just slightly further forward toward the box, and Kurt raises an eyebrow at him. "I mean yeah, bath stuff, but it's supposed to be like. For like. The word 'erotic' is literally on the box."
Kurt looks. It is.
"Saccharine and pornographic," Kurt says again, sinking back away from Mike into the chair and refocusing his attention on H&M. This black sweater really needs to come down in price.
"Uhhhh I'm gonna go take a shower I think."
Kurt sits back bolt upright and nearly drops his laptop, but Mike is already up off the sofa and scrambling insect-limbed to the bathroom door. "Mike!" Kurt barks sharply, even as he knows full-well it's too late. "Dammit, Mike, don't get yourself off in the shower, it's disgusting! And it clogs the drain!"
"I'll clean like the whole bathroom tomorrow, dude, I promise!" yells Mike through the closed door, and Kurt sighs all-sufferingly and falls backward again, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about the fact that his roommate - who, admittedly, is very attractive and very nice and a very good dancer, but also incredibly straight and so not what Kurt's looking for - jerking himself off to the scent of his girlfriend while the bathroom radio blasts Tina's favorite Lady Gaga song. And it's not even entirely that, either - it's that Mike is notorious for taking the longest showers imaginable and wasting all of the hot water, leaving Kurt to soak lukewarm and do horrible, horrible things to his skin. Some days Kurt gets lucky and makes it in before him, but they keep pretty different hours between their different schools and their side jobs and rehearsals and other friends, and Mike's apparently always been a very early riser, so it's rare.
Aside from all that, though, thinks Kurt, Mike's turned out to be a pretty wonderful roommate. He'd always seen himself living with Rachel in his first, woefully Blaineless year in the city, staying up late having fabulous movie marathons and making each other over (well, he'd make Rachel over, anyway) and then taking the whole world by storm by day. Thankfully, a test run over the summer - Quinn, in some strange shining moment of sanity and solidarity there at the very end, had invited all of the graduating New Directions out to her father's lakehouse for a week of time together before they all split apart - had helped them dodge the bullet of utter disaster that that would have been. Rachel and Kurt spent about three days in the same room before both of them had to admit that they'd been contemplating throttling the other in the middle of the night. Rachel is loud, and absolutely horrible at confining her own explosion of things to her side of the room; Kurt is, even he'll admit, a bit of a freak about keeping things orderly, and an extraordinarily light sleeper, susceptible to every little rustle and disturbance Rachel made all night. To stave off their oncoming insanity, Rachel spent the rest of the week rooming with Sam, and that left Kurt to share a room with Mike. The rest, as they so often say, was history. Mike is incredibly good at staying quiet when he needs to - and also incredibly good at sensing when that is - and great about keeping his space and Kurt's space separate entities except for in the places that they share. And they've turned out to have a remarkable amount in common. Mike really grew into his own their senior year when he finally started seriously letting himself latch onto his dream of being a performer. Tina got him into a lot of Broadway shows - "required if you're going to New York, baby!" and Kurt had definitely agreed - and they've evolved a nice overlap of music tastes and city activities. Plus the boy knows how to dress himself much better than one Ms. Rachel Berry. Even after less than two months, it amazes Kurt that he ever thought about doing it any other way. The whole thing seems so natural - they've really settled into a rhythm here, and it works great, and everything is finally fitting into place.
In the lull between songs on the bathroom stereo, Kurt finds himself hearing some soft dirty noise he's fairly certain he was never, ever meant to hear, and while he tries to clear his mind of that, he frowns, glaring at the torn-up cardboard box that's still sitting on the sofa out of the corner of his eye. Almost everything is fitting into place, anyway.
He's pulling his phone out before he even realizes it. Miss you extra today. :(
The response is almost instantaneous, and it warms his heart way more than it probably should. those are the worst days! :( miss you too.
It's weird to live without you.
you think thats weird? says Blaine's text. try a mckinley high school with no kurt hummel. youre out being fabulous and im stuck here with this massive empty void
Well, there is no one like me, that's certain ;)
you dont have to tell me that, it says, and it's far too sincere, and Kurt aches, just a little. call you when im done with hw? after dinner.
Oh yes, let's answers Kurt, and then he's smiling, and trying not to think about his own looming homework, and trawling his memory for the best stories he could possibly tell. He definitely needs to mention Cecelia from his Tuesday/Thursday class again. He knows Blaine would love her.
God, it's hard to be apart from him.
Kurt's knocked out a little bit of an outline for a paper and is thinking about his own dinner when Mike finally resurfaces, towel around his waist and hair sticking every which way like a ruffled bird. "Sorry," he says sincerely.
"Oh, I suppose it's excusable," says Kurt, putting on his loftiest voice. He motions vaguely to the other contents of the box. "I'm assuming you're going to eat that tonight?"
"Absolutely," Mike says.
"I figured I'd probably run over to that place a few blocks down, then," Kurt tells him, finally committing to it and getting up to head out as Mike crosses to his room for clothes. "Blaine's going to call later, I want to be done by then."
"Aww, good for you guys," says Mike. "Oh but hey, it's getting chillier a little? I know you're super-sensitive to when it's cold or whatever, you might wanna take a coat?"
Kurt grins. "As if I would turn down an opportunity to wear a stellar coat." He heads back into his own room in search of something - he knows exactly the one to match today's boots - and finds it relatively easily. The problem comes when he goes to put it on. With one sleeve tugged on, the shoulders of the jacket won't quite stretch across his back all the way for him to get his arm slipped in the other. Or rather, they do in a way, but once it's all the way on it pulls just tight enough that Kurt's concerned one false move might rip something. Reluctantly, he squirms back out of it and takes his second choice. It fits a little better but induces a similar frustration - plus, the buttons down the front won't lay flat the way he wants them to. Good lord, he hopes the drycleaners haven't botched something - or worse, he hopes someone like Finn never attempted to wash these in a washing machine.
"I might have to get a new coat," he admits, mostly to himself.
"Are you serious?" answers Mike anyway. "You have more coats than my crazy grandmother who thought she was going to come be an American movie star." He sticks his head out the door to his room and peers across the hall - still shirtless, but at least with his bottom half covered - and makes some kind of silly dramatic motion like a faux-glamorous woman in real fur. Kurt laughs.
"No, but really, nothing's fitting right," he insists, turning back to the wardrobe with a huff of aggravation. "I don't know what happened."
Mike shrugs. "It's probably not that cold out, if you're just going down a couple corners or so you'll be okay without." He grins a little. "Don't wanna waste your time trying to pick an outfit and then have to talk to the hubby with your mouth full!"
"Ugh, good point," says Kurt. "I better get going. You want anything?"
"Nah, I'm set."
Kurt heads out of the apartment for real this time, down the flights and flights of narrow stairs and out into the streets. The steps don't even wind him, just like they didn't that afternoon, and as he crosses his arms over his chest against the late September chill, Kurt finds himself smiling again. He'll have to tell Blaine about that, too.
---
October 12th: First Friday Off, Ever
Kurt wakes on a long, slow inhale, stretching his arms catlike as far above his head as they will go, and as he breathes out again, he feels his face settle into a lazy smile. Oh, this isn't one of his spur-of-the-moment personal holidays. This one's been marked on his calendar for weeks.
When he was planning his schedule for the fall semester, Kurt was thrilled to discover that he could get in five classes that he needed for his program of study without having a single one on Friday - practically a permanent three-day weekend. Unfortunately, as soon as his job in one of the on-campus cafes had heard about it, they'd scheduled him extra Friday hours every week to compensate, effectively nullifying Kurt's original brilliant plan. He's spent all year so far waking just as early on his academic "day off" as he does the rest of the week to get to class on time, and the knowledge that something that could have been so wonderful has been stolen from him has been enough to occasionally drive him absolutely crazy. But not today. Today the customer service gods have smiled down upon him and let him sleep in until - oh, wow, Kurt doesn't even know what time it is. All he knows is that he went to bed last night without even setting an alarm, with every intention of letting himself take advantage of the longest, sweetest night of sleep he's been able to catch in months.
And, oh, sweet indeed. As his head starts to clear, Kurt finds within it remnants of the quite marvelous dream he's been having - a dream involving reams and reams of beautiful fabrics the likes of which have never existed in real life, some sort of supernatural silk that felt like flower petals and cool clear water on his skin all at once, and how he'd made a bed from them and then taken Blaine to it, and they curled tighter and tighter in on one another, heat and warm grasping hands and skin and muscle and tongue -
He blinks his eyes two or three times to fully clear his vision and then peers down the line of his body to find himself almost fully hard, his dream-eager cock making a perfect unmistakable tent in his cream-colored sheets, the low light of his room illuminating its distinct shape in a way that's almost...artistic. Like it's begging to be photographed. And Kurt's so hungry for it now, his body still buzzing pleasantly from his dreamy memories of Blaine, its need for sleep satiated and leaving it free to need something else - god, he wants. Before he knows it he's reaching down with his left hand to slide his thumb up the length of himself a time or two through the sheets - and oh, oh that's good, arousal bubbling through him - and fumbling his right hand out in search of his iPhone on the shelf beside his bed, finally grasping it and leaning back far enough that there's no denying exactly what the picture is of when he takes it. It looks almost ethereal on the screen, as dreamy and lazily hungry as the whole of him feels, and he doesn't even hesitate before sending it to Blaine, doesn't even add a caption.
He keeps stroking lightly, hand against fabric against cock, as he waits for his response, and he gets one quickly - a cheeky awwww is that for me? complete with a winking face. But Kurt's been lulled so far under, the whole of him thrumming so thick with want, that he doesn't even rise to the bait.
Yes, he texts back, of course, it's always for you. Yes, please.
im in class, says Blaine, cant really play right now
Just get me through it? asks Kurt. I was having a wonderful dream. He strokes his cock more earnestly now, trying to cling to the shreds of dream-memory that are beginning to elude him the longer he's awake, and when his thumb catches just so over the slit of his cock and the sheet slides through slickness there, Kurt moans out into his empty room and adds I'm so hard before sending the text.
It's a moment before Blaine responds again, and Kurt spends it sliding the sheet away before it gets too messy and letting his cock stand stiff in the open air, palming it hot and heavy. He lays his phone on his chest just under his collarbone and shivers when it vibrates with the new message. what were your dreams about?
When Kurt moves his hand off his cock to text, his hips keep swiveling upward of their own accord, hitching just slightly off the mattress as his erection bobs in the emptiness. Your mouth, he answers honestly. It seems like all I ever want any more is your mouth. You're so perfect at it... Kurt imagines, letting his dream run together with his memories of reality, Blaine's soft generous lips and the almost unbearable heat of him, his tongue sliding deft and eager around the throbbing head of Kurt's cock or deep along the underside, and how Kurt can get so far in and Blaine just takes absolutely all of it, his cheeks hollowing out with tender unforgiving suction, the way the strong tendons and veins in his neck strain against the surface of his skin as the muscles work in his throat. It should be illegal.
i love sucking your cock, Blaine texts him, and Kurt moans again as he bucks into the ever-tightening tunnel of his own hand. its so big and hot and perfect like its made to fit inside me like that. do you wanna fuck my mouth?
"Please," Kurt moans into the silence of his bedroom, the word sounding pitifully desperate to his own ears before he even realizes that Blaine can't hear him like that. He stutters back a text of please please please that he's sure is full of typos and just imagines it, Blaine there in his too-small bed with him buried between his thighs, his dark curls clutched in Kurt's fingers as Kurt heaves up off the bed's surface at his own pace, plunging deeper and deeper into the perfect sweet cavern of Blaine's mouth. It's been so long and Kurt wants it so much -
dammit im getting hard in math class, fuck, kurt, i wanna blow you so bad
- and then Kurt is picturing that, the cruel erotic truth of his high school boyfriend sitting at McKinley with his phone hidden under his desk, getting hard in some pair of his bright tight high-cropped slacks and having to hide that too, flushing up under the collar, maybe sweating with it a little, keeping his secrets tucked away while miles and miles from there he's getting Kurt off, and that's when Kurt comes, his limbs all still heavy with sleep and his cock pulsing hot and frantic in his hand as he makes a mess of himself, tries clumsily to catch his breath, and gives up on dreaming for hot, hot reality.
He has to text back one-handed and it makes it slow, like his whole world has slowed down from how fast it was spinning just moments before. Blaine. You still make me come so hard even when you're not here.
i guess thats satisfying to hear, says Blaine, and Kurt laughs at him a little now, at how smug he's let himself become. i wish i could be there to do it in person.
Me too, Kurt says, the ache lifting from his limbs to come settle in his heart.
at least ive got this super sexy picture now, says Blaine. that ill probably have to go get off to in the locker rooms during first lunch. so thanks for that.
Mmmm, you're welcome, says Kurt, smiling to himself. Wish I could be there to see that, too. Maybe take me a picture to send back?
naaahhh, says Blaine, with another little winking face. surely youve got PLENTY enough to keep you going, dont you?
So selfish, says Kurt. Okay, I've got to clean myself up, don't get your phone confiscated. Love you.
you too, so much, every day, says Blaine, and Kurt lets the conversation end there, and rolls his legs to the side of the bed, shaking them a little to clear out the combined heaviness of an amazing night's sleep and the aftermath of a great orgasm. He imagines Blaine on his knees in the back corner of the locker room, his forearm braced against the row of lockers as his other hand jacks his cock furiously, his panting breaths echoing in the tiled space, and then quickly has to stop before he starts the whole process all over again. Instead, he makes his way to the bathroom, trying to psych himself up for another unsatisfying post-Mike-Chang shower, and smiling at the calendar on the wall on his way there.
There were certainly worse ways his first ever Friday off could have started.
---
November 8th: Epic Rejection Thursday
This is not a holiday Kurt celebrates.
This is possibly one of the most miserable days of his life.
He's been picking up speed since he got off the subway, moving faster and faster the closer he gets to home, and he probably caused a scene somewhere but he can't honestly bring himself to care. The instant the apartment door slams shut behind him is when he lets himself crack. He leans his back hard against it and coughs out one loud, absolutely pitiful-sounding sob. Then he keeps moving, and Mike calls out a soft "Do you want to talk about it?" but Kurt just shakes his head and throws his messenger bag into "his" sunken-in spot on the sofa before bustling on into his room and faceplanting on the bed, crying a little more into his pillow and worming one hand underneath his hip to tug and yank at his phone until it slides out of his pocket. Because Kurt was kind of lying - he does want to talk about it. Just not with Mike.
"Hey," says Blaine, soft and breathy-sweet when he answers.
"Baby?" croaks Kurt, and then his chest sort of heaves and he starts crying in earnest.
"Oh, Kurt," murmurs Blaine, "what is it, what do you need?"
"Can I just - " he's having a harder and harder time breathing, has to stutter and stop and start - "can I just cry at you for a - for a minute until - and then t-tell you the story?"
"Sure," says Blaine, "absolutely." Kurt faintly hears him toss off some excuse to whoever he's with, his parents probably, and then Blaine's back with him, whispering little things that Kurt can't really hear or understand through the cloud of his own gurgling. He can't believe he's such a blubbering mess - he feels so unbelievably stupid and childish for letting something like this get to him so badly, but then the miserable feeling of his own self-hatred only makes him cry harder. Blaine's voice is a soothing nothing-sound against his ear and after several long minutes that seem even longer from how stupid this is, Kurt finally cries himself out and is able to explain what happened.
What happened was, Kurt went in Tuesday for an audition - his first audition out in the "real world" that had nothing to do with any classes or clubs he's been part of. The description he'd looked at for what they wanted had seemed...fairly close to what he had to offer, so he'd been a little concerned, but he figured it couldn't hurt to put himself out there as much as possible. His audition, however, went flawlessly - well, maybe an eight out of ten, but it definitely could have been miles worse - and though the guy in charge seemed like kind of an a-hole, Kurt was delighted to check his phone the next day after getting out of class and discover a voicemail offering him a callback. It was an impossibly huge boost to his confidence - an honest-to-god callback! At his first ever real audition! And he had to cancel on some Wednesday evening study plans with the very nice girl in his 2:30 class, which he did feel a little bad about, but he went back in and did his best to wow them once more.
Then this afternoon, near the end of his heart-stoppingly dull shift at the campus cafe, the guy called again.
"And they hate me!" Kurt wails, trying to keep his voice down but having a bit of a difficult time with things, especially considering how unsteady it still is (stupid, stupid, why on Earth are you still weepy about this?). "That man is one of the most hateful p-people I have ever met in my life and I cannot believe he would say those things to a freshman in college. It's as if he expects us all to be pitch-perfect performing robots who'll do anything he says at the drop of a hat! And so I'm just standing there in my gross apron and visor trying not to just absolutely lose it."
"Oh, Kurt - " Blaine interjects again - he hasn't said much else, for which Kurt is very grateful, he really is such a wonderful boyfriend that Kurt can't stand it.
"I guess I was just kind of numb at first and so I managed to finish out my shift but then I just raced home as fast as I could and now I'm just a slovenly pile of misery," he says, rolling onto his back in the bed and flinging the arm that's not holding the phone dramatically over his face. (He then realizes he'll probably get tears on his perfect new burgundy pea coat, and throws it back onto the pillows above his head instead.) As he stares blearily up at the ceiling, there's the loud scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor in the apartment above. It's an appalling sound and Kurt cringes. He pretty much wants to curl up and die.
Blaine ventures a full sentence. "I can't believe someone would say such horrible things to you when all you did was audition - no doubt beautifully," he says.
"He called me incongruous," says Kurt, "who even says that? He then went on to elaborate and told me that I looked like a marble statue but sounded like a rubber dog toy."
Blaine murmurs out a sound Kurt can't quite decipher (not least of all because the noise upstairs is increasing). "You look like a marble statue?" he says. "That's - that's at least a compliment, right? And I've never known you to be upset over a compliment, even if it is back-handed."
"I'm going to get upset any time someone tells me that I'm not what they want!" Kurt says, fresh tears threatening to spill over again. "You're absolutely nothing in this business if nobody wants you." His voice tapers off, his head reeling and pounding all at once, thunderous footsteps joining the screeching furniture upstairs, his throat and heart clenching. Because that's it, isn't it? "I just want someone to want me."
"I want you," says Blaine, with buckets of honesty and absolutely no hesitation. "Every hour every day I want you."
Kurt finally manages a little smile through his grossness. "You're so sweet," he says, and he means it. Then he sighs. "But alas, sweetness won't be enough to fix my self-loathing-induced headache." Suddenly a bass-thick track of crappy music kicks into gear upstairs, and Kurt groans. "And the ASSHOLES UPSTAIRS aren't making this any better!" he shouts pointedly. "Ugh, not again, I can't believe this. Just because an apartment's empty shouldn't mean that the landlord is allowed to us it to host ridiculous drunken parties. It's not even eight o'clock for crying out loud! Talk about irresponsible, this is the last thing I need - "
"I thought the fourth floor was the top floor?" says Blaine, that strangeness back in his voice again.
"I know!" cries Kurt. "So they're right on top of me, jesus christ - "
There's a sudden light rapping on his bedroom door, and Kurt curves the phone away from his mouth and calls, "Come in." Mike sticks his head around the doorframe.
"D'you want me to go up and see if they'll shut up?" he asks, jerking his thumb at the ceiling.
"Yes, please, god," says Kurt, and Mike disappears again. He leans back to Blaine on the phone. "Sorry. What were you...?"
"I, ah - " says Blaine, "baby, I have to go."
Kurt pouts. "What? Noooo, you're supposed to stay on the phone with me for another hour or five until I stop feeling horrible and get some of my self-confidence back. Blaine - "
"I guess it just - doesn't work that way," says Blaine, and now his voice just sounds pained. "God, I wish I were there to be with you, and I'd just hold you, Kurt, I hate to know you're hurting. But I'm - I'm not there. I'm here. And there's stuff here I have to do, too."
"But that's not fair," Kurt says, still sniffling. "I don't get to see you for Thanksgiving or Christmas because of my stupid job and your stupid parents, the least this lousy stuff you have to do could do would be to take a damn rain check."
"I love you," says Blaine. "I'm so sorry."
He ends the call rather abruptly, and Kurt's heart aches a little more for it. What was that about? And why, why, why does New York City and being separated and life have to be so hard?
---
December 31st: New Year's Eve...And More
"I can't believe that today is really a holiday," says Kurt, who's been staring at a magazine under the (false) pretense of actually reading it for nearly half an hour.
It's a testament to how truly great Mike is as a friend that he doesn't even ask for Kurt to explain that statement, and just says, "I know."
"Like, this has significance to other people," he continues anyway, fidgeting in his seat. "There's some broader meaning behind it being December thirty-first. Something that somehow actually exists beyond they're coming."
"I know!" says Mike again.
Kurt lolls backward and drops the magazine to the floor. "You're totally not actually getting anywhere in that game, are you."
Mike's hand holding the Xbox controller droops similarly. "Nope." He presses pause, and then turns and grins at Kurt, and god, Kurt can see it, exactly in Mike's eyes the way it must be in his, and he grins back. They are both stupidly, beautifully in love and neither of them can bring themselves to feel sorry about it.
"How much longer?"
"Fourteen minutes," says Mike almost before Kurt's done asking. He can see the clock on their microwave better from where he's sitting than Kurt can.
"I think I'm going to explode."
"Before they get here?" says Mike, going comically straight-faced. "That'll suck."
"Uugghhh," groans Kurt, flopping dramatically across the sofa and landing his head nearly in Mike's lap. He laughs and shoves at Kurt's shoulders and Kurt struggles to sit back up, clawing at the back of the sofa. "I just can't actually take this any more! I'm amazed I even made it till today to be honest, that last shift at work was like - "
They both freeze, their eyes going wide, when there is a crisp soft hummingbird-fast knock on their apartment door.
"Early," says Mike, his face cracking in that grin again.
"You answer it," says Kurt, tugging at Mike's elbow until he's standing and then following him up. "That's her knocking, go, go!"
Mike spiders around their half-kitchen to the door in about one second flat and then he's wrenching the knob and then comes a high-pitched eeeeeeee! and he stumbles three or four steps backward, his arms absolutely full of Tina, in a vivid pink coat and boots that come up over her knees. He whirls her around and they're laughing, trying to kiss and laugh at the same time and it's absolutely wonderful but Kurt needs them to move, glares at them unseen until they clear the area and step aside to reveal -
Blaine.
"Hi," he says, his voice warm and thick, his eyes positively sparkling and his smile curving crooked almost like he can't believe it's happening. And frankly, Kurt is right there with him, astonishment making his steps slow as he crosses over to where Blaine is shutting the door behind him, never once breaking their eye contact - because it's so wonderful just to see him. He brushes past the bubbling, bouncing Mike-and-Tina explosion to his right and before he knows it Kurt's got one hand fitted around the back of Blaine's head and he's tugging their mouths flush together and positively devouring him, angling just right to get their lips in this beautiful tandem and his tongue as far into Blaine's mouth as it will go, sucking at Blaine's own and sliding as wet and dirty as he can possibly let himself be with two other people in the room, which is apparently quite a lot more than it would have been four months ago. Blaine, Kurt is pleased to hear, moans faintly out through his nose and has his own hand twisted tight-scrunched into the back of Kurt's shirt by the time Kurt pulls away.
"Hi," he echoes, and Blaine swears softly.
"And your parents are totally okay with all of this?" Mike's asking when they tune back into reality, for probably the seven hundredth time.
"My mom is very progressive," says Tina with a sharp grin. "After we - you know, the first time - she was one of the first people I told, we talked it out and she helped me work through some stuff. They had no problem when I told them we were staying over with you. It's cheaper this way, everything's fine."
Kurt glances from them to Blaine. "And your parents are okay with all of it?"
Blaine smiles serenely at him. "Of course they're okay with their gay son sharing a nice inexpensive hotel room with his straight female friend for a couple of days," he says. "Why wouldn't they be?"
Kurt kisses him swiftly again, just for being a fabulous bastard.
Tina starts in with a whirlwind of conversation, gabbing to Mike about absolutely everything to do with their plane ride and all the while picking at his clothes or nuzzling her cheek against his face (he'd decided not to go back to totally clean-shaven after his bold venture into No-Shave November, and Kurt was still kind of undecided on the look but it was apparently definitely working for her). They're moving in a slow progression toward Mike's bedroom and Kurt has no doubt about how that will end up. Truth be told, he's been scheming similar plans, but Blaine is still standing there in his thick winter coat just looking at him, inscrutable, and finally Kurt has to just raise an eyebrow at him. "Well?"
"I have something I need to tell you," Blaine whooshes out, and Kurt feels his heart drop from wry bemusement to genuine concern.
"What is it?" he asks, reaching to take Blaine's hand in his.
"Okay, you have to promise not to get mad at me," says Blaine. "You also have to promise not to laugh." Kurt purses his lips - anything that could garner both of those reactions means this is getting stranger by the second. "For the past few months I may have been a little - confused, about your apartment. About the exact address of your apartment." His gaze shifts a little to the side and his cheeks color, and oh god, Blaine is embarrassed. "I could have sworn you said you were going to be living on the fourth floor, and so I think I've made - a mistake. Just. The apartment above yours is still empty, right?"
"Yes," says Kurt, still confused. "You'd think people would snatch up city apartments so quickly but he's asking far too much for it, presumably so he can keep partying. Blaine, what - "
"In the mail," says Blaine. "I've sent you - some things, in the mail."
Kurt's suddenly starting to get a much better idea of the situation, and his expression slowly, slowly shifts. "What kinds of things?"
"Can we get into the mailbox?"
The two of them are suddenly a flurry of movement, Kurt tugging on a sweater and then darting out of the apartment with Blaine hot on his heels. They take the stairs in leaps and bounds, past the floors below and down to the tiny street-level entryway with its rows of dilapidated metal mail slots, and Kurt flicks automatically to 3-C before shifting his gaze one box up. 4-C definitely has a couple of things in it. 4-C is also locked.
"So when you - on the phone - "
"I'm so sorry, Kurt, but is there any way we can get into that? Because this is kind of potentially really incriminating and I just - "
Kurt is way ahead of him, his hand slinking into the pocket of Blaine's enormous coat and pulling out his wallet, searching the inside for his crappy McKinley High ID card. He reaches up to wedge it through the tiny gap, and combined with Kurt's own mailbox key for pressure, they jimmy it open and watch four faintly-yellow envelopes tumble out.
"That's it?" says Kurt, just to be sure.
"That's it." Blaine kneels down to scoop them up, and when he stands he's awfully close to Kurt, staring straight into his eyes and blushing harder than ever, his lips working faintly around words that he apparently just can't bring himself to say.
Kurt gives him a lush smile. "Come upstairs and show me."
So they climb back up to the third floor, Blaine panting for breath in his coat by the time they get there and Kurt just smiling, smiling, thinking of September. September, which is when the first of these envelopes was mailed, and there's one a month since then and they all look very similar. His heart's already thrilling with the anticipation, and he takes Blaine straight to his room when he gets inside, where they sit on the bed side by side and Blaine starts nervously unbuttoning his coat, trying to give his shaking hands something to do.
"Go ahead," he says, and so Kurt starts from the beginning. And they are exactly what he thought they were, and yet - so much more.
Inside the September envelope there are five striking soft-focus black and white photographs. There's also a small note, but Kurt disregards it - given the circumstances - and just lays the pictures out, letting his eyes scan across them as his breath begins to hitch. A beautiful one of Blaine smiling, laughing. One marked first day of school! with a smily-face in which Blaine is wearing an absolutely fabulous outfit. And three, different angles and different parts and different poses, in which Blaine is wearing absolutely nothing at all.
Of course Kurt has seen Blaine naked before. And yet he gazes hungrily down at the photographs - Blaine sprawled limply in his bed, Blaine softly touching himself, Blaine standing casual in his own nudity - and just drinks it all in.
"Who took these?" Kurt breathes without looking up, because there's no way Blaine could've done it himself, but the answer comes to him almost as soon as he's said it, and he says, "Tina," in unison with Blaine's own answer.
"She's been really into that camera ever since she took all those pictures at graduation and the after-party," Blaine elaborates. "And I...trust her."
"They're stunning," says Kurt. "You're stunning. Oh my god, and there's more, what am I doing - "
He hastily tears into the October envelope, and while there's only four photos in this one, it's more of the same - a sweet Halloween snapshot (Blaine's the scarecrow, Artie's the tin man and Sam is the lion to what Kurt assumes is Tina's Dorothy), a soft and gorgeous candid shot, and two amazing, sensual others. The loose full-body shot has been repeated. November has five again. December has seven.
"Your secret extra Christmas present that I couldn't exactly leave with your dad," says Blaine. "Tina and I had gotten a little more...comfortable, by that point." Kurt can tell; one of the December photos is from behind and to the side, with Blaine curved vulnerable on his hands and knees.
"I can't believe this," says Kurt, finally flicking his eyes up to the real live Blaine in front of him. "I can't believe any of this."
"I can't believe it," says Blaine. "I feel kind of like a creep for sending you these when I'm not even eighteen yet in some of them, and then kind of like the world's biggest moron for getting your apartment number wrong - "
"I can't believe that all of this is for me," Kurt says, and then yanks Blaine toward him by the collar of his shirt for a thick, hungry kiss. Blaine slides his hand through the hair at Kurt's temple and grips him tightly, and after a moment they topple sideways, clutching close, squashing the photos beneath them - Kurt realizes and makes himself pull away, sitting back up and collecting them all together.
The stock standing picture from December ends up on the top of the pile, and Kurt looks down at it and then back up to real-Blaine. "What's with all these plain standing-up ones?" he asks. "Why'd you do it every time?"
"Oh!" says Blaine, smiling a little. "That was actually the one part of this that I sort of thought was a good idea and not just kind of skeezy. I figured that way you could - I mean, if you put them all next to each other..." He takes the stack from Kurt's hands and sorts through it, tugging out the photos in question and lining them up chronologically. "It'd be like you could follow along, as our year went on, away from me."
Kurt looks at the picture from September, the set of Blaine's shoulders in it, the softness of his shy smile, and he begins to get it. This was very much the exact same Blaine that he left in mid-August when he moved to New York - the same Blaine he thought was sitting beside him now. But he looks more closely at the October picture, the November picture, the one from earlier this month, and Kurt can actually see it, and it's astonishing. The way his jaw comes to stand out a little more sharply. The tightening of his stomach, the thickening of his long, lean muscles. The way his chest is a little bit hairier, and a not-quite-so-little bit broader, his warm skin stretched taut. He's styling his hair different too, a little longer, a little less plastered-down. And when Kurt turns back to Blaine, his real, solid, three-dimensional right here Blaine, and really looks at him, compared to the boy in the picture from September, it's absolutely mind-blowing.
"Jesus fuck," Kurt says somewhat abruptly. "Look at you." Without the thick shell of his winter coat hiding him away, Blaine's laid out before him more gorgeously than ever, all the lines and slopes and angles of him absolutely flawless and just begging to be memorized anew.
But Blaine shakes his head, his eyes wide, and curves his broad hands around both sides of Kurt's face. "Look at you," he breathes out. "I can't believe - we've gone so long without getting to see each other, and here I am expecting my same beautiful skinny high school boyfriend but god, Kurt - " His hands slide down Kurt's neck to his shoulders, and they squeeze there, firm and warm and tantalizing. "New York has done everything for you."
Kurt tries to think about it, all the ways he could have changed just like Blaine has, as his boyfriend's strong sensual hands keep massaging into his upper arms and Blaine leans closer to kiss faintly at the corners of his mouth and the line of his jaw. He thinks about the wardrobe struggles he went through back in the earlier autumn - he supposes he went up about half a size, his shoulders and his torso in general a little bit fuller. He thinks about having to start shaving regularly, which really has been nothing but an absolute chore. He thinks about taking the stairs without getting winded or being back-handedly called a marble statue. And he thinks Blaine may be on to something here - but then he sort of stops being able to think at all, because Blaine's sucking on that spot under his ear (and that hasn't changed a bit) and then one of those warm deft hands slides down to palm sure and steady right across his cock and Kurt gasps sharply.
"So hot," Blaine babbles against his neck. "God, Kurt, I want you on top of me, fuck, want all of this all over me - " he starts pulling Kurt's shirt loose from his waistband - "need you to fuck me, so strong and so fucking sexy - "
Kurt's hands are up tugging Blaine's shirt buttons open at the collar in an instant, the photos discarded to the floor, and as he peels back the soft red fabric the hair on Blaine's chest starts coming into view and Kurt absolutely loses it. He leans in and buries his face against it and just breathes, the intoxicating smell of Blaine clouding him absolutely everywhere, and he has a fleeting funny memory of Mike back in September, going crazy over the scent of Tina -
Shit. Mike and Tina.
As if on cue, Kurt hears a soft but unmistakable noise waft from Mike's bedroom across the hall, and he and Blaine both giggle just a little, pulling apart from one another and adjusting their borderline-uncomfortable erections. Kurt collects himself and crosses to the door, leaning half into the hallway and calling out as politely as he can. "Ladies?" he says, smirking to himself. "So as to maintain some respect for one another's privacy in these couple of hours we have before we need to leave to get to Times Square I think I'm going to put some music on very, very loudly, does that sound reasonable?"
"Uhhhh yeah!" calls Tina back through the door. "Um - like - as long as it's - "
"I'll risk sounding somewhat inappropriate and admit that I have a playlist crafted specifically for this purpose," says Kurt. "And it's eighty-percent Mike Chang approved."
"Best roommate ever!" cries Mike, and Kurt laughs a little to himself and then crosses past Blaine on the bed to get at his iHome, swirling to the playlist labeled Don't Even Knock and cranking it up nearly as loud as it will go before setting it on the shelf by the door and turning back to Blaine with a cheshire grin.
"Now, where were we?" he says.
"September," says Blaine, as Kurt falls into his lap, their hips grinding together the instant they make contact. Kurt kisses him, hard, and drags his hands up and down Blaine's chest in a couple of firm, fervent passes, feeling out his muscle through the fabric of his shirt and then starting back in on the buttons again until it falls completely open and hangs from Blaine's thick-corded shoulders. He rakes his eyes over every square inch of Blaine, as they strip out of their clothes and put themselves skin to skin, Blaine's heavy-hung cock sliding perfect against Kurt's own, everything both comfortably old and fascinatingly new all at once. This is his Blaine; every one of the photographs strewn on the floor by the bed is his Blaine, faint variations on this perfect, erotic theme.
Blaine moans loudly against his mouth, but Kurt barely hears it over the music, and doesn't need to hear, anyway, not today, not when he can see.
---
New York is hard. It's a lot of pain and misery that Kurt never expected, not when he was the too-young too-small boy that Lima, Ohio spat out at the end of high school, when the big city was all bright lights and dark intrigue and huge, impossible dreams. When the Kurt of four and a half months ago moved into apartment 3-C he had every intention of taking the whole place by storm. That Kurt planned to change New York. The Kurt of today fully understands that New York is changing him.
It happens every single day.
And Kurt's so remarkably all right with that. Kurt figures, if he can have that - if he can change and shift and grow, here in New York, and even then know that back in Ohio Blaine is growing and shifting and changing too; and if they can map these changes with their eyes and hands and bodies, and then still get up afterward and beat Mike Chang to the shower, and bundle up in their warm bulky coats and stand in the splendor of New York City as the calendar rolls over to a brand new year; if Kurt can clutch Blaine's hand in his as the ball drops and know that at midnight, at the end of the day, at the end of every day, Blaine and everything he becomes is unfailingly his, no matter how hard life is, no matter what else might change - if Kurt can have all of that, then pretty much every day is worth celebrating.
pictures of you all placed in a line
disregard the present and the occurrence of time
memories through photographs, pristine and sincere
forgetting recent history; in my mind, you are here.
-- Paper Moon, "Memories Through Photographs"
---
Please consider spreading holiday cheer by commenting on and/or reblogging this fanfic! If you rec this fic, please be sure to attribute it to anonymous until the author/artist is revealed on January 3rd, 2011. Don’t forget to check out all of the other amazing works that will be posted throughout December!
Recipient: dinojay
Author/Artist: to be revealed January 3rd, 2012
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: (none really; I think 'NC-17 for sexual content' kind of covers it)
Word Count: 8800
Summary: In New York, where everything is so much impossibly harder than Kurt ever dreamed it would be, he takes time to stop and celebrate even the smallest of things on the most insignificant of days.
Notes: hope I hit your prompts in ways that deliver! They kind of ran away with me lol ♥
New York is hard. It's so much impossibly harder than Kurt ever thought it would be. At the end of high school in Lima, Ohio, nearly four months ago, Kurt felt so wonderfully older somehow, and more mature, and more powerful, looking back on the place that kept him trapped for the whole first two or three chapters of his life with not a small amount of condescension, because he was going to New York City. It wasn't until he got here that he realized just how truly young and small he is. It makes his jaw ache from clenching his teeth, from forcing smiles; it makes his heart ache, from not so much homesickness as familysickness and Blainesickness (that last one being its own animal entirely - Kurt thinks sometimes that it's half of his hurt all on its own). It means there are some days where he wants to cry himself to sleep and some days where he wants to slap his roommate in the face.
So whenever something goes right - whenever something becomes a little bit easier - Kurt takes those days to celebrate. They're his new holidays; they're his Labor Days and Halloweens and then some. A couple of times he's even written them in on his calendar, in fits of happiness and relief that he's worried might occasionally border on the manic. But with the crazy city whirling past him at the speed of light, Kurt will take any opportunity to slow down and smell the proverbial flowers that he can possibly get.
---
September 24th: Easy Stairs Day
He's on the last flight of stairs leading up to their small, third-floor apartment (past the broken elevator - the Big Bang Theory joke got old in week 1) when it occurs to Kurt: he's nearly at the top, has been hurrying even, and he hasn't even broken a sweat. He pauses, just two steps left between him and his floor, and takes a deep, satisfying breath in through his nose. He's not even breathing heavily. By the time he's keying into the apartment he can feel a smile stretching across his face.
Kurt can picture the day they moved him into this apartment, he and his father and his brother, just the three of them doing all the work, and how all three of them had lamented the busted elevator and cursed the narrowness of the stairwell and the stitches in their sides from carrying boxes and boxes of shoes (Kurt honestly can't be expected to censor himself - it's New York) in the sweltering mid-August heat. Even carrying so much as a double-armful of pillows had been exhausting when you were coming up from the half-floor that lay even with the back parking lot, past the first and the second to the third. Kurt distinctly remembers collapsing face-down on the futon the moment his family left, wishing his idiot boyfriend were there to massage the ache out of his feet and tell him everything was going to be okay.
Because apparently, everything was. Apparently a month and a half of taking these infuriating stairs two or three or more times a day has built up Kurt's stamina to a degree that they're hardly a big deal any more at all, and instead of falling straight onto the couch as he walks into the apartment, Kurt crosses to the chair by the lone window and slides his laptop out of his bag, because this sounds like a great blog post: It all feels like a metaphor, doesn't it? For his body finally getting used to the city, to being an adult? (Perhaps he'll throw in something about how he's finally had to start taking shaving seriously as well. Surely someone will get a kick out of that.)
He's still there, proofreading mostly interspersed with bouts of flipping to a tab with the men's new arrival items at H&M, when his roommate comes bustling loudly through the door, startling him back to reality by waving a package around in his face.
"You forgot to check the mail!"
"Oh, my apologies," says Kurt, rolling his eyes but keeping it light. "Just because my boyfriend isn't constantly sending me weird care packages that hover somewhere between saccharine and pornographic every other week - "
"Wait - did you just insinuate that Tina was my boyfriend?" Mike pulls a face at him and crosses through the kitchen area to grab the scissors out of the junk drawer before darting over and flopping across from Kurt on the sofa. He's so excited to slit the packing tape open he nearly cuts through the cord connecting his right ear bud to his iPod, still dangling around his neck.
"Maybe a little," says Kurt, smirking.
"Whatever, dude." He finally wrestles aside the oversized address label and pops the box open, peering inside. Kurt gives up on his blog post - if there are any typos he's still overlooking by his fourth read, he deserves the mockery they'll bring him - and goes ahead and submits it. When he glances back over Mike has pulled out two tupperwares full of some kind of spicy noodles that he goes through like Kurt goes through hair spray, Tina's standard envelope-an-inch-thick letter, and a smaller box, about the size of a box of cereal but a vivid, eye-shocking purple. It almost looks like cosmetics, and Kurt leans in closer as Mike turns it over in his hands.
"Scensationalize is a unified line of products formulized in our ScentLabs - TM," he points out with a laugh - "to match as exactly as possible with the unique personal scent of someone's...romantic partner." His voice starts to trail off as he finishes, and he turns the package over and over in his hands, staring at it. "It's a starter kit?"
"I imagine with something like that it'd be quite expensive to get anything more," says Kurt, trying to get a good glimpse of it as Mike keeps flipping and turning it. "Who even comes up with this?"
"There's like a little pouch like those lavender ones you put in the closet," says Mike, "and then some stuff you can put in laundry - oh, sweet, because I think I snuggled most of the Tina out of that tank top she left - "
"Gross," says Kurt blithely, but Mike just frowns and is nice enough not to mention the grungy zip-up sweatshirt hung primly in the back of Kurt's wardrobe that Kurt himself wouldn't be caught dead in.
" - and...some bath oil type stuff. At least I think that's - oh. Uh." Mike's ears go a little red and his shoulders hunch just slightly further forward toward the box, and Kurt raises an eyebrow at him. "I mean yeah, bath stuff, but it's supposed to be like. For like. The word 'erotic' is literally on the box."
Kurt looks. It is.
"Saccharine and pornographic," Kurt says again, sinking back away from Mike into the chair and refocusing his attention on H&M. This black sweater really needs to come down in price.
"Uhhhh I'm gonna go take a shower I think."
Kurt sits back bolt upright and nearly drops his laptop, but Mike is already up off the sofa and scrambling insect-limbed to the bathroom door. "Mike!" Kurt barks sharply, even as he knows full-well it's too late. "Dammit, Mike, don't get yourself off in the shower, it's disgusting! And it clogs the drain!"
"I'll clean like the whole bathroom tomorrow, dude, I promise!" yells Mike through the closed door, and Kurt sighs all-sufferingly and falls backward again, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about the fact that his roommate - who, admittedly, is very attractive and very nice and a very good dancer, but also incredibly straight and so not what Kurt's looking for - jerking himself off to the scent of his girlfriend while the bathroom radio blasts Tina's favorite Lady Gaga song. And it's not even entirely that, either - it's that Mike is notorious for taking the longest showers imaginable and wasting all of the hot water, leaving Kurt to soak lukewarm and do horrible, horrible things to his skin. Some days Kurt gets lucky and makes it in before him, but they keep pretty different hours between their different schools and their side jobs and rehearsals and other friends, and Mike's apparently always been a very early riser, so it's rare.
Aside from all that, though, thinks Kurt, Mike's turned out to be a pretty wonderful roommate. He'd always seen himself living with Rachel in his first, woefully Blaineless year in the city, staying up late having fabulous movie marathons and making each other over (well, he'd make Rachel over, anyway) and then taking the whole world by storm by day. Thankfully, a test run over the summer - Quinn, in some strange shining moment of sanity and solidarity there at the very end, had invited all of the graduating New Directions out to her father's lakehouse for a week of time together before they all split apart - had helped them dodge the bullet of utter disaster that that would have been. Rachel and Kurt spent about three days in the same room before both of them had to admit that they'd been contemplating throttling the other in the middle of the night. Rachel is loud, and absolutely horrible at confining her own explosion of things to her side of the room; Kurt is, even he'll admit, a bit of a freak about keeping things orderly, and an extraordinarily light sleeper, susceptible to every little rustle and disturbance Rachel made all night. To stave off their oncoming insanity, Rachel spent the rest of the week rooming with Sam, and that left Kurt to share a room with Mike. The rest, as they so often say, was history. Mike is incredibly good at staying quiet when he needs to - and also incredibly good at sensing when that is - and great about keeping his space and Kurt's space separate entities except for in the places that they share. And they've turned out to have a remarkable amount in common. Mike really grew into his own their senior year when he finally started seriously letting himself latch onto his dream of being a performer. Tina got him into a lot of Broadway shows - "required if you're going to New York, baby!" and Kurt had definitely agreed - and they've evolved a nice overlap of music tastes and city activities. Plus the boy knows how to dress himself much better than one Ms. Rachel Berry. Even after less than two months, it amazes Kurt that he ever thought about doing it any other way. The whole thing seems so natural - they've really settled into a rhythm here, and it works great, and everything is finally fitting into place.
In the lull between songs on the bathroom stereo, Kurt finds himself hearing some soft dirty noise he's fairly certain he was never, ever meant to hear, and while he tries to clear his mind of that, he frowns, glaring at the torn-up cardboard box that's still sitting on the sofa out of the corner of his eye. Almost everything is fitting into place, anyway.
He's pulling his phone out before he even realizes it. Miss you extra today. :(
The response is almost instantaneous, and it warms his heart way more than it probably should. those are the worst days! :( miss you too.
It's weird to live without you.
you think thats weird? says Blaine's text. try a mckinley high school with no kurt hummel. youre out being fabulous and im stuck here with this massive empty void
Well, there is no one like me, that's certain ;)
you dont have to tell me that, it says, and it's far too sincere, and Kurt aches, just a little. call you when im done with hw? after dinner.
Oh yes, let's answers Kurt, and then he's smiling, and trying not to think about his own looming homework, and trawling his memory for the best stories he could possibly tell. He definitely needs to mention Cecelia from his Tuesday/Thursday class again. He knows Blaine would love her.
God, it's hard to be apart from him.
Kurt's knocked out a little bit of an outline for a paper and is thinking about his own dinner when Mike finally resurfaces, towel around his waist and hair sticking every which way like a ruffled bird. "Sorry," he says sincerely.
"Oh, I suppose it's excusable," says Kurt, putting on his loftiest voice. He motions vaguely to the other contents of the box. "I'm assuming you're going to eat that tonight?"
"Absolutely," Mike says.
"I figured I'd probably run over to that place a few blocks down, then," Kurt tells him, finally committing to it and getting up to head out as Mike crosses to his room for clothes. "Blaine's going to call later, I want to be done by then."
"Aww, good for you guys," says Mike. "Oh but hey, it's getting chillier a little? I know you're super-sensitive to when it's cold or whatever, you might wanna take a coat?"
Kurt grins. "As if I would turn down an opportunity to wear a stellar coat." He heads back into his own room in search of something - he knows exactly the one to match today's boots - and finds it relatively easily. The problem comes when he goes to put it on. With one sleeve tugged on, the shoulders of the jacket won't quite stretch across his back all the way for him to get his arm slipped in the other. Or rather, they do in a way, but once it's all the way on it pulls just tight enough that Kurt's concerned one false move might rip something. Reluctantly, he squirms back out of it and takes his second choice. It fits a little better but induces a similar frustration - plus, the buttons down the front won't lay flat the way he wants them to. Good lord, he hopes the drycleaners haven't botched something - or worse, he hopes someone like Finn never attempted to wash these in a washing machine.
"I might have to get a new coat," he admits, mostly to himself.
"Are you serious?" answers Mike anyway. "You have more coats than my crazy grandmother who thought she was going to come be an American movie star." He sticks his head out the door to his room and peers across the hall - still shirtless, but at least with his bottom half covered - and makes some kind of silly dramatic motion like a faux-glamorous woman in real fur. Kurt laughs.
"No, but really, nothing's fitting right," he insists, turning back to the wardrobe with a huff of aggravation. "I don't know what happened."
Mike shrugs. "It's probably not that cold out, if you're just going down a couple corners or so you'll be okay without." He grins a little. "Don't wanna waste your time trying to pick an outfit and then have to talk to the hubby with your mouth full!"
"Ugh, good point," says Kurt. "I better get going. You want anything?"
"Nah, I'm set."
Kurt heads out of the apartment for real this time, down the flights and flights of narrow stairs and out into the streets. The steps don't even wind him, just like they didn't that afternoon, and as he crosses his arms over his chest against the late September chill, Kurt finds himself smiling again. He'll have to tell Blaine about that, too.
---
October 12th: First Friday Off, Ever
Kurt wakes on a long, slow inhale, stretching his arms catlike as far above his head as they will go, and as he breathes out again, he feels his face settle into a lazy smile. Oh, this isn't one of his spur-of-the-moment personal holidays. This one's been marked on his calendar for weeks.
When he was planning his schedule for the fall semester, Kurt was thrilled to discover that he could get in five classes that he needed for his program of study without having a single one on Friday - practically a permanent three-day weekend. Unfortunately, as soon as his job in one of the on-campus cafes had heard about it, they'd scheduled him extra Friday hours every week to compensate, effectively nullifying Kurt's original brilliant plan. He's spent all year so far waking just as early on his academic "day off" as he does the rest of the week to get to class on time, and the knowledge that something that could have been so wonderful has been stolen from him has been enough to occasionally drive him absolutely crazy. But not today. Today the customer service gods have smiled down upon him and let him sleep in until - oh, wow, Kurt doesn't even know what time it is. All he knows is that he went to bed last night without even setting an alarm, with every intention of letting himself take advantage of the longest, sweetest night of sleep he's been able to catch in months.
And, oh, sweet indeed. As his head starts to clear, Kurt finds within it remnants of the quite marvelous dream he's been having - a dream involving reams and reams of beautiful fabrics the likes of which have never existed in real life, some sort of supernatural silk that felt like flower petals and cool clear water on his skin all at once, and how he'd made a bed from them and then taken Blaine to it, and they curled tighter and tighter in on one another, heat and warm grasping hands and skin and muscle and tongue -
He blinks his eyes two or three times to fully clear his vision and then peers down the line of his body to find himself almost fully hard, his dream-eager cock making a perfect unmistakable tent in his cream-colored sheets, the low light of his room illuminating its distinct shape in a way that's almost...artistic. Like it's begging to be photographed. And Kurt's so hungry for it now, his body still buzzing pleasantly from his dreamy memories of Blaine, its need for sleep satiated and leaving it free to need something else - god, he wants. Before he knows it he's reaching down with his left hand to slide his thumb up the length of himself a time or two through the sheets - and oh, oh that's good, arousal bubbling through him - and fumbling his right hand out in search of his iPhone on the shelf beside his bed, finally grasping it and leaning back far enough that there's no denying exactly what the picture is of when he takes it. It looks almost ethereal on the screen, as dreamy and lazily hungry as the whole of him feels, and he doesn't even hesitate before sending it to Blaine, doesn't even add a caption.
He keeps stroking lightly, hand against fabric against cock, as he waits for his response, and he gets one quickly - a cheeky awwww is that for me? complete with a winking face. But Kurt's been lulled so far under, the whole of him thrumming so thick with want, that he doesn't even rise to the bait.
Yes, he texts back, of course, it's always for you. Yes, please.
im in class, says Blaine, cant really play right now
Just get me through it? asks Kurt. I was having a wonderful dream. He strokes his cock more earnestly now, trying to cling to the shreds of dream-memory that are beginning to elude him the longer he's awake, and when his thumb catches just so over the slit of his cock and the sheet slides through slickness there, Kurt moans out into his empty room and adds I'm so hard before sending the text.
It's a moment before Blaine responds again, and Kurt spends it sliding the sheet away before it gets too messy and letting his cock stand stiff in the open air, palming it hot and heavy. He lays his phone on his chest just under his collarbone and shivers when it vibrates with the new message. what were your dreams about?
When Kurt moves his hand off his cock to text, his hips keep swiveling upward of their own accord, hitching just slightly off the mattress as his erection bobs in the emptiness. Your mouth, he answers honestly. It seems like all I ever want any more is your mouth. You're so perfect at it... Kurt imagines, letting his dream run together with his memories of reality, Blaine's soft generous lips and the almost unbearable heat of him, his tongue sliding deft and eager around the throbbing head of Kurt's cock or deep along the underside, and how Kurt can get so far in and Blaine just takes absolutely all of it, his cheeks hollowing out with tender unforgiving suction, the way the strong tendons and veins in his neck strain against the surface of his skin as the muscles work in his throat. It should be illegal.
i love sucking your cock, Blaine texts him, and Kurt moans again as he bucks into the ever-tightening tunnel of his own hand. its so big and hot and perfect like its made to fit inside me like that. do you wanna fuck my mouth?
"Please," Kurt moans into the silence of his bedroom, the word sounding pitifully desperate to his own ears before he even realizes that Blaine can't hear him like that. He stutters back a text of please please please that he's sure is full of typos and just imagines it, Blaine there in his too-small bed with him buried between his thighs, his dark curls clutched in Kurt's fingers as Kurt heaves up off the bed's surface at his own pace, plunging deeper and deeper into the perfect sweet cavern of Blaine's mouth. It's been so long and Kurt wants it so much -
dammit im getting hard in math class, fuck, kurt, i wanna blow you so bad
- and then Kurt is picturing that, the cruel erotic truth of his high school boyfriend sitting at McKinley with his phone hidden under his desk, getting hard in some pair of his bright tight high-cropped slacks and having to hide that too, flushing up under the collar, maybe sweating with it a little, keeping his secrets tucked away while miles and miles from there he's getting Kurt off, and that's when Kurt comes, his limbs all still heavy with sleep and his cock pulsing hot and frantic in his hand as he makes a mess of himself, tries clumsily to catch his breath, and gives up on dreaming for hot, hot reality.
He has to text back one-handed and it makes it slow, like his whole world has slowed down from how fast it was spinning just moments before. Blaine. You still make me come so hard even when you're not here.
i guess thats satisfying to hear, says Blaine, and Kurt laughs at him a little now, at how smug he's let himself become. i wish i could be there to do it in person.
Me too, Kurt says, the ache lifting from his limbs to come settle in his heart.
at least ive got this super sexy picture now, says Blaine. that ill probably have to go get off to in the locker rooms during first lunch. so thanks for that.
Mmmm, you're welcome, says Kurt, smiling to himself. Wish I could be there to see that, too. Maybe take me a picture to send back?
naaahhh, says Blaine, with another little winking face. surely youve got PLENTY enough to keep you going, dont you?
So selfish, says Kurt. Okay, I've got to clean myself up, don't get your phone confiscated. Love you.
you too, so much, every day, says Blaine, and Kurt lets the conversation end there, and rolls his legs to the side of the bed, shaking them a little to clear out the combined heaviness of an amazing night's sleep and the aftermath of a great orgasm. He imagines Blaine on his knees in the back corner of the locker room, his forearm braced against the row of lockers as his other hand jacks his cock furiously, his panting breaths echoing in the tiled space, and then quickly has to stop before he starts the whole process all over again. Instead, he makes his way to the bathroom, trying to psych himself up for another unsatisfying post-Mike-Chang shower, and smiling at the calendar on the wall on his way there.
There were certainly worse ways his first ever Friday off could have started.
---
November 8th: Epic Rejection Thursday
This is not a holiday Kurt celebrates.
This is possibly one of the most miserable days of his life.
He's been picking up speed since he got off the subway, moving faster and faster the closer he gets to home, and he probably caused a scene somewhere but he can't honestly bring himself to care. The instant the apartment door slams shut behind him is when he lets himself crack. He leans his back hard against it and coughs out one loud, absolutely pitiful-sounding sob. Then he keeps moving, and Mike calls out a soft "Do you want to talk about it?" but Kurt just shakes his head and throws his messenger bag into "his" sunken-in spot on the sofa before bustling on into his room and faceplanting on the bed, crying a little more into his pillow and worming one hand underneath his hip to tug and yank at his phone until it slides out of his pocket. Because Kurt was kind of lying - he does want to talk about it. Just not with Mike.
"Hey," says Blaine, soft and breathy-sweet when he answers.
"Baby?" croaks Kurt, and then his chest sort of heaves and he starts crying in earnest.
"Oh, Kurt," murmurs Blaine, "what is it, what do you need?"
"Can I just - " he's having a harder and harder time breathing, has to stutter and stop and start - "can I just cry at you for a - for a minute until - and then t-tell you the story?"
"Sure," says Blaine, "absolutely." Kurt faintly hears him toss off some excuse to whoever he's with, his parents probably, and then Blaine's back with him, whispering little things that Kurt can't really hear or understand through the cloud of his own gurgling. He can't believe he's such a blubbering mess - he feels so unbelievably stupid and childish for letting something like this get to him so badly, but then the miserable feeling of his own self-hatred only makes him cry harder. Blaine's voice is a soothing nothing-sound against his ear and after several long minutes that seem even longer from how stupid this is, Kurt finally cries himself out and is able to explain what happened.
What happened was, Kurt went in Tuesday for an audition - his first audition out in the "real world" that had nothing to do with any classes or clubs he's been part of. The description he'd looked at for what they wanted had seemed...fairly close to what he had to offer, so he'd been a little concerned, but he figured it couldn't hurt to put himself out there as much as possible. His audition, however, went flawlessly - well, maybe an eight out of ten, but it definitely could have been miles worse - and though the guy in charge seemed like kind of an a-hole, Kurt was delighted to check his phone the next day after getting out of class and discover a voicemail offering him a callback. It was an impossibly huge boost to his confidence - an honest-to-god callback! At his first ever real audition! And he had to cancel on some Wednesday evening study plans with the very nice girl in his 2:30 class, which he did feel a little bad about, but he went back in and did his best to wow them once more.
Then this afternoon, near the end of his heart-stoppingly dull shift at the campus cafe, the guy called again.
"And they hate me!" Kurt wails, trying to keep his voice down but having a bit of a difficult time with things, especially considering how unsteady it still is (stupid, stupid, why on Earth are you still weepy about this?). "That man is one of the most hateful p-people I have ever met in my life and I cannot believe he would say those things to a freshman in college. It's as if he expects us all to be pitch-perfect performing robots who'll do anything he says at the drop of a hat! And so I'm just standing there in my gross apron and visor trying not to just absolutely lose it."
"Oh, Kurt - " Blaine interjects again - he hasn't said much else, for which Kurt is very grateful, he really is such a wonderful boyfriend that Kurt can't stand it.
"I guess I was just kind of numb at first and so I managed to finish out my shift but then I just raced home as fast as I could and now I'm just a slovenly pile of misery," he says, rolling onto his back in the bed and flinging the arm that's not holding the phone dramatically over his face. (He then realizes he'll probably get tears on his perfect new burgundy pea coat, and throws it back onto the pillows above his head instead.) As he stares blearily up at the ceiling, there's the loud scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor in the apartment above. It's an appalling sound and Kurt cringes. He pretty much wants to curl up and die.
Blaine ventures a full sentence. "I can't believe someone would say such horrible things to you when all you did was audition - no doubt beautifully," he says.
"He called me incongruous," says Kurt, "who even says that? He then went on to elaborate and told me that I looked like a marble statue but sounded like a rubber dog toy."
Blaine murmurs out a sound Kurt can't quite decipher (not least of all because the noise upstairs is increasing). "You look like a marble statue?" he says. "That's - that's at least a compliment, right? And I've never known you to be upset over a compliment, even if it is back-handed."
"I'm going to get upset any time someone tells me that I'm not what they want!" Kurt says, fresh tears threatening to spill over again. "You're absolutely nothing in this business if nobody wants you." His voice tapers off, his head reeling and pounding all at once, thunderous footsteps joining the screeching furniture upstairs, his throat and heart clenching. Because that's it, isn't it? "I just want someone to want me."
"I want you," says Blaine, with buckets of honesty and absolutely no hesitation. "Every hour every day I want you."
Kurt finally manages a little smile through his grossness. "You're so sweet," he says, and he means it. Then he sighs. "But alas, sweetness won't be enough to fix my self-loathing-induced headache." Suddenly a bass-thick track of crappy music kicks into gear upstairs, and Kurt groans. "And the ASSHOLES UPSTAIRS aren't making this any better!" he shouts pointedly. "Ugh, not again, I can't believe this. Just because an apartment's empty shouldn't mean that the landlord is allowed to us it to host ridiculous drunken parties. It's not even eight o'clock for crying out loud! Talk about irresponsible, this is the last thing I need - "
"I thought the fourth floor was the top floor?" says Blaine, that strangeness back in his voice again.
"I know!" cries Kurt. "So they're right on top of me, jesus christ - "
There's a sudden light rapping on his bedroom door, and Kurt curves the phone away from his mouth and calls, "Come in." Mike sticks his head around the doorframe.
"D'you want me to go up and see if they'll shut up?" he asks, jerking his thumb at the ceiling.
"Yes, please, god," says Kurt, and Mike disappears again. He leans back to Blaine on the phone. "Sorry. What were you...?"
"I, ah - " says Blaine, "baby, I have to go."
Kurt pouts. "What? Noooo, you're supposed to stay on the phone with me for another hour or five until I stop feeling horrible and get some of my self-confidence back. Blaine - "
"I guess it just - doesn't work that way," says Blaine, and now his voice just sounds pained. "God, I wish I were there to be with you, and I'd just hold you, Kurt, I hate to know you're hurting. But I'm - I'm not there. I'm here. And there's stuff here I have to do, too."
"But that's not fair," Kurt says, still sniffling. "I don't get to see you for Thanksgiving or Christmas because of my stupid job and your stupid parents, the least this lousy stuff you have to do could do would be to take a damn rain check."
"I love you," says Blaine. "I'm so sorry."
He ends the call rather abruptly, and Kurt's heart aches a little more for it. What was that about? And why, why, why does New York City and being separated and life have to be so hard?
---
December 31st: New Year's Eve...And More
"I can't believe that today is really a holiday," says Kurt, who's been staring at a magazine under the (false) pretense of actually reading it for nearly half an hour.
It's a testament to how truly great Mike is as a friend that he doesn't even ask for Kurt to explain that statement, and just says, "I know."
"Like, this has significance to other people," he continues anyway, fidgeting in his seat. "There's some broader meaning behind it being December thirty-first. Something that somehow actually exists beyond they're coming."
"I know!" says Mike again.
Kurt lolls backward and drops the magazine to the floor. "You're totally not actually getting anywhere in that game, are you."
Mike's hand holding the Xbox controller droops similarly. "Nope." He presses pause, and then turns and grins at Kurt, and god, Kurt can see it, exactly in Mike's eyes the way it must be in his, and he grins back. They are both stupidly, beautifully in love and neither of them can bring themselves to feel sorry about it.
"How much longer?"
"Fourteen minutes," says Mike almost before Kurt's done asking. He can see the clock on their microwave better from where he's sitting than Kurt can.
"I think I'm going to explode."
"Before they get here?" says Mike, going comically straight-faced. "That'll suck."
"Uugghhh," groans Kurt, flopping dramatically across the sofa and landing his head nearly in Mike's lap. He laughs and shoves at Kurt's shoulders and Kurt struggles to sit back up, clawing at the back of the sofa. "I just can't actually take this any more! I'm amazed I even made it till today to be honest, that last shift at work was like - "
They both freeze, their eyes going wide, when there is a crisp soft hummingbird-fast knock on their apartment door.
"Early," says Mike, his face cracking in that grin again.
"You answer it," says Kurt, tugging at Mike's elbow until he's standing and then following him up. "That's her knocking, go, go!"
Mike spiders around their half-kitchen to the door in about one second flat and then he's wrenching the knob and then comes a high-pitched eeeeeeee! and he stumbles three or four steps backward, his arms absolutely full of Tina, in a vivid pink coat and boots that come up over her knees. He whirls her around and they're laughing, trying to kiss and laugh at the same time and it's absolutely wonderful but Kurt needs them to move, glares at them unseen until they clear the area and step aside to reveal -
Blaine.
"Hi," he says, his voice warm and thick, his eyes positively sparkling and his smile curving crooked almost like he can't believe it's happening. And frankly, Kurt is right there with him, astonishment making his steps slow as he crosses over to where Blaine is shutting the door behind him, never once breaking their eye contact - because it's so wonderful just to see him. He brushes past the bubbling, bouncing Mike-and-Tina explosion to his right and before he knows it Kurt's got one hand fitted around the back of Blaine's head and he's tugging their mouths flush together and positively devouring him, angling just right to get their lips in this beautiful tandem and his tongue as far into Blaine's mouth as it will go, sucking at Blaine's own and sliding as wet and dirty as he can possibly let himself be with two other people in the room, which is apparently quite a lot more than it would have been four months ago. Blaine, Kurt is pleased to hear, moans faintly out through his nose and has his own hand twisted tight-scrunched into the back of Kurt's shirt by the time Kurt pulls away.
"Hi," he echoes, and Blaine swears softly.
"And your parents are totally okay with all of this?" Mike's asking when they tune back into reality, for probably the seven hundredth time.
"My mom is very progressive," says Tina with a sharp grin. "After we - you know, the first time - she was one of the first people I told, we talked it out and she helped me work through some stuff. They had no problem when I told them we were staying over with you. It's cheaper this way, everything's fine."
Kurt glances from them to Blaine. "And your parents are okay with all of it?"
Blaine smiles serenely at him. "Of course they're okay with their gay son sharing a nice inexpensive hotel room with his straight female friend for a couple of days," he says. "Why wouldn't they be?"
Kurt kisses him swiftly again, just for being a fabulous bastard.
Tina starts in with a whirlwind of conversation, gabbing to Mike about absolutely everything to do with their plane ride and all the while picking at his clothes or nuzzling her cheek against his face (he'd decided not to go back to totally clean-shaven after his bold venture into No-Shave November, and Kurt was still kind of undecided on the look but it was apparently definitely working for her). They're moving in a slow progression toward Mike's bedroom and Kurt has no doubt about how that will end up. Truth be told, he's been scheming similar plans, but Blaine is still standing there in his thick winter coat just looking at him, inscrutable, and finally Kurt has to just raise an eyebrow at him. "Well?"
"I have something I need to tell you," Blaine whooshes out, and Kurt feels his heart drop from wry bemusement to genuine concern.
"What is it?" he asks, reaching to take Blaine's hand in his.
"Okay, you have to promise not to get mad at me," says Blaine. "You also have to promise not to laugh." Kurt purses his lips - anything that could garner both of those reactions means this is getting stranger by the second. "For the past few months I may have been a little - confused, about your apartment. About the exact address of your apartment." His gaze shifts a little to the side and his cheeks color, and oh god, Blaine is embarrassed. "I could have sworn you said you were going to be living on the fourth floor, and so I think I've made - a mistake. Just. The apartment above yours is still empty, right?"
"Yes," says Kurt, still confused. "You'd think people would snatch up city apartments so quickly but he's asking far too much for it, presumably so he can keep partying. Blaine, what - "
"In the mail," says Blaine. "I've sent you - some things, in the mail."
Kurt's suddenly starting to get a much better idea of the situation, and his expression slowly, slowly shifts. "What kinds of things?"
"Can we get into the mailbox?"
The two of them are suddenly a flurry of movement, Kurt tugging on a sweater and then darting out of the apartment with Blaine hot on his heels. They take the stairs in leaps and bounds, past the floors below and down to the tiny street-level entryway with its rows of dilapidated metal mail slots, and Kurt flicks automatically to 3-C before shifting his gaze one box up. 4-C definitely has a couple of things in it. 4-C is also locked.
"So when you - on the phone - "
"I'm so sorry, Kurt, but is there any way we can get into that? Because this is kind of potentially really incriminating and I just - "
Kurt is way ahead of him, his hand slinking into the pocket of Blaine's enormous coat and pulling out his wallet, searching the inside for his crappy McKinley High ID card. He reaches up to wedge it through the tiny gap, and combined with Kurt's own mailbox key for pressure, they jimmy it open and watch four faintly-yellow envelopes tumble out.
"That's it?" says Kurt, just to be sure.
"That's it." Blaine kneels down to scoop them up, and when he stands he's awfully close to Kurt, staring straight into his eyes and blushing harder than ever, his lips working faintly around words that he apparently just can't bring himself to say.
Kurt gives him a lush smile. "Come upstairs and show me."
So they climb back up to the third floor, Blaine panting for breath in his coat by the time they get there and Kurt just smiling, smiling, thinking of September. September, which is when the first of these envelopes was mailed, and there's one a month since then and they all look very similar. His heart's already thrilling with the anticipation, and he takes Blaine straight to his room when he gets inside, where they sit on the bed side by side and Blaine starts nervously unbuttoning his coat, trying to give his shaking hands something to do.
"Go ahead," he says, and so Kurt starts from the beginning. And they are exactly what he thought they were, and yet - so much more.
Inside the September envelope there are five striking soft-focus black and white photographs. There's also a small note, but Kurt disregards it - given the circumstances - and just lays the pictures out, letting his eyes scan across them as his breath begins to hitch. A beautiful one of Blaine smiling, laughing. One marked first day of school! with a smily-face in which Blaine is wearing an absolutely fabulous outfit. And three, different angles and different parts and different poses, in which Blaine is wearing absolutely nothing at all.
Of course Kurt has seen Blaine naked before. And yet he gazes hungrily down at the photographs - Blaine sprawled limply in his bed, Blaine softly touching himself, Blaine standing casual in his own nudity - and just drinks it all in.
"Who took these?" Kurt breathes without looking up, because there's no way Blaine could've done it himself, but the answer comes to him almost as soon as he's said it, and he says, "Tina," in unison with Blaine's own answer.
"She's been really into that camera ever since she took all those pictures at graduation and the after-party," Blaine elaborates. "And I...trust her."
"They're stunning," says Kurt. "You're stunning. Oh my god, and there's more, what am I doing - "
He hastily tears into the October envelope, and while there's only four photos in this one, it's more of the same - a sweet Halloween snapshot (Blaine's the scarecrow, Artie's the tin man and Sam is the lion to what Kurt assumes is Tina's Dorothy), a soft and gorgeous candid shot, and two amazing, sensual others. The loose full-body shot has been repeated. November has five again. December has seven.
"Your secret extra Christmas present that I couldn't exactly leave with your dad," says Blaine. "Tina and I had gotten a little more...comfortable, by that point." Kurt can tell; one of the December photos is from behind and to the side, with Blaine curved vulnerable on his hands and knees.
"I can't believe this," says Kurt, finally flicking his eyes up to the real live Blaine in front of him. "I can't believe any of this."
"I can't believe it," says Blaine. "I feel kind of like a creep for sending you these when I'm not even eighteen yet in some of them, and then kind of like the world's biggest moron for getting your apartment number wrong - "
"I can't believe that all of this is for me," Kurt says, and then yanks Blaine toward him by the collar of his shirt for a thick, hungry kiss. Blaine slides his hand through the hair at Kurt's temple and grips him tightly, and after a moment they topple sideways, clutching close, squashing the photos beneath them - Kurt realizes and makes himself pull away, sitting back up and collecting them all together.
The stock standing picture from December ends up on the top of the pile, and Kurt looks down at it and then back up to real-Blaine. "What's with all these plain standing-up ones?" he asks. "Why'd you do it every time?"
"Oh!" says Blaine, smiling a little. "That was actually the one part of this that I sort of thought was a good idea and not just kind of skeezy. I figured that way you could - I mean, if you put them all next to each other..." He takes the stack from Kurt's hands and sorts through it, tugging out the photos in question and lining them up chronologically. "It'd be like you could follow along, as our year went on, away from me."
Kurt looks at the picture from September, the set of Blaine's shoulders in it, the softness of his shy smile, and he begins to get it. This was very much the exact same Blaine that he left in mid-August when he moved to New York - the same Blaine he thought was sitting beside him now. But he looks more closely at the October picture, the November picture, the one from earlier this month, and Kurt can actually see it, and it's astonishing. The way his jaw comes to stand out a little more sharply. The tightening of his stomach, the thickening of his long, lean muscles. The way his chest is a little bit hairier, and a not-quite-so-little bit broader, his warm skin stretched taut. He's styling his hair different too, a little longer, a little less plastered-down. And when Kurt turns back to Blaine, his real, solid, three-dimensional right here Blaine, and really looks at him, compared to the boy in the picture from September, it's absolutely mind-blowing.
"Jesus fuck," Kurt says somewhat abruptly. "Look at you." Without the thick shell of his winter coat hiding him away, Blaine's laid out before him more gorgeously than ever, all the lines and slopes and angles of him absolutely flawless and just begging to be memorized anew.
But Blaine shakes his head, his eyes wide, and curves his broad hands around both sides of Kurt's face. "Look at you," he breathes out. "I can't believe - we've gone so long without getting to see each other, and here I am expecting my same beautiful skinny high school boyfriend but god, Kurt - " His hands slide down Kurt's neck to his shoulders, and they squeeze there, firm and warm and tantalizing. "New York has done everything for you."
Kurt tries to think about it, all the ways he could have changed just like Blaine has, as his boyfriend's strong sensual hands keep massaging into his upper arms and Blaine leans closer to kiss faintly at the corners of his mouth and the line of his jaw. He thinks about the wardrobe struggles he went through back in the earlier autumn - he supposes he went up about half a size, his shoulders and his torso in general a little bit fuller. He thinks about having to start shaving regularly, which really has been nothing but an absolute chore. He thinks about taking the stairs without getting winded or being back-handedly called a marble statue. And he thinks Blaine may be on to something here - but then he sort of stops being able to think at all, because Blaine's sucking on that spot under his ear (and that hasn't changed a bit) and then one of those warm deft hands slides down to palm sure and steady right across his cock and Kurt gasps sharply.
"So hot," Blaine babbles against his neck. "God, Kurt, I want you on top of me, fuck, want all of this all over me - " he starts pulling Kurt's shirt loose from his waistband - "need you to fuck me, so strong and so fucking sexy - "
Kurt's hands are up tugging Blaine's shirt buttons open at the collar in an instant, the photos discarded to the floor, and as he peels back the soft red fabric the hair on Blaine's chest starts coming into view and Kurt absolutely loses it. He leans in and buries his face against it and just breathes, the intoxicating smell of Blaine clouding him absolutely everywhere, and he has a fleeting funny memory of Mike back in September, going crazy over the scent of Tina -
Shit. Mike and Tina.
As if on cue, Kurt hears a soft but unmistakable noise waft from Mike's bedroom across the hall, and he and Blaine both giggle just a little, pulling apart from one another and adjusting their borderline-uncomfortable erections. Kurt collects himself and crosses to the door, leaning half into the hallway and calling out as politely as he can. "Ladies?" he says, smirking to himself. "So as to maintain some respect for one another's privacy in these couple of hours we have before we need to leave to get to Times Square I think I'm going to put some music on very, very loudly, does that sound reasonable?"
"Uhhhh yeah!" calls Tina back through the door. "Um - like - as long as it's - "
"I'll risk sounding somewhat inappropriate and admit that I have a playlist crafted specifically for this purpose," says Kurt. "And it's eighty-percent Mike Chang approved."
"Best roommate ever!" cries Mike, and Kurt laughs a little to himself and then crosses past Blaine on the bed to get at his iHome, swirling to the playlist labeled Don't Even Knock and cranking it up nearly as loud as it will go before setting it on the shelf by the door and turning back to Blaine with a cheshire grin.
"Now, where were we?" he says.
"September," says Blaine, as Kurt falls into his lap, their hips grinding together the instant they make contact. Kurt kisses him, hard, and drags his hands up and down Blaine's chest in a couple of firm, fervent passes, feeling out his muscle through the fabric of his shirt and then starting back in on the buttons again until it falls completely open and hangs from Blaine's thick-corded shoulders. He rakes his eyes over every square inch of Blaine, as they strip out of their clothes and put themselves skin to skin, Blaine's heavy-hung cock sliding perfect against Kurt's own, everything both comfortably old and fascinatingly new all at once. This is his Blaine; every one of the photographs strewn on the floor by the bed is his Blaine, faint variations on this perfect, erotic theme.
Blaine moans loudly against his mouth, but Kurt barely hears it over the music, and doesn't need to hear, anyway, not today, not when he can see.
---
New York is hard. It's a lot of pain and misery that Kurt never expected, not when he was the too-young too-small boy that Lima, Ohio spat out at the end of high school, when the big city was all bright lights and dark intrigue and huge, impossible dreams. When the Kurt of four and a half months ago moved into apartment 3-C he had every intention of taking the whole place by storm. That Kurt planned to change New York. The Kurt of today fully understands that New York is changing him.
It happens every single day.
And Kurt's so remarkably all right with that. Kurt figures, if he can have that - if he can change and shift and grow, here in New York, and even then know that back in Ohio Blaine is growing and shifting and changing too; and if they can map these changes with their eyes and hands and bodies, and then still get up afterward and beat Mike Chang to the shower, and bundle up in their warm bulky coats and stand in the splendor of New York City as the calendar rolls over to a brand new year; if Kurt can clutch Blaine's hand in his as the ball drops and know that at midnight, at the end of the day, at the end of every day, Blaine and everything he becomes is unfailingly his, no matter how hard life is, no matter what else might change - if Kurt can have all of that, then pretty much every day is worth celebrating.
pictures of you all placed in a line
disregard the present and the occurrence of time
memories through photographs, pristine and sincere
forgetting recent history; in my mind, you are here.
-- Paper Moon, "Memories Through Photographs"
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