you might need me (1b/2); glee
1a/2
It’s painfully clear that Kurt needs to move on. He’s tired of liking boys and feeling hopeless about it, and he’s tired of Sam acting like it’s normal for them to spend all their time together, because when he asks Puck to be honest about what he thinks about it, he says that he thought they were fucking.
“What?” he asks when Kurt responds by giving him a hard look and flicking his paintbrush at his old, threadbare clothes, smattering them white. He’s doing his last week of community service, repainting a game-room in a retirement home, and Kurt is pitching in because he thinks Puck might be lonely.
But Puck just rolls his eyes, slapping his paintbrush back against the wall and dragging it carelessly downwards. “You think everyone hasn’t been thinking that?”
Defiantly, Kurt drops his brush, crossing his arms and sitting stiffly on a newspaper-covered love seat. “Of course they have. I’m gay and Sam’s a guy, I must be in love with him,” he snaps. He does like Sam, he can’t deny it to himself, but it’s not simple like everyone thinks. None of it is really simple right now.
“Christ,” Puck hisses, then he drops his brush too and turns to face Kurt, jaw tight. “Everyone thinks you’re banging because you constantly fucking flirt, Kurt. And I know you aren’t, so don’t bite my head off, but you can’t blame people for thinking, ‘wow, holy shit, all these two people do is look at each other like they’ll die if they don’t get to suck the others’ dick.’”
Kurt gapes at him, horrified, knowing he’s going completely red in the face. Then he hardens his expression and sneers. “You’re vile.”
With an aggravated sigh, Puck rolls his eyes again. “I’m telling you the truth.” His jaw relaxes, and he’s looking at Kurt without any frustration anymore, which must be as weird for him as it is for Kurt, because he quickly turns away, scratching his paint-patched neck. “You’re scared you’re gonna get hurt, right? So you should just go for it or call it quits, dude. No need drawing this shit out any longer.”
It’s a surprising thing to hear from him. Kurt looks at him for a moment, wide eyed, then swallows and looks away. “Yeah,” he says, noncommittally. If he goes for it, he’ll have to go through Sam telling him he’s straight then trying to let him down easy with his crooked, endearing grin and telling him they’ll stay friends, even though Kurt will have to move on, move away from him for good. If he calls it quits, they can’t be friends anymore, because Kurt’s past the point of looking at Sam like he’s anything but a unique, Sam Evans kind of perfect.
After a moment, Puck steps closer to him, and after another, he puts his hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “I’m rooting for you guys, y’know,” he tells him, quietly, while Kurt is trying to make himself stop.
-
The girl Kurt sits beside in math is insanely, ridiculously hot.
He knows when Finn looks at her he does that stupid, blatant staring thing with his mouth almost totally wide open, and he knows Puck’s positioned his chair in all his classes with her for maximum viewing pleasure, because they’re both gross that way. She’s Polish, with long blonde hair and grey eyes and a really great figure that makes Kurt wish they were closer so he could pick her clothes, sometimes, because she’s kind of gothic and tacky too.
But they get along well, and they like talking to each other, and when she asks Kurt for the blond boy he’s always hanging around with’s number he can’t think of any real reason to tell her no, so he doesn’t. He types it into her phone and thinks it should feel good to really let go, but instead it kind of hurts, starts an ache in his chest that doesn’t go away the rest of the day, because Milena is beautiful when she smiles and tells him, “Thank you,” and he doesn’t think any boy in the world could think otherwise.
He sits the rest of the class staring at the brown roots of the girl sitting in front of him and not thinking of Sam kissing someone that isn’t him, spending all his time with someone else, falling in love with someone Kurt can never be.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asks him immediately when he sits down at their lunch-table. She’s frowning at him and shifting closer, worriedly, with her eyebrows pulled almost completely together. Kurt forgives her for wearing a sweater with a cow on it because God, she can be sweet.
He presses his lips together and looks around, cautiously, but nobody else has arrived yet and none of the other tables care about what the glee club is talking about.
“I gave Sam’s number to a girl,” he explains, quietly, knowing he’s already said too much, but then it kind of pours out, in this big, hasty cluster, “And now I have to accept that he’ll never like me the way I like him, and I thought it would be easier than this but it hurts worse than I thought it could.”
Wincing at himself, he turns to Rachel and just repeats, quieter but steadier, “It hurts,” because it really does. This constant, stupid pain inside of him. Thinking of letting go of Sam makes him feel burnt, and alone, and like he might always be alone.
For a moment, Rachel stares at him with her mouth parted in surprise, and then her face scrunches up like it does before she cries and stays that way. She puts a light hand on Kurt’s then goes further, squeezing it in hers, and Kurt abruptly realises Rachel’s sort of one of his closest friends. They sit like that for a while, her fingers curled around his, and he knows she's searching for the right thing to say, something good to tell him, so he waits on her, wordlessly.
When she has it, a small smile on her parting lips, her eyes go behind him and find something that makes her move away again, hand lingering over his briefly before Sam appears on the other side of the table and it flies back to her lap.
Sam smiles at them both, more tight-lipped than usual, and pulls his bag strap over his head before setting it down. He sits across from them, oddly tense. "Hey, guys.”
He doesn't look at Kurt, not once, and Kurt hates himself for being so wary of it, feeling so wounded by it. Sam rustles through his bag for his lunch, jaw looking tight, and Kurt tries not to look at him, either. Even though he knows he won't eat, he takes his lunch out, too, and Rachel hesitatingly goes back to hers, glancing at them both from the corner of her eyes.
She seems to gather that it's awkward, and that neither of them seem especially like talking - which is fine, because Rachel's specialty is loudly filling in silences.
She turns to Kurt, visibly forcing herself to beam at him like usual, and pats his leg. "You know, Kurt, my dads cancelled our Saturday family shopping trip," she starts, and then her eagerness becomes realer, happier. "We should make some plans. I think our first duet really was a huge success - both personally and musically - and I've been thinking we should pair up again for another song. We can prepare for it early this weekend; I know we're both technically sound, but it never hurts to be well-rehearsed, and considering we did our first one completely unprepared and it turned out as commendable, who knows how good we'd be with practice."
She loses a little of her enthusiasm, pushing her pasta around her plastic plate and looking down at it instead of him. "If you want to do it, that is."
Kurt blinks down at her, weirdly touched. “That sounds great, Rachel,” he tells her. He feels himself start to smile, feels better, and when he turns around again Sam’s looking back at him with his lips together tightly, and it all fades.
Sam looks away and takes a too-long drink of his slushie.
It’s quiet for another moment and then the rest of the club starts to show up, the first being Santana, who drops down next to Sam, steals the tomato he picks off his sandwich and asks him, “Guess who Mr Schuester gave the solo at Sectionals to?” Then she smirks and says, looking meanly at Rachel, “Let’s think, who’s the most talented? Who doesn’t wear sweaters featuring animals she’ll never know the joy of tasting? Who has the biggest - Sam?” Noticing the look on his face, she pauses to frown, almost concernedly, then looks between he and Kurt and just rolls her eyes, saying around the straw of his slushie. “God, does it ever end with you two?”
They pretend they don’t hear, and when Mercedes appears at Kurt’s other side he’s endlessly thankful to have her distract him with her self-celebratory hug over getting the duet at Sectionals with Quinn.
-
After his last class of the day, Kurt finds Sam leaning on his locker, waiting for him. It’s completely inescapable, especially when he looks up and sees that Kurt’s noticed him there. He doesn’t smile either like he normally does; if anything he looks upset, almost as much as Kurt knows he must look, too.
Kurt is not ready for this.
He stops in front of Sam, squeezing the strap of his bag tightly and trying to look more calm than he feels. Being this distant from him is so strange - but it’s something he should get used to.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Sam tells him, quietly. He looks around them, surrounded by other students loitering in the hallway, and nods his head in the other direction. “Can we go somewhere else?”
Kurt nods hesitatingly. He follows Sam into the empty choir room and joins him when he sits down on the piano bench, feeling nervous this way he’s never had to be around him before.
Neither of them talk for a moment. Kurt waits for Sam, who takes a while to figure out what to say and spends it idly pressing piano keys. Then he takes in a deep breath, stares down at his hands and asks with a strange sounding voice, “Why did you give that girl my number?”
Dread washes over Kurt. There’s nothing, nothing else he’d like to talk about less. And he knows it’s inevitable and it’s what he’d wanted, but it feels too soon to have this talk with Sam where he confirms, once and for all, that he isn’t interested in boys, let alone Kurt.
“She’s nice,” he answers, his throat feeling painfully dry. He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek before adding, “She’s really beautiful, you know,” and it hurts him, all of it. He forces himself to look at Sam, to smile as much as he can.
Sam is staring at him, wide-eyed. He looks hurt, or scared - this expression Kurt doesn’t think makes sense right now. “You want me to date her,” he states, softly, and keeps staring at Kurt for an answer.
Then he suddenly asks, “Is this about Blaine?”
Kurt stares at him in shock. “I don’t - what do you mean?” He has no idea, none at all. Blaine texts him occasionally to check in, ask about the bullying, but since Karofsky Sam’s dealt with it well enough for him, and all he and Blaine have had are some weekly messages exchanged during climactic moments in Revenge.
With a shrug, Sam looks back down at his hands and stays that way for a while, his whole body looking tense. “Are you dating him?” he asks, so quickly Kurt has to replay it in his mind, and even then he’s still unsure.
“I don’t know what that has to do with any of this.” He means it, but apparently that’s the wrong answer, because Sam looks almost panicked by it.
“Are you?” His eyes are big and pale, and his dry lips are parted, and the look he’s giving Kurt is full of so much, he doesn’t even know how to begin understanding it. “Because you can tell me.”
Kurt frowns at him. “No. We barely even talk.” He feels angry all of a sudden, his chin jutting out and head sharply turning away. “Just because we’re both gay doesn’t mean we can’t just be friends,” he snaps, and he can’t believe he has to explain that to Sam of all people.
“No, I know that, I never thought that,” Sam tells him hastily, shaking his head. “I know. It just seemed like he was...” Sam glances at him. “You know. Into you.”
Most of Kurt’s anger fades, but he doesn’t reply. He knows Blaine doesn’t like him that way in the least. He knows because when (at this point he’s thinking more along the lines of if) he meets a boy who likes him, it’ll be special. Blaine is nice, but sitting next to him in some out of town cafe and talking in hushed voices about what it’s like to be hated for something unchangeable didn’t feel like it could lead anywhere like that.
Beside him, Sam takes another deep breath.
“I don’t want to date her.”
He spreads his hand out over the keys and presses down on them slowly, one after the other. His mouth is a thin line. “Sorry. I don’t want to date...” He swallows, then pauses and seems to think better, shaking his head. “I’m just not interested.”
He looks at Kurt and swallows again, this time thicker. A funny, nervous smile twitches on his lips, and for a minute Kurt thinks of Sam liking him back, but then he tells himself to be realistic, because having too much hope has never ended well for him.
“You know you said you’d hang out with Rachel this weekend?” Sam asks. “Are we still on for Sunday? The greatest movie marathon ever made and everything.”
Kurt snorts, feeling much, much lighter. “Of course.”
Sam is grinning at him, playfully nudging him with his shoulder, and even if it’s stupid and reckless Kurt just wants to spend just a little while longer liking him without consequences.
-
Rachel shows up at his doorstep on Saturday with her pixelated-cats patterned bag over her shoulder and her giant, excited grin. She throws her arms around Kurt in greeting and says a cheerful hello to his parents and when pushes Finn away when he leans down for a kiss hello upstairs.
“I’m here on friend business only, Finn,” she tells him with her hand up to his face. She looks away from him and speaks like it’s paining her to say the words. “We should avoid any physical contact tonight.”
Mercedes appears soon too, because he doesn’t know how not to invite her everywhere, and they spend most of the night in Kurt’s room talking about all the things he can’t say to Sam or Finn or Puck.
It’s fun, even though he has this insistent urge the entire night to tell them things he can’t, like what he sees when he looks at Sam and how Sam looks back at him sometimes with something in his eyes Kurt just can’t place.
-
Sam comes over in the morning as Rachel and Mercedes are leaving, giggling together and throwing their overnight bags over their shoulders. They both kiss Kurt on the cheek before running outside to Mercedes’s brother’s car, and he waves them off at the front door with Sam at his side, crookedly saluting them as they go.
After Kurt closes the door he turns to Sam and finds him already looking down at him, intently. The he blinks and smiles his dorky half-smile, holding up a plastic bag of DVDs and nudging Kurt with his elbow. “On a scale of one to ten, how psyched are you for this?” He wags his eyebrows and starts awkwardly shrugging off his letterman jacket, getting it stuck in his left elbow and then trying just as awkwardly trying to manoeuvre himself free.
Kurt snorts and reaches out to slide it from his arms. “Oh, eleven, definitely,” he answers, his face blank. It makes Sam smile; Kurt smiles back and mindlessly fidgets with the collar of the letterman jacket hung over his arm. “Start me off easy.” He leads Sam up the stairs. “I’d appreciate the least boring one of the lot.”
He hears Sam shaking the bag behind him, and his smile when he says, “Well, you're lucky none of them are boring, then.”
They aren’t particularly productive today, especially considering they both have tests on Monday that neither of them have gotten around to preparing for - which is a definite first for Kurt and a bad habit for Sam at this point - but Kurt kind of enjoys Sam’s collection of odd films and TV shows, despite himself. There’s something about the inexplicable overuse of blue eyeshadow that makes the original Star Trek episodes appealing to him, and the endearing way Sam finds just about every line in the old Batman series starring Adam West and a plethora of other overzealous actors hilarious beyond belief gives Kurt butterflies in his stomach.
He likes how nerdy Sam can get around him. He likes how the first time Sam was in his room he sat stiff and quiet on the carpet and now he’s sprawled over Kurt’s bed, laughing breathlessly at the worst television show Kurt has seen in his entire life.
Somewhere between Sam sliding in the next disc and Sam rejoining him on the bed, the atmosphere shifts. His eyes flick to Kurt; it’s dark everywhere except for the TV, but Kurt sees it, Sam’s face all blue from the glare and his gaze strange from so far. When Sam lies next to him again, he’s silent, and the bottom half of his face is buried into Kurt’s throw-pillow.
“The girls kissed you earlier,” he states, simply, which isn’t at all what Kurt was expecting.
He raises an eyebrow and tries not to let his mind wander too far about where this conversation is going, because that’s dangerous - this could be dangerous.
“On the cheek,” he feels is necessary to be said, almost primly. He pretends to look at the television and wonders what Sam’s thinking, what Sam’s expression is right now. “They do that.”
For a moment, Sam is silent. He has his finger hovering over the play button, still, and all Kurt can hear is his breathing - then, just as unexpectedly, “Why?”
Kurt blinks and sits up, abruptly. “They’re my best friends.”
Sam’s expression isn’t really what he thought it’d be. It’s more hard-set, like he knows exactly what he’s saying and how it sounds, which Kurt can’t help but doubt anyway. His green eyes go black in the shade and there’s a visible shine on his lips from where he’s licked them. Kurt’s heart picks up speed just looking at him.
“You’re my best friend. And I'm one of yours... right?” Sam asks, his voice low, and it sounds like entirely too /much/ to be said while they’re alone in the dark together, draped across Kurt’s bed. He looks up at Kurt with his big, questioning eyes, fingers tracing along the pattern of Kurt’s bedspread.
Dangerous. Kurt looks away again. “Well, yes, but that’s - it’s different, Sam.” Kurt doesn’t love Rachel or Mercedes the way he loves Sam. It’s suddenly a little terrifying to know that, definitely. That this isn’t like Finn, either: he isn’t savouring little moments in the corridors between classes that don’t amount to anything important, not the way he’d wanted them to be, there’s something much more tangible and romantic between them, no matter how much Kurt tries to ignore it. Sometimes Sam feels like too much for him to have already. Like he should be waiting in a New York airport terminal for him two years from now instead, with his arms outstretched. Like nothing this good could happen to him in Lima, not ever.
Maybe Sam loves him the same way.
“What happened to ‘the greatest movie marathon ever made’?” Kurt asks, interrupting himself. He feels hopelessly sore.
After a small, heart-hammering moment, Sam smiles at him crookedly, his eyes crinkling at the corners and his cheeks a little overly pink. Kurt feels his heart aching and wonders what Sam’s chapped lips would taste like for the hundredth time, despite himself.
-
Sam leaves a few bad movies later. The end credits of Predator are playing when Kurt finally turns the television off and shifts to lie flat on his back, staring up at his ceiling while Sam answers a text from his mom with careful, considerate slowness. “I guess it’s about time I get going,” he says, quietly, and there’s a pause before his fingers start clicking across the tiny keys of his secondhand cellphone again like he was waiting. But it is time, Kurt thinks, because as nice as he feels being with Sam, it’s also a little intense, a little too weighted to be safe for him right now.
Beside him, Sam slips his phone back into his pocket and flips onto his back, too, an inch or so closer to Kurt than he was before. Kurt looks at him out of the corner of his eye and watches his chest rise and fall in measured breaths - and the way it catches, once, enough for Kurt to hear his trembling exhale.
“This was fun,” Sam tells him after a moment, like he knows he’s been caught, and this is an offer of consolation, like he needs that. And he sort of does.
But Kurt’s good at shaking these things off now. He smiles wryly, one of his arms thoughtlessly stretching out above them in the air. “Corny, trashy, C-list fun,” he agrees. Then he sighs and drops his arm back to his side, still staring hard up at the ceiling and trying to ignore the itch to turn to Sam and look at him - look that way he knows he really shouldn’t. Clearing his throat, he adds, “I’m going to have to watch like, a hundred boring Oscar winning movies to make up to my brain for that now, you know.”
“Bet you’re wishing Avatar had won now,” Sam says with a smile in his voice, playfully nudging his arm.
“Oh, yes. ‘Wishing’ - not internally crying with thankfulness and joy.”
Sam nudges him again, this time slightly harder. Kurt turns to him and they grin at each other and it feels like Kurt’s falling in love with him again every time they’re together now. It’s too much, he thinks, but at the same time the feeling is wonderful and precious to him in a way nothing else ever has been.
They lie together for a few more minutes in silence. The room is dark without the television light and the night from outside is gradually creeping deeper inside. As much as Kurt needs Sam to go he kind of needs him to stay, too, but then Sam makes it easy for him by sitting up and clapping his hands together with finality.
“I have to go,” he repeats, as though he just remembered. He sits on the side of the bed and slips his shoes back on. He takes all his bad DVDs and puts them back in his bag, then he stands at the door, tapping absent-mindedly on his thighs as he smiles and waits on Kurt, like always.
Kurt hauls himself up and follows him down the stairs to the front door, ignoring the curious eyebrow-raise Finn gives them on the way to his room. When he hears Finn’s door shutting over, he doesn’t relax - he feels guilty for how he looks at Sam and how he can't help feeling around him. It’s not Finn’s doing, but the way he looks at Kurt and knows - knows so well - it makes everything feel even worse.
A hand grasps his arm and knocks him back out of his thoughts. Sam is smiling down at him with an eyebrow raised in concern. He squeezes Kurt’s arm. “You alright, dude?”
Shaking his head, Kurt dismissively waves a hand in front of him, waves it off. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he replies, sounding convincingly unaffected. “I’m just still shaken up about the thought of watching Avatar for a second time.”
Sam stares at him and doesn’t move his hand away, not even after Kurt wills it to be gone with Jedi mind-force (and then realises God, he and Sam need to hang out less). “You’ve only seen it once? Shit, Kurt, we need to fix that one day. We’re going to watch it back-to-back for like 20 hours or something.”
Kurt scrunches his nose up in distaste. “If I remember correctly, that's only enough time to watch it once.”
Another hand curls around Kurt’s other arm and they both squeeze him, tightly. Sam is giving him an abruptly serious look. “I will make you love it,” he pledges. Then he pulls Kurt a stumbling step closer to him and leans in the rest of the way to firmly press a kiss against his cheek.
(Kurt stills and wonders if he actually has Jedi mind-powers, because he secretly wished for them to do that.)
The front door opens, and Kurt realises Sam has let him go, that he's standing in the doorway now and giving him a parting smile over his shoulder and saying, “I’ll see you later, okay?” like it never even happened.
Dumbly, Kurt nods. By then, Sam’s already left, and he’s heard his car start up outside and drive all the way out of hearing distance, and he isn’t actually capable of anything more than an inch of vertical head movement because Sam kind of kissed him, and it feels kind of awesome.
-
They rehearse for Sectionals and Kurt knows Sam puts in half the effort he normally would (although it’s impossible for anyone else to tell, really) because Mr Schuester turned them down for the duet again. Kurt, who knows Mr Schue better, didn’t expect anything else from him.
“He hasn’t even heard us,” Sam mutters to him, doing some half-hearted bumbling that could be mistaken for the choreography.
Kurt makes a small noncommittal sound and pretends he can’t see both Rachel and Puck side-eyeing the two of them intently. Even Santana is looking at them periodically, although her face is filled less with concern and more with her sleazy smile, complete with lewd eyebrow wagging. God, their friends suck.
Almost forgetting to even feign dancing, Sam turns to him, frowning. “Doesn’t it piss you off? He wouldn’t even listen to us, Kurt.”
It’s different, but he knows Sam won’t understand why, because Sam’s inherently a good person and the teachers in Mckinley are questionable at best. He glances at the front of the class, where Mr Schue is trying two-handed to position one of Finn’s legs correctly, and decides it’s safe enough. “I think he thinks maybe us singing together is a bad idea,” Kurt states, almost placatingly, and he knows he’s not wrong. “With all the bullying this year.”
It’s giving Mr Schue too much credit, acting like it isn’t mostly because he doesn’t know what the judges will think about a two-boy duet. And Kurt hates that, of course, but what he hates more is giving the jocks more ammunition than they’re already got - and not just to attack him with.
Sam looks at him consideringly. Kurt knows he’s being figured out, Kurt knows Sam knows Mr Schue’s real reasons. He’s not stupid.
“None of that’ll ever happen to you again,” he murmurs, leaning closer. His eyes are half-covered by his yellow bangs, but Kurt can see the sincerity in them, and he feels it more than he should when Sam reassuringly, lightly touches his arm. And Sam is frowning at him when he tells him, seriously, “I won’t let it. So don’t worry about that stuff anymore, okay?”
He steps back again, glancing cautiously at the front and then looking back at Kurt for a response, and Kurt’s throat does that thing it does sometimes when Sam surprises him - closes up around all the words and dries them all up, away.
All he can do is swallow and nod, trying to smile. His face must be red, he knows, and he turns so maybe Sam won’t notice it, trying to think about Sectionals and what Rachel has repeatedly told him are extremely important numbers, even if she isn’t leading them.
Mr Schue claps his hands together at the front, asking them to draw their attention to Finn, who’s smiling happily and showing that he can nearly, almost, sort of do a pretty standard move.
Beside him, Sam mumbles, “We should have gotten a chance.”
-
Sectionals is fun.
Competitions always are, but this is the first one where Sam sits next to him on the bus-ride over and makes up a game of staring forward and catching the other looking at them (a game Kurt normally played with him in secret already) and where he and Puck sit together while Mr Schue signs them in and judge the girls’ dresses in the other club (Puck even gestures to the Warblers and says, “We can talk about - that, too, y’know. If you want to have some bulge-conversation or whatever.”) and it’s the first one where Rachel drags him into the empty girls’ bathroom to do vocal warming up exercises, a lot of which are fun in a crazy-Rachel way and a lot of which are mildly terrifying in a crazy-Rachel way, too.
It’s the first competition where Kurt has a friend from an opposing school, too.
“Hey there,” Blaine greets backstage, smiling and looking completely the same as the last time Kurt saw him.
Looking at him, Kurt doesn’t think he could’ve handled Dalton for long. The idea of a set uniform, identical to every other person around him every day scares him a little, strangely. It’s not for him, really, though Blaine always seems happy enough.
He takes his hands out of his grey pockets and sits down next to Kurt on the set of stairs he felt sick on last year. This time he’s much less uneasy, but feeling the same discontent as Sam about the duet situation all of a sudden. He still smiles at Blaine when he bumps their knees together and gives him a, “Hey.”
“Think you guys are ready for us?” Blaine grins at him, nudges him again.
Kurt jokingly rolls his eyes.“Please, I know we are. You’re leaving here disappointed.” He’s never really certain at these things though, probably because New Directions only seems to rehearse their numbers a handful of weeks in advance while he knows the other teams prepare for months. They’re lucky, though.
Blaine laughs and leans back, propped up a few steps above them on his elbows. “We’re pretty good, you know. Even if the other teams have spied on our setlists.”
Smiling, Kurt says nothing and absentmindedly fidgets a little with his shirt collar, instead. When he turns to Blaine, he sees his eyes are following the movement of his fingertips above the skin of his neck and blinks at him.
Blaine’s eyes flick back up to meet his, then he shifts closer on the step and looks around them before regarding Kurt fully again. “How is... everything going?” he asks, lowly, eyebrows scrunching up. “At school. Has it let up?”
And so far - it has. Kurt knows Blaine wants him to talk to Karofsky, maybe, tell the school or something but he doesn’t know how to deal with it, at least not right now. He’s given Karofsky space, and thankfully Karofsky’s returned the favour, and every other jock doesn’t want Sam or Finn or Puck after them, or, worst of all, his famously terrifying dad.
“Yeah,” Kurt answers, and he feels himself smiling big and surprising himself with it. “School is good right now. Really good. And I don’t think any of that will happen again.” He hopes not, anyway, or he doubts that Karofsky would try anything else at least.
“That’s great, Kurt,” Blaine tells him, sounding genuine. He reaches out and puts his hand on Kurt’s knee, still wearing his pleased smile, and then looks down at his own hand in surprise. He gives Kurt a look he never has before, and Kurt feels nervous and uneasy that way only boys can make him feel. Then Blaine opens his mouth to speak but only gets to say, “You -” before he’s interrupted.
It’s Santana, who stands in front of them with crossed arms and asks Blaine, sharply, “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to go onstage with the rest of the Dalton Swallowers? You guys are up in a minute.”
Blaine looks up at her, mouth still parted, and then nods with his eyebrows drawn in suspicion. “You’re right.” He stands up, brushing off his slacks and briefly turning to Kurt again with a parting smile. “I’ll see you around, Kurt. Wish me luck.”
On his way past Santana gives him a fakely sweet smile and an outdrawn, “Good luck.” Then she looks at his retreating back, rolls her eyes, groans out loudly in disgust and drops next to Kurt on the step, a little too close for comfort.
"Are you into that kid?” she asks, outright. “Like, is that your type? Or is he trying to get you to join some kind of skeevy, Kool-Aid drinking cult or something? He has that overly nice Scientologist vibe going for him.” She makes an overly-nice-Scientologist gesture in the air with a vague hand wave.
Kurt stares at her, expression turning hard. “No, okay? Why does nobody get that I can be friends with other gay guys? Platonically?”
After a brief moment of looking half-surprised and half-impressed by the outburst, Santana rolls her eyes again. “So, what you got from that little meet-and-greet with Blair -”
“Blaine.”
“God, whatever. You didn’t see him feeling you up with his eyes?” Her eyebrows lower, and then she squints at Kurt, pulling back from him a little to give him a proper look of confusion. “Do you really never notice guys doing that to you? I thought that was just a little Sam-and-Kurt game or something queer like that.”
Kurt sighs in frustration and stands up. He can hear the Warblers, distantly, and doubts he’ll get to see them perform now like he’d planned to. “What does Sam have to do with this?” he asks, crossing his arms.
They look at each other for a moment, and Kurt’s kind of unnerved by the way she looks like she’s trying to figure him out. Then she stands, too, quickly running her hands down the front of her dress before stepping in front of him and looking up into his face with an almost-frown.
She pretends to find something interesting on her fingernails when she speaks to him. “Look, I get that you and Sam are going through - stuff.” She even makes air-quotes around the word. “It’s awkward and cringey enough just watching so I can’t imagine how hideously embarrassed you guys feel over it.” Her eyes flick briefly to him then away again. “But Sam’s going through something bigger than your tragic teenage gay romance right now. Big,” she says, lowly, and then she looks at him head-on. Something in her eyes looks scared.
Turning her gaze to the floor, she finishes, almost inaudibly, “It’s hard enough to deal with one crisis at a time, let alone a big flaming gay one and a sappy, disgusting love one at the same time.” She clutches her elbow. “And it hurts to see someone else there instead of...” Her head snaps up again, abruptly, lips pressing together before she finishes with a newly-steadied voice, “Instead of him. Hurts Sam, I mean.”
Applause sounds from the stage, and they both turn towards it, Kurt feeling at a loss for anything to say. Santana is completely back to normal when he looks at her, giving him a smirk that only wavers slightly and sliding her fingers around his wrist. “You ready?”
He answers with a hesitating nod, and she pulls him into a run towards the stage.
-
During the performance Kurt notices two things.
The first is Santana - who’s performance in Valerie is admittedly amazing, although he’d never inflate her ego by telling her so - and the way she lights up all over, grinning around the lyrics on her tongue whenever Brittany dances next to her and when Brittany throws her arms around her when their performance is over.
The second is Sam, who waits nervously for him before getting onstage with the others and looks down at him almost with sadness until Kurt fixes his collar and says, “Regionals is ours, okay?” and then he’s bright, smiling, laughing, kissing Kurt’s cheek and giving him this look all throughout their performance that’s enough to make him stumble over his footing, but not enough to make them lose joint first place.
1c/2