zunmo
in
kurt_blaine
Thought I Saw You Breathing
Title: Thought I Saw you Breathing
Rating: R
Warnings: A little sex, use of substances.
Word Count: 2801
Summary: The summer he was seventeen, Kurt memorized the cicadas heady, constant buzz and made choices.
February is the right time of year to fall in love, Kurt thinks, because it adds something softer to the landscape. Driving between Westerville and Lima, he can pluck out a rosy blur that drops itself over the top edges of gray-shingled roofs and twines itself around thirsty, emaciated tree branches lifting themselves praying into the sky. At seventeen, there isn’t much more to dwell on than that gentleness that seems to have fallen over everything at some point in the past two months- some unidentifiable moment, Blaine smiling at him crookedly over a paper coffee cup, or his hand thoughtlessly brushing the latitude of Kurt’s upper back.
Kurt commutes forty minutes every day, spends the time wrapped in his cocoon of a car, hurtling through the winter air along a highway made up of stark gray lines. By Valentines Day, it looks like the snow is starting recede a little from the edges of the road, creep back into the rivers and lakes. The woods press in close, and Kurt drums his fingers over the steering wheel, willing himself not to cry. Thinks about taking up smoking just to spite Wes, just to be able to feel his vice between his fingers wrapped up and contained.
---
April passes in a haze, mud pressing under Kurt’s green rainboots and the sickening pressure niggling at the back of his mind: I’m still in love with him. It’s hard because of the way his breath catches in his throat sometimes when he sees Blaine shaving a stripe down his neck in the morning or picking his way listlessly through a plate of cafeteria food. Inconvenient, he thinks, to have such a sticky throat that these days he hardly says anything he means at all.
When the last of the snow finally melts off the quad, Blaine is there waiting, and Kurt is sure that something is going to happen. He meets him gingerly halfway, searching fruitlessly for dry spots in the vaguely grassy soup of mud.
“Good sir,” says Blaine, grin about three miles wide. “I’m here to divest you of your weather virginity.”
“Wait,” Says Kurt, “What?”
Blaine pushes him.
There is a moment of tense, loaded silence where the only thought running through Kurt’s head is Sebago loafers before he lashes forward and steals Blaine’s feet out from under him. Blaine whoops and literally rolls in the mud for a minute before taking off across the quad, dirt clinging to the sides of his uniform pants, arms streaming gracelessly away from his body. Kurt is up in an instant, following him, losing his shoes to the cloying wet earth halfway and not even caring, that is the most extraordinary thing, not even caring.
---
Dalton lets out for the summer earlier than McKinley, and by the time Rachel Berry comes knocking he’s already spread himself into the idea of summer, grease stains in his t-shirts from humid afternoons at the garage, nights wandering the neighborhood with Mercedes, searching desperately for something to do. Blaine’s been around twice, and they made tuna sandwiches, leaning against the kitchen counter and giggling into the whole-wheat bread Kurt buys for his father. Talked about David, about Flint, about the other boys who stay in sharp focus all summer on travel programs or internships. Kurt let himself soften around the edges, a little, and thought about the packet of cigarettes buried in his sock drawer, the little bag of marijuana he bought from Puck last weekend. The cigarettes will probably end up left at the garage for some lucky employee to discover, he admits to Blaine, but the pot he will keep to himself. It’s not much, not enough for a blunt, but he likes the idea that he has it.
Rachel Berry arrives on his doorstep on the twenty-third of June, around three in the afternoon, and pulls him out the front door with just a promise of frozen yogurt. He gets peach and they sit on shiny metal chairs outside the shop in what would be called the center of Lima, if Lima had a center.
“… dads were a little worried about you, you know, how you were adjusting, they always wished I brought you around more. I told them you were fine or Mercedes would have told me, especially under all the stress of regionals and nationals and everything. My duties as a leader were being severely stretched, along with all the romantic tension in the group, you know, so I didn’t have much time to check up on you. And Wesley- that’s his name?- would probably have murdered me if I’d come around to Dalton, not without reason! I mean, your setlist was only just short of extraordinary, really a beautiful mix of mod- Kurt? Are you even listening to me?”
“Mmmm,” he responds eloquently, tilting his chin in her direction and smiling a little. It is a mark of how truly languid July’s impending descent has turned him that he allows himself to lick idly at his spoon as he speaks. “I’m listening Rachel. It’s just a little…” he gestures expansively. “I don’t know, the glint of murder hasn’t left your eyes, is all. Everyone at Dalton is very, ah, reticent? Nobody just…” another gesture.
“Well, what did you expect?” She says, and he sits up, a little startled.
“What?”
“It isn’t exactly surprising, is it? They wear uniforms, they have a council. They call it a council. I bet they raise their hands when they want to speak, or something like that. I don’t really find it strange.”
Kurt tilts his head to the side and examines Rachel. Her hair is immaculate in braids, tank top tucked into some awful little skirt, Keds laced like nooses. Energy hums under her skin so gently she almost seems to flutter with it. Her eyes are bright and brown, pointing straight at Kurt with a type of intensity he isn’t used to anymore.
“I suppose not.” He says, and uncrosses his legs to stand up, smoothing down his black shorts. “Come along, then. Let’s walk down main street, and you can tell me all about whatever complicated romantic debacle you’re involved in this week.”
She smiles at him, genuine, soft, lips closed. Takes his proffered hand and stands up, adjusting his bow tie a little in another of her endless small maternal gestures.
---
Once, in mid-July, when the cicadas have just dug themselves out of the ground and begun their buzzing dog-days symphony, Blaine calls him at eight o’clock.
“I want to leave, I want to go somewhere, but where is there to go? It’s too late, but it feels like one of those nights where tomorrow is just forever away. I just need to move, you know?”
Kurt knows. There’s been an itching building under his skin for months, like his veins are rubbing up against the sandpaper insides of his skin. If he so much as looks at his Dalton blazer, hanging in the back of his closet like a warning, he feels an insurmountable desire to wiggle out of his skin and become some kind of sleek, shapeless creature who doesn’t fit into blazers or a capella arrangements. Instead, he peels off every piece of his clothing and lays himself naked in the bathtub, willing his body to restructure itself so the lines of his bones and ligaments fit.
But Kurt can’t say any of this to Blaine. It’s too much, and more than he can forge into words right now. So instead he says “Come see me.”
“What, now? Won’t your dad get angry, I know he doesn’t like me sleeping over? And I thought you had to work tomorrow.”
“It’s fine. Just come over.”
So he does, and they drive to the playground Kurt skinned seven small knees at as a child in Blaine’s boxy green Volvo that still holds the smell of the last owners. They crouch under the play structure and Kurt packs a bowl, and they pass the little blown glass pipe back and forth and feel like there is less and less coming between their brains and the universe with every hit. Blaine lets his head loll back against a wooden beam and giggles as his fingers move over the woodchips beneath him. Kurt closes his eyes and exhales, and his lips go soft around the wide plume of smoke. In the morning they will drink orange juice and do vocal exercises to make up for the damage to their lungs, but for now their blood flows differently and their fingertips pick up every drop of texture in the world.
Blaine rubs the fabric of Kurt’s canvas sneaker with his thumb and then moves his hand to cover the whole foot, and then somehow he’s holding Kurt’s ankle and sliding his fingers up his calf, and Kurt’s eyes are blown wide and nervous so he takes another hit to distract himself with the flicker of his finger against the lighter. Blaine is grinning lazily, but his head is still tilted back, his eyes closed, and eventually he lets go with a sweet huff.
“Give it here,” He says, and holds out his hand for the pipe. “Just one more, mkay? No more for you either. High as fuccccccck, the both of us, and… singing. Smoke in the lungs, boy!”
Kurt giggles, imagining what Wes and David would say if they saw them now, and barely manages to hand over the pipe before he has descended into a belly-deep laugh and is grabbing Blaine’s wrist to tug him out into the moonlight.
“Come on come on come on,” He chatters, finding the viscous motion of his body through space a whole new kind of beautiful. “Let’s go places.”
Blaine stumbles out smiling, lips stretched tight over his big, beautiful teeth, arms about the best thing Kurt’s ever seen because there they are, arms, boy arms, so pretty.
---
Mercedes clucks her tongue at him, a motion Kurt knows she picked up from her mother, and carefully folds a sweatshirt back onto the shelf from whence it came.
“You know better than to try and wear yellow, Kurt. Yellow’s barely even my color, for lord’s sake, and you know I have a much more versatile skin tone than you do.”
“Yes,” Kurt concedes, “but can you blame a boy for feeling a little hopeful?”
Mercedes turns and fixes him with a look that clearly says ‘there are no excuses’ and turns back to refolding things left hanging haphazardly by messy customers.
“You need to stop bothering me at work, boo. I will get fired. They’re looking for an excuse.” She shoots a hateful glance towards her supervisor, busy at the register. The dream job they assumed it would be working at Forever 21 is not.
“Fffft, I buy something every time I come in here. She can’t give you the boot for having fabulous friends.”
“There’s no problem with that statement, beautiful, but this is a women’s store.”
“Fashion has no gender, I don’t know how many times I need to say it, Mercedes.”
She smiles at him then, takes his hand behind a stack of unflatteringly cut blouses and rubs her thumb over the knuckles. The thing about Mercedes is that she’s never been afraid to touch Kurt, even when everyone else treated him like he had some kind of horribly communicable disease. She’s so casual about it, too, hugging him hello and goodbye like it doesn’t mean anything at all, even when Kurt’s held on just a little too long, dug his forehead a little to hard into her shoulder. In this way, she’s saved him.
“Come to my house when your shift’s over, beautiful,” he says, clasping her hand briefly before trailing away towards the register. “We’ll make organic juice pops and watch RuPauls’ Drag Race.”
Her grin widens and she blows him a kiss before returning to her folding, neat, precise aligning of fabric and the comfortable motion of her fingers smoothing in creases.
---
When Blaine finally kisses him, it’s with a soft mouth leaning upwards and questioning fingertips braced against the sides of his neck. Kurt lets his body sink into it a little and kisses back with humming elbows bent so his hands brush gently at the fabric of Blaine’s t-shirt.
Blaine kisses him in mid-July, and the summer’s first cicada crawls up the side of a tree and starts buzzing. Kurt’s coveralls are tied around his waist and he knows the dog days have begun with the movement of his shoulderblades against the back wall of Hummel Tires and Lube, the noise of a car engine stalling and stalling.
---
“Hey dude,” Says Finn, looking up from his videogame. “Going out?”
“Mmm.” Hums Kurt affirmatively, carefully adjusting the collar of his new shirt in the hall mirror.
“So… with Blaine, then?” And Finn still has Call of Duty on pause, is still looking up at Kurt in an unselfconscious way that Kurt would’ve taken as sexy six months ago, saved for swift late-night sessions of pillow-biting and mild self-loathing. Really, masturbation sans guilt is an entirely new, beautiful world Kurt’s only recently opened himself up to.
“No, Quinn and Mercedes, actually. Why are you so curious, oh stagnant one?”
“No reason, just… you know. Be safe.”
Kurt fights the urge to cluck his tongue in frustration, spinning around to face Finn.
“You do realize that I am a boy? I have male genitalia. Enough testosterone is flowing through my blood that I do grow facial hair, I could, feasibly, impregnate a-“
“Dude, not what I meant at all.” Finn says, slicing him off mid-rant in a way that’s far more socially graceful than Kurt ever expected from his stepbrother. “Just, like, you’re my little brother now? So don’t get… mauled, or something.”
There is enough to be astonished about in this statement that it sticks Kurt’s feet to the floor for a few minutes, his mouth slightly open, pithy retaliations dying on his tongue.
“Um… oh, okay then…” He splutters, and Finn nods before turning back to killing Russians or Iraqis or whoever is threatening America’s self-image at the moment.
---
They fall into sex quickly and easily after that sticky afternoon behind the auto shop. It doesn’t seem worth it to wait, because of all the energy they’ve already wasted dancing around one another, and because they both know Kurt’s not going back to Dalton in the fall. Karofsky’s graduated, but Kurt also knows Blaine can feel it in the new fluidity of his limbs as they wrap around him, projecting an apology through layers of tissue straight down to the bone. That first tentative embrace is all Kurt needs by way of asking.
August hits like a wave of air stained a watery orange and popsicle juice that runs down Blaine’s chin in the late afternoon one Thursday, sitting on Kurt’s back porch with their feet dangling sockless into an ocean of grass. Kurt smiles and knows his tongue has turned cherry red, and doesn’t even care.
Blaine scoots closer, wraps a sticky-fingered arm around his waist and kisses him sloppily, all big wet lips and just a little stubble. Kurt expects him to stop at some point, maybe laughingly to wipe a smear of red off his cheek, or petering out with softer kisses like a graceful promise.
When Blaine never stops, neither does Kurt, and the beautiful tangle they make of Kurt’s sheets is the thing Kurt thinks he will remember the most. The wrinkles read of the gentle arc his own spine presses against Blaine’s body from neck to chest or the way they both gasp for air near the end with mouths gaping softly. Kurt absorbs the stretching pain with teeth latched into his lower lip, then a kiss that’s made entirely of clicking teeth and lips smearing together like a collision. Then his breath hitches just a little and Blaine traces fingers over his lower belly, leaving soft electric trails over Kurt’s hipbones and thighs.
It’s too much, in the end, but that was essentially the point. Blaine falls asleep quickly, and Kurt memorizes the pale curve where the back of his thigh tucks into his knee and the spot where his collarbone meets his shoulder in a patch of rapidly fading sunlight. He falls asleep committing the skeletal structure of the boy next to him to memory.
When they wake up, night is fleeing the horizon, and Kurt’s window is wide open to the dew and crickets dissolving into the Midwestern sun. Blaine rolls over into him, lets their hips bump together like it’s nothing at all, and asks him if things are going to change.
“Uhm,” Says Kurt, voice still blurry around the edges from sleep, “Probably.”
fin
AN: The title comes from Sufjan Steven's "Casimir Pulaski Day." That song is pretty much my current jam. I'd like to preemptively address the pot smoked in this fic- this was conceived before I knew about BIOTA, and I know this might not be the best time to post it, but I'm doing it anyway. I know far, far more teenagers who smoke pot than drink, because, honestly, pot is safer. I'm not sure why there's so little said about weed on Glee itself, or in the fandom, but I'm trying to write about my experience as a teenager, and pot is definitely a part of that. Stepping off my soapbox now, thanks.
Rating: R
Warnings: A little sex, use of substances.
Word Count: 2801
Summary: The summer he was seventeen, Kurt memorized the cicadas heady, constant buzz and made choices.
February is the right time of year to fall in love, Kurt thinks, because it adds something softer to the landscape. Driving between Westerville and Lima, he can pluck out a rosy blur that drops itself over the top edges of gray-shingled roofs and twines itself around thirsty, emaciated tree branches lifting themselves praying into the sky. At seventeen, there isn’t much more to dwell on than that gentleness that seems to have fallen over everything at some point in the past two months- some unidentifiable moment, Blaine smiling at him crookedly over a paper coffee cup, or his hand thoughtlessly brushing the latitude of Kurt’s upper back.
Kurt commutes forty minutes every day, spends the time wrapped in his cocoon of a car, hurtling through the winter air along a highway made up of stark gray lines. By Valentines Day, it looks like the snow is starting recede a little from the edges of the road, creep back into the rivers and lakes. The woods press in close, and Kurt drums his fingers over the steering wheel, willing himself not to cry. Thinks about taking up smoking just to spite Wes, just to be able to feel his vice between his fingers wrapped up and contained.
---
April passes in a haze, mud pressing under Kurt’s green rainboots and the sickening pressure niggling at the back of his mind: I’m still in love with him. It’s hard because of the way his breath catches in his throat sometimes when he sees Blaine shaving a stripe down his neck in the morning or picking his way listlessly through a plate of cafeteria food. Inconvenient, he thinks, to have such a sticky throat that these days he hardly says anything he means at all.
When the last of the snow finally melts off the quad, Blaine is there waiting, and Kurt is sure that something is going to happen. He meets him gingerly halfway, searching fruitlessly for dry spots in the vaguely grassy soup of mud.
“Good sir,” says Blaine, grin about three miles wide. “I’m here to divest you of your weather virginity.”
“Wait,” Says Kurt, “What?”
Blaine pushes him.
There is a moment of tense, loaded silence where the only thought running through Kurt’s head is Sebago loafers before he lashes forward and steals Blaine’s feet out from under him. Blaine whoops and literally rolls in the mud for a minute before taking off across the quad, dirt clinging to the sides of his uniform pants, arms streaming gracelessly away from his body. Kurt is up in an instant, following him, losing his shoes to the cloying wet earth halfway and not even caring, that is the most extraordinary thing, not even caring.
---
Dalton lets out for the summer earlier than McKinley, and by the time Rachel Berry comes knocking he’s already spread himself into the idea of summer, grease stains in his t-shirts from humid afternoons at the garage, nights wandering the neighborhood with Mercedes, searching desperately for something to do. Blaine’s been around twice, and they made tuna sandwiches, leaning against the kitchen counter and giggling into the whole-wheat bread Kurt buys for his father. Talked about David, about Flint, about the other boys who stay in sharp focus all summer on travel programs or internships. Kurt let himself soften around the edges, a little, and thought about the packet of cigarettes buried in his sock drawer, the little bag of marijuana he bought from Puck last weekend. The cigarettes will probably end up left at the garage for some lucky employee to discover, he admits to Blaine, but the pot he will keep to himself. It’s not much, not enough for a blunt, but he likes the idea that he has it.
Rachel Berry arrives on his doorstep on the twenty-third of June, around three in the afternoon, and pulls him out the front door with just a promise of frozen yogurt. He gets peach and they sit on shiny metal chairs outside the shop in what would be called the center of Lima, if Lima had a center.
“… dads were a little worried about you, you know, how you were adjusting, they always wished I brought you around more. I told them you were fine or Mercedes would have told me, especially under all the stress of regionals and nationals and everything. My duties as a leader were being severely stretched, along with all the romantic tension in the group, you know, so I didn’t have much time to check up on you. And Wesley- that’s his name?- would probably have murdered me if I’d come around to Dalton, not without reason! I mean, your setlist was only just short of extraordinary, really a beautiful mix of mod- Kurt? Are you even listening to me?”
“Mmmm,” he responds eloquently, tilting his chin in her direction and smiling a little. It is a mark of how truly languid July’s impending descent has turned him that he allows himself to lick idly at his spoon as he speaks. “I’m listening Rachel. It’s just a little…” he gestures expansively. “I don’t know, the glint of murder hasn’t left your eyes, is all. Everyone at Dalton is very, ah, reticent? Nobody just…” another gesture.
“Well, what did you expect?” She says, and he sits up, a little startled.
“What?”
“It isn’t exactly surprising, is it? They wear uniforms, they have a council. They call it a council. I bet they raise their hands when they want to speak, or something like that. I don’t really find it strange.”
Kurt tilts his head to the side and examines Rachel. Her hair is immaculate in braids, tank top tucked into some awful little skirt, Keds laced like nooses. Energy hums under her skin so gently she almost seems to flutter with it. Her eyes are bright and brown, pointing straight at Kurt with a type of intensity he isn’t used to anymore.
“I suppose not.” He says, and uncrosses his legs to stand up, smoothing down his black shorts. “Come along, then. Let’s walk down main street, and you can tell me all about whatever complicated romantic debacle you’re involved in this week.”
She smiles at him, genuine, soft, lips closed. Takes his proffered hand and stands up, adjusting his bow tie a little in another of her endless small maternal gestures.
---
Once, in mid-July, when the cicadas have just dug themselves out of the ground and begun their buzzing dog-days symphony, Blaine calls him at eight o’clock.
“I want to leave, I want to go somewhere, but where is there to go? It’s too late, but it feels like one of those nights where tomorrow is just forever away. I just need to move, you know?”
Kurt knows. There’s been an itching building under his skin for months, like his veins are rubbing up against the sandpaper insides of his skin. If he so much as looks at his Dalton blazer, hanging in the back of his closet like a warning, he feels an insurmountable desire to wiggle out of his skin and become some kind of sleek, shapeless creature who doesn’t fit into blazers or a capella arrangements. Instead, he peels off every piece of his clothing and lays himself naked in the bathtub, willing his body to restructure itself so the lines of his bones and ligaments fit.
But Kurt can’t say any of this to Blaine. It’s too much, and more than he can forge into words right now. So instead he says “Come see me.”
“What, now? Won’t your dad get angry, I know he doesn’t like me sleeping over? And I thought you had to work tomorrow.”
“It’s fine. Just come over.”
So he does, and they drive to the playground Kurt skinned seven small knees at as a child in Blaine’s boxy green Volvo that still holds the smell of the last owners. They crouch under the play structure and Kurt packs a bowl, and they pass the little blown glass pipe back and forth and feel like there is less and less coming between their brains and the universe with every hit. Blaine lets his head loll back against a wooden beam and giggles as his fingers move over the woodchips beneath him. Kurt closes his eyes and exhales, and his lips go soft around the wide plume of smoke. In the morning they will drink orange juice and do vocal exercises to make up for the damage to their lungs, but for now their blood flows differently and their fingertips pick up every drop of texture in the world.
Blaine rubs the fabric of Kurt’s canvas sneaker with his thumb and then moves his hand to cover the whole foot, and then somehow he’s holding Kurt’s ankle and sliding his fingers up his calf, and Kurt’s eyes are blown wide and nervous so he takes another hit to distract himself with the flicker of his finger against the lighter. Blaine is grinning lazily, but his head is still tilted back, his eyes closed, and eventually he lets go with a sweet huff.
“Give it here,” He says, and holds out his hand for the pipe. “Just one more, mkay? No more for you either. High as fuccccccck, the both of us, and… singing. Smoke in the lungs, boy!”
Kurt giggles, imagining what Wes and David would say if they saw them now, and barely manages to hand over the pipe before he has descended into a belly-deep laugh and is grabbing Blaine’s wrist to tug him out into the moonlight.
“Come on come on come on,” He chatters, finding the viscous motion of his body through space a whole new kind of beautiful. “Let’s go places.”
Blaine stumbles out smiling, lips stretched tight over his big, beautiful teeth, arms about the best thing Kurt’s ever seen because there they are, arms, boy arms, so pretty.
---
Mercedes clucks her tongue at him, a motion Kurt knows she picked up from her mother, and carefully folds a sweatshirt back onto the shelf from whence it came.
“You know better than to try and wear yellow, Kurt. Yellow’s barely even my color, for lord’s sake, and you know I have a much more versatile skin tone than you do.”
“Yes,” Kurt concedes, “but can you blame a boy for feeling a little hopeful?”
Mercedes turns and fixes him with a look that clearly says ‘there are no excuses’ and turns back to refolding things left hanging haphazardly by messy customers.
“You need to stop bothering me at work, boo. I will get fired. They’re looking for an excuse.” She shoots a hateful glance towards her supervisor, busy at the register. The dream job they assumed it would be working at Forever 21 is not.
“Fffft, I buy something every time I come in here. She can’t give you the boot for having fabulous friends.”
“There’s no problem with that statement, beautiful, but this is a women’s store.”
“Fashion has no gender, I don’t know how many times I need to say it, Mercedes.”
She smiles at him then, takes his hand behind a stack of unflatteringly cut blouses and rubs her thumb over the knuckles. The thing about Mercedes is that she’s never been afraid to touch Kurt, even when everyone else treated him like he had some kind of horribly communicable disease. She’s so casual about it, too, hugging him hello and goodbye like it doesn’t mean anything at all, even when Kurt’s held on just a little too long, dug his forehead a little to hard into her shoulder. In this way, she’s saved him.
“Come to my house when your shift’s over, beautiful,” he says, clasping her hand briefly before trailing away towards the register. “We’ll make organic juice pops and watch RuPauls’ Drag Race.”
Her grin widens and she blows him a kiss before returning to her folding, neat, precise aligning of fabric and the comfortable motion of her fingers smoothing in creases.
---
When Blaine finally kisses him, it’s with a soft mouth leaning upwards and questioning fingertips braced against the sides of his neck. Kurt lets his body sink into it a little and kisses back with humming elbows bent so his hands brush gently at the fabric of Blaine’s t-shirt.
Blaine kisses him in mid-July, and the summer’s first cicada crawls up the side of a tree and starts buzzing. Kurt’s coveralls are tied around his waist and he knows the dog days have begun with the movement of his shoulderblades against the back wall of Hummel Tires and Lube, the noise of a car engine stalling and stalling.
---
“Hey dude,” Says Finn, looking up from his videogame. “Going out?”
“Mmm.” Hums Kurt affirmatively, carefully adjusting the collar of his new shirt in the hall mirror.
“So… with Blaine, then?” And Finn still has Call of Duty on pause, is still looking up at Kurt in an unselfconscious way that Kurt would’ve taken as sexy six months ago, saved for swift late-night sessions of pillow-biting and mild self-loathing. Really, masturbation sans guilt is an entirely new, beautiful world Kurt’s only recently opened himself up to.
“No, Quinn and Mercedes, actually. Why are you so curious, oh stagnant one?”
“No reason, just… you know. Be safe.”
Kurt fights the urge to cluck his tongue in frustration, spinning around to face Finn.
“You do realize that I am a boy? I have male genitalia. Enough testosterone is flowing through my blood that I do grow facial hair, I could, feasibly, impregnate a-“
“Dude, not what I meant at all.” Finn says, slicing him off mid-rant in a way that’s far more socially graceful than Kurt ever expected from his stepbrother. “Just, like, you’re my little brother now? So don’t get… mauled, or something.”
There is enough to be astonished about in this statement that it sticks Kurt’s feet to the floor for a few minutes, his mouth slightly open, pithy retaliations dying on his tongue.
“Um… oh, okay then…” He splutters, and Finn nods before turning back to killing Russians or Iraqis or whoever is threatening America’s self-image at the moment.
---
They fall into sex quickly and easily after that sticky afternoon behind the auto shop. It doesn’t seem worth it to wait, because of all the energy they’ve already wasted dancing around one another, and because they both know Kurt’s not going back to Dalton in the fall. Karofsky’s graduated, but Kurt also knows Blaine can feel it in the new fluidity of his limbs as they wrap around him, projecting an apology through layers of tissue straight down to the bone. That first tentative embrace is all Kurt needs by way of asking.
August hits like a wave of air stained a watery orange and popsicle juice that runs down Blaine’s chin in the late afternoon one Thursday, sitting on Kurt’s back porch with their feet dangling sockless into an ocean of grass. Kurt smiles and knows his tongue has turned cherry red, and doesn’t even care.
Blaine scoots closer, wraps a sticky-fingered arm around his waist and kisses him sloppily, all big wet lips and just a little stubble. Kurt expects him to stop at some point, maybe laughingly to wipe a smear of red off his cheek, or petering out with softer kisses like a graceful promise.
When Blaine never stops, neither does Kurt, and the beautiful tangle they make of Kurt’s sheets is the thing Kurt thinks he will remember the most. The wrinkles read of the gentle arc his own spine presses against Blaine’s body from neck to chest or the way they both gasp for air near the end with mouths gaping softly. Kurt absorbs the stretching pain with teeth latched into his lower lip, then a kiss that’s made entirely of clicking teeth and lips smearing together like a collision. Then his breath hitches just a little and Blaine traces fingers over his lower belly, leaving soft electric trails over Kurt’s hipbones and thighs.
It’s too much, in the end, but that was essentially the point. Blaine falls asleep quickly, and Kurt memorizes the pale curve where the back of his thigh tucks into his knee and the spot where his collarbone meets his shoulder in a patch of rapidly fading sunlight. He falls asleep committing the skeletal structure of the boy next to him to memory.
When they wake up, night is fleeing the horizon, and Kurt’s window is wide open to the dew and crickets dissolving into the Midwestern sun. Blaine rolls over into him, lets their hips bump together like it’s nothing at all, and asks him if things are going to change.
“Uhm,” Says Kurt, voice still blurry around the edges from sleep, “Probably.”
fin
AN: The title comes from Sufjan Steven's "Casimir Pulaski Day." That song is pretty much my current jam. I'd like to preemptively address the pot smoked in this fic- this was conceived before I knew about BIOTA, and I know this might not be the best time to post it, but I'm doing it anyway. I know far, far more teenagers who smoke pot than drink, because, honestly, pot is safer. I'm not sure why there's so little said about weed on Glee itself, or in the fandom, but I'm trying to write about my experience as a teenager, and pot is definitely a part of that. Stepping off my soapbox now, thanks.