Fic: Distractions (2/3)
Title: Distractions (2/3)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 22,483
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: I own nothing and am making no money from this.
Summary: On the first day of ninth grade, Blaine develops a crush on Kurt. It causes him a lot of awkwardness as he gradually gets to know the gorgeous boy he sits behind in almost all of his classes.
Author's Notes: This was originally posted in response to this prompt on the glee_kink_meme. I've cleaned it up to post here with the help of my wonderful beta, anodrethlluvine.
---
Summer break had arrived, and Blaine thought he was going to go insane by the end of the first week. He spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys - throwing a football around, fooling around on guitars and pianos, playing video games - but he felt like there was something missing.
He was lying in bed one night, mulling over everything he was planning to do the next day (re-alphabetize his CD collection and… not much else, actually), when he realized what was missing.
He was going through Kurt withdrawal.
He groaned and rolled over onto his side, letting his head fall the handful of inches down to the pillow. It landed with a muted thud. Of course. He was going to end up spending his entire summer break fighting off thoughts of Kurt Hummel.
One night at the beginning of July, though, Blaine gave up. He had tried looking at porn on his computer - and that usually worked, it really did - but for whatever reason it just wasn’t doing it for him that night. He wanted something less rehearsed, less professional.
That’s how he found himself lying on top of his covers with his boxers kicked down around his ankles, his hand wrapped tightly around his erection. He pulled his lower lip between his teeth and let his eyes flutter shut, allowing his mind to play through a series of images as he stroked himself.
Images of Kurt’s ass before that history presentation at the beginning of the year.
Images of Kurt’s lickable neck, sometimes hidden by a scarf, sometimes a naked invitation.
Images of Kurt walking away from him in the parking lot of McKinley, leather pants painted onto his skin.
Images of Kurt on stage, performing his heart out.
Images of Kurt sitting in front of him in various classrooms, a thin shirt stretched by muscles as he changed positions.
His mouth opened in a silent scream as he stroked himself through orgasm. He panted heavily, bonelessly settling down into the mattress as he came back down. Somehow, he had a feeling he’d be watching a lot less porn for the rest of the summer.
---
It was the first weekend in August, and Blaine couldn’t believe how fast the summer had gone by. He was sitting with one foot underneath him in front of the upright piano in Wes’s living room, running his fingers absently over the keys and playing chords at random. Nick was on the floor behind him, leaning against one of the armchairs with a guitar in his lap, plucking out chords as the fancy struck him. Jeff had plopped down on the other armchair and swung a leg over one of the arms and was tapping out rhythms with his fingers. Only Wes was sitting properly on the couch, his feet on the floor and his own guitar held in his arms.
Blaine closed his eyes and listened to the beat being tapped out on the armchair. He internalized it and started up a rhythm in the bass clef of the keyboard. They played in sync for several bars before Blaine heard Nick join in as well. Before long, all four of them were playing together, improvising a tune that sounds surprisingly good.
After a few minutes, they all started to drop out, one by one. Eventually Blaine was the only one still playing, and he continued with two more repetitions of his rhythm before he faded out as well.
They sat still for a minute or more, none of them wanting to move and break the silence.
Nick was the first to speak up. “Awesome,” he said, voice barely above a whisper but somehow still startlingly loud in the room.
Blaine rolled his shoulders back and twisted on the piano bench to face the others.
“We could totally start a band,” Jeff said.
No one said anything for a moment, all lost in thoughts about what that would entail. Eventually, Wes started nodding, and Blaine joined in. “That would be sweet.”
“I’m in,” Nick said.
There was a split second pause before the other three chorused with a “Me too.”
---
The first day of school came around both far too quickly and nowhere near soon enough. Blaine told himself he didn’t care where he ended up sitting this year, but he still found himself loitering outside all of his classrooms until the last minute. He wasn’t waiting to see if Kurt would be in class with him. He just didn’t want to seem too eager to be starting school again. That’s all it was.
If he felt a bit of disappointment after three classes without a single sign of Kurt Hummel, it was because he hadn’t had any classes with Nick, Jeff, or Wes, either.
Just as he thought Kurt had decided not to take French again, he turned the corner and slipped into the classroom with five seconds to spare before the late bell. Blaine let out quick sigh and made it in just as the bell rang. The two of them simultaneously sat down in their same seats from last year, in the row closest to the door; after all, Blaine thought, it had worked out well enough for him before.
Madame DuPont passed out the syllabus, and Blaine found himself losing attention quickly. There was this absolutely incredible smell two feet in front of him, and it was far too distracting to care about grade percentages and gum policies. He wondered absently if Kurt had changed his shampoo over the summer, or maybe cooked something aromatic for breakfast, because he was quite definitely the best-smelling thing in the entire school.
All of a sudden he heard Kurt’s melodic voice, and he really had no idea what he was saying but it sounded really sexy. Blaine bit his lip when he realized a particular part of his body thought it sounded sexy as well.
“Merci, Monsieur Hummel. Monsieur Anderson?”
Blaine’s head snapped up toward the sound of the teacher’s voice when he heard his name. He swallowed, hoping he hadn’t been caught. “Oui?”
“Ton été?” She asked. Blaine frowned and shook his head, trying to make sense of what she was asking him. Été was summer, but he was still kind of distracted by the gorgeous boy in front of him and he really would prefer to just spend the next half hour engulfed in thoughts of him.
“Comment était ton été?” she prompted, probably repeating the question she had asked the class before Kurt had answered.
“Oh,” Blaine responded smoothly, realizing she wanted to know how his summer was. “Bien. J’ai commencé un… band avec mes amis,” he said, telling her about the band.
Kurt had turned around after he had fumbled into English. He noticed a raised eyebrow, and he felt a strange twist in his stomach. Of course Kurt knew the word for band in French - he was easily the best student in the class - but it felt strangely like he was judging Blaine for not knowing.
Once the teacher moved on to the girl sitting behind him, he zoned out again, pondering his short interaction with Kurt, if it could even be called that.
He ended up being the last one out of the classroom when the bell rang, because he was too engrossed in his thoughts to notice the bell (or, really, anything other than Kurt standing up and making his way to his next class).
Blaine waited outside the rest of his classes that day, hoping to have better luck with seeing Kurt in the afternoon, but his luck from last year didn’t hold out. French was the only class they shared, which meant it was going to be a long year.
---
About a week into the school year, Blaine noticed a signup sheet for auditions for the glee club. His mother had really been on his case about getting involved in at least one extracurricular activity, and singing and dancing sounded like it might be a lot of fun. Practices were at the same time as he usually got together with the guys to rehearse, and he noticed a big beefy guy in a letterman jacket watching the signup sheet like a hawk. He decided it wasn’t worth risking getting on the jocks’ radar if he could help it, and finding another time to practice with the guys would be hard since none of their parents wanted to deal with the noise once they got home from work.
He had all but forgotten about glee club when he found himself sitting with the guys in the gym one Friday afternoon for a school-wide assembly. Apparently the glee club needed more members and they were trying to get more people interested in joining. From the way the jocks in the row in front of them were glaring at the stage before the performance began, he knew it was going to be a fruitless effort.
When the mismatched group of singers got up on the stage, Blaine was glad that he had decided not to join. It would have been complete social suicide. He did notice that loud brunette from his math classes, that kid in the wheelchair who was in the same lunch period as him, and… on the end was Kurt.
They started singing - Push It by Salt-n-Pepa - and Blaine felt his mouth run dry. That really, really should not be as hot as it was. At all.
It so, so was. Kurt was actually thrusting his hips, and Blaine had the sudden need to cross his legs to hide just how much he was enjoying the show. Wes and Nick noticed and gave him a pointed look, causing his face to flush and his eyes to glance away from the stage.
“You should talk to him,” Wes whispered in his ear.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Blaine replied, sitting up straighter.
Wes rolled his eyes and went back to watching the performance.
Soon enough, the song was over and the school was shouting and cheering and clapping. Blaine took cover in the crowd and made his way to the bathroom, locking himself into the far stall while everyone else was focused on going home for the weekend.
He leaned back against the stall door and closed his eyes, images of Kurt dancing flashing behind his eyelids. He sucked in a deep breath and… fuck it, Blaine thought. He unzipped his pants and pulled himself out through the flap in his underwear.
His breath stuttered out as he wrapped his fingers around his length and started stroking slowly. He started to groan at how good it felt but caught himself and bit his lip to keep quiet. He really couldn’t afford anyone finding him like this, but somehow that thought just made him even harder.
He slowly built up his pace, pumping harder and faster, focusing much of his attention on the tip until he was coming, strings of white shooting into the toilet in front of him. He collapsed against the stall door, breathing deeply and struggling to stay upright.
Voices started growing louder and he realized that a group of guys had come into the bathroom right as he finished. He forced himself upright, tucked himself back in, flushed the toilet, and exited the stall to wash his hands.
Luckily, none of the guys were paying him any attention. He dried his hands and hurried out of the room to his locker to grab the books he needed for homework over the weekend.
---
Blaine had avoided jerking off in school since the glee club performance. He had gone home that evening and had felt absolutely horrified at how close he had been to getting caught, and he vowed to himself that he wouldn’t do it again.
Oh, he still got off to thoughts of Kurt Hummel several times a week. He just made sure to do it in the comfort of his own bedroom - not somewhere public with a risk of someone finding him.
He had mostly blocked that incident out of his memory - or at least, he had until another assembly was called. This time the marching band and the Cheerios were performing instead of the glee club. Blaine wasn’t sure why he hadn’t realized Kurt would be performing with them since he had been wearing that horrendous red polyester monstrosity for a couple weeks by that point, but it was still a shock to see him in front of the whole school again.
At least this time there wouldn’t be any obscene pelvic thrusting to be had. Blaine shook his head. This was the Cheerios. Of course there would be obscene pelvic thrusting - and likely lots of other obscene dance moves as well. Not that he was complaining. The memory of the aftermath of the glee assembly was suddenly fresh in his mind, and he just didn’t want that to happen again.
He found himself tapping his foot to the beat set up by the brass section, and the cheerleaders looked kind of good. For girls, at least. The performance got ten times better when the vocals started, and it took Blaine way too long to realize that the vocals were coming from Kurt. Well, Kurt and one of the girls he was pretty sure was also in glee.
His pants began to feel tighter quickly. At one point, it seemed like Kurt was actually singing to him, which was absurd. He looked away quickly (focusing on the short skirts the girls were wearing seemed to do a lot to alleviate his problem), and by the time he brought his eyes back to Kurt, the other boy was dancing toward the other side of the gymnasium.
Blaine let out a shaky breath.
The performance was over much too quickly in his opinion, and Blaine had to be imagining that the smile on Kurt’s face was shining directly up at him. He was just on an adrenaline high from the performance, and Blaine was sitting toward the center of the bleachers. Of course it would look like Kurt was smiling at him.
The band and the cheerleaders stayed on the floor while the rest of the student body left the gym. Blaine was glad to be wearing dark pants that didn’t show much of anything, and Wes hadn’t commented again so he thought he was pretty much in the clear. As it was their row’s turn to make their way back out of the gym, Blaine focused his attention on Kurt, who appeared to be in conversation with one of the cheerleaders - a latina girl who was in the same study hall as Blaine.
He wasn’t sure what she was saying to him, but he seemed to be embarrassed by it. His face was redder now than it was when the performance was over. Blaine strained his ears to try to make out any part of their conversation, but he only caught the last thing the girl said before turning and weaving her way back to two blonde cheerleaders: “Get it, Hummel.”
Blaine had no idea what she meant by that, but Kurt seemed to if the color of his face was any indication. He shrugged and decided to forget the conversation. It had nothing to do with him, so why should he care?
If he went home and got off to thoughts of Kurt writhing in that red uniform, well, then that was just his reward for having sat through another school assembly.
---
French class ended up easily being the highlight of his sophomore year at William McKinley High School. The language was gorgeous and, well, so was the student sitting in front of him.
Blaine’s grades had improved over the course of his tenth grade year. He was less distracted in most of his classes, though he didn’t really think of that as an improvement over the previous year. He even kept his French grade up, which he thought was pretty damned impressive, though in reality it was just because the teacher went so slow for the idiots at the school that he still managed to absorb everything while focusing a good ninety percent of his attention on the curves of Kurt’s back muscles. Or the way his hair was styled just so. Or how amazing his skin had to taste, because nothing could look that delicious and not live up to his expectations.
It was precisely this thought that he was jolted out of when Madame DuPont made her way to the center of the classroom and cleared her throat loudly, her wispy black hair a mess behind her head. She said something in rapid-fire French, and Blaine caught a few words here and there. He wasn’t worried about missing anything, because she always repeated herself in English anyway.
Sure enough, she finished speaking, gave a quick glance around the room (Kurt was scribbling something in his notebook but everyone else was staring blankly at her), and switched to English. “As I am sure you are all aware, finals are in three weeks. Instead of a final exam, you will create a ten minute presentation on the topic of your choice. The only requirements are that you include both the passé composé and the imparfait. You will be working in pairs of your choosing, and you have the entire class period today to brainstorm ideas.”
Blaine’s heart sank a bit at the mention of working with a partner. He wasn’t too keen on having his grade brought down by one of the idiots in the class. He wondered for a moment if he’d be able to get out of the partner part of the assignment when suddenly something was moving rapidly in front of his face. He blinked slowly.
“Earth to Blaine!”
He blinked again and felt his face begin to redden when he realized that the object that had been waving around was a hand. Kurt Hummel’s hand, to be precise. He was twisted around in his desk so that he could face Blaine more directly. He had lost the dreadful red uniform a week or two earlier, and today he was wearing a blue sequined vest over a white top. The color of the vest made his eyes pop gorgeously, and the red of Blaine’s face quickly began to retreat toward another part of his body. Not again.
Blaine blinked a third time. “Huh?” Great. He sounded oh-so-intelligent.
Kurt had the nerve to laugh - just for a second, but it was a laugh nonetheless. “I said, do you want to partner up?” He turned his head to the right, glancing over the rest of the room. “I mean, it doesn’t look like we have much choice at this point, so we’re sort of stuck with each other. I could always go talk to Madame DuPont and see if she would let us work on our-“
Blaine couldn’t help it. He reached out and gripped Kurt’s wrist lightly, preventing him from standing and talking to the teacher. The other boy seemed to freeze instantly, and they stared at each other for what had to have only been about five seconds but seemed like much longer. Eventually he dropped Kurt’s wrist as if he had been burned.
“Sorry,” Blaine mumbled. “No, that’s okay. You don’t have to do that. I just- I, uh- I mean- What kind of presentation did you have in mind?”
Kurt relaxed a bit after Blaine finally spat out the question. It was as if he had been preparing himself for rejection. He took a deep breath and started outlining a family tree project that he had already started to think up.
“Sounds like a plan,” Blaine said once Kurt had finished explaining.
---
The presentation ended up going off without a hitch. Madame DuPont had actually given them a lot of class time to work on it (she had said she wanted to be available for questions, but Blaine suspected she just didn’t feel like teaching anymore), so there sadly hadn’t been a need for any meetings outside of school. Blaine would have welcomed any extra opportunity to spend time with Kurt, which wasn’t so horribly frightening now that he had gotten used to it, but perhaps it was for the best. The idea of Kurt sitting on his bed was almost too much to think about, and he didn’t even want to imagine sitting on Kurt’s bed. Where he slept, among other things.
Blaine groaned and turned back to his locker. It was the last day of school and he was fishing out the last few bits of paper and broken pencils that had made their way to the back corner of his locker.
He felt rather than saw someone sidle up beside him. Wes smelled really good today, and wasn’t that a weird thought to have? “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’m coming, Wes. Hold your horses.”
Wes didn’t respond, so he turned to raise an eyebrow at - not Wes. Kurt was leaning against the locker next to him. The smelling-good thing suddenly made a whole lot more sense. He was biting back a grin and Blaine rolled his eyes. “Sorry.”
Kurt waved a hand. “I just wanted to say thanks for partnering with me in French. I don’t know what I would have done had I been forced to work with one of those Neanderthals in our class.”
“We did make a great team, didn’t we?”
Kurt nodded, but all of a sudden he had his back up against the lockers. Blaine realized far too late that someone in a letterman jacket had walked by and shoved him, and that was why he suddenly wasn’t looking at Blaine anymore. His eyes were actually wider than normal, and there was a strange glint in them that Blaine didn’t understand.
Then blue syrupy ice came out of what seemed like nowhere and was dripping down Kurt’s perfect hair and his perfect face onto his perfect clothes. Blaine felt his fists automatically clench in rage, but the rest of his body seemed to be frozen in shock. He turned around in time to see a group of three jocks turning around the corner, laughing and high fiving. Just before they were out of sight, one of them turned around and shouted, “Faggot!” down the hallway.
That seemed to shake Blaine out of his shock. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “Are you okay?”
Kurt lifted his hands to wipe some of the slushie out of his eyes. He brushed what he could onto the floor, and made his way silently across the hall into the men’s room.
Blaine followed. He stood awkwardly behind Kurt while he scrubbed the remaining ice off of his skin and out of his hair, finally thinking to grab some paper towels from the dispenser to help out.
“They’re idiots, you know,” Blaine said, handing over the rough towels. Kurt looked up at him sharply through the mirror. Duh, Blaine. Of course they’re idiots. “I’m sorry,” he added.
“You don’t have to stay,” Kurt said finally, accepting the paper towels and going back to cleaning up. “You’re going to miss your bus.”
Blaine shrugged. He was about to say he could walk home, that it really wasn’t that far (which, actually, it definitely was), but something about Kurt’s stance gave off the impression that he just wanted to be alone. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “It was good working with you in French.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “Have a good summer.”
“You too,” Blaine replied, slinking quickly out of the bathroom before he had a chance to change his mind.
---
The summer passed by slowly for Blaine. About a week in, his mother announced that they would be visiting her sister’s family in Connecticut for a month while his father did business in Boston. After that, they would all be taking a month’s vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. It didn’t matter that the band had been planning on rehearsing all summer long or that they actually had a small gig lined up for mid-August; it was a family trip and Blaine was part of the family, so there was no way he’d be getting out of it.
To top it all off, his cell reception was completely non-existent when they reached their timeshare. He was bored out of his mind and he wasn’t even able to text any of the guys or listen in one of their rehearsals without him. He had even thought about texting Kurt once or twice out of complete boredom (they had exchanged phone numbers in case they needed to get in touch about their French presentation at the end of the school year), but even if he had had proper service, he felt like that would be abusing the trust Kurt had shown in sharing his number.
It wasn’t like they were even friends. They had been French partners and nothing more. Kurt was still just the boy Blaine had been crushing on for the better part of two years, and Blaine was still the silly teenager who couldn’t take his mind off of him.
He ended up spending a lot of time on the beach, either walking along the surf, his pants rolled up to his knees, or sitting on a rock he had found, staring out over the open sea and trying to write out some lyrics to run past the others.
Despite the boredom, when September came, Blaine wondered where his entire summer had gone. He felt relaxed, sure, but he hadn’t spent any time just hanging out, and he wasn’t ready to go back to the grindstone quite yet.
He sighed, glancing one last time at the mirror. He had his hair perfectly gelled down, and he had chosen a new neon green bowtie he had gotten as a present from his aunt when they were in New England. He sprayed on his favorite cologne, grabbed his messenger bag, and sprinted down the stairs and out the door. At the end of his street, he turned right instead of left to meet the guys at Jeff’s house. He was the oldest and had gotten his license while Blaine was away, and his parents were letting him take the car to drive them to school. Getting older was awesome.
“Hey, man. Nice tan,” Wes said when Blaine came into sight.
“You don’t look too bad yourself,” Blaine returned. “I like the haircut.”
“Of course you do,” Nick said from where he was leaning against the fence. “He’s wearing gel.”
Jeff came out the side door then, and Nick called for shotgun. Blaine and Wes grumbled good-naturedly and clambered into the backseat.
“This is so great,” Wes said.
“Yeah,” Nick agreed, “and we get to sleep in a little longer since the bus always gets there so early.”
“I’m all for extra sleep,” Jeff said as he turned into the school parking lot.
The others hummed in agreement.
“Well, here we are!” Jeff announced as he pulled into an empty spot. “Let another year of high school begin.”
Nick groaned. “Did you really have to remind me?”
“It’s not all bad,” Wes replied.
Jeff nodded. “Yeah, there goes Kurt Hummel,” he said, pointing across the parking lot.
“Go get ‘em, tiger!” Nick joked from the front seat.
Blaine groaned, covering his eyes and slouching down in his seat. “There’s nothing to get.”
“Uh huh,” Wes said. “That’s why your eyes were glued to his ass five seconds ago.”
“They were not.”
“Were too!” chimed the other three voices in the car.
Blaine opened the door and climbed out. “I hate you all,” he said viciously before slamming the door and stalking off toward the school.
So what if he had been staring at Kurt Hummel’s ass again? It was a nice ass. A gorgeous ass, really. And the way those pants were painted on… He felt his throat tighten, and he tried to take his mind elsewhere. He was a junior now. He didn’t have time for this little infatuation.
Except he so did. He walked through the front doors of the school and turned down the hallway to get to his locker, and as he made his way around the corner, he noticed one thing: puberty had hit Kurt Hummel over the summer, and it had hit him hard. Blaine stopped in his tracks. Kurt was, like, a thousand - no, ten thousand - times more attractive than he had been the year before. Blaine didn’t know how it was possible, but it definitely was. His face was somehow more angular, and the way he had styled his hair was incredible. He was wearing a short-sleeved lavender button down shirt with a deep purple necktie, the combination of which only served to show off the shape of his neck and arm muscles.
If Blaine didn’t keep moving, he was going to have to swing his bag in front of himself pretty soon, and he really didn’t want to keep doing that this year. He took a deep breath and took a step forward, only to have two big guys jostle past him on either side. He saw the slushie cups in their hands a moment too late, and before he knew what was really happening, Kurt had been doused once again in a bath of syrup and ice and the jocks were high fiving as they continued down the hallway.
Blaine took a deep breath. It was now or never, and he couldn’t take the injustice of it all any longer. “What the hell?” he shouted after them.
They stopped and turned around, and boy, did they look menacing. “What did you just say?” the smaller one asked, advancing a step toward him. Blaine gulped, wondering if this was really what he wanted to do. He glanced at Kurt, who was looking a green and blue mess but was shaking his head slightly back and forth. Blaine ignored him.
“I said,” Blaine spoke as loudly and as confidently as his voice would let him, “what the hell was that? What the hell gives you the right to pick on someone for no reason at all? Who died and made you kings?” he spat and almost instantly regretted it.
The bigger one cracked his knuckles and stepped forward but stopped when a teacher Blaine didn’t recognize came out of a nearby classroom to see what the commotion was. “I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, pointing two fingers at his face and then turning his hand so that they were aimed at Blaine. “I’d watch my back.”
With that, the two boys in letterman jackets turned and made their way down the hallway, laughing loudly as they went. The teacher returned to her classroom, seemingly content that no one was actually fighting anyone else.
Blaine shook off the adrenaline that was pumping through him and went to Kurt’s locker. “You okay?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Kurt replied, his voice strangely cold.
“Of course I should have,” Blaine said. “You don’t deserve-“
“It doesn’t matter what I deserve,” Kurt said, cutting him off. “Everyone will think you’re… you know.”
Blaine blinked, trying to fit the pieces together. When they did, he smiled. Kurt scowled at his reaction.
“But I am,” Blaine responded. “You know.”
“No,” Kurt said. “I don’t think you do know. They’ll think you’re like me.”
Blaine cocked his head to the side. Surely they had to be talking about the same thing. Kurt couldn’t really think…
“I’m gay,” Kurt said in clarification, and he turned back to his locker as if to try to deflect Blaine’s reaction.
Blaine shrugged. “Me too.”
Kurt dropped the bag of clothing he had just picked up. “What?”
Blaine rolled his eyes.
“No, you’re not,” Kurt insisted, shaking his head back and forth in disbelief.
Blaine crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow. “You’re really going to argue me about this?”
Kurt seemed to deflate at that. “No,” he admitted, looking around to see if anyone was paying attention to their conversation. Blaine glanced, too, but everyone seemed absorbed in catching up with friends and talking about their summer vacations. “Really?” Kurt asked.
Blaine laughed. “I don’t, like, shout it down the halls or anything, but yeah. I don’t really feel like it’s anyone’s business, but I’m not ashamed.”
“Okay,” Kurt said, seeming to accept that. He shook a bit of flavored ice from his sleeve and picked the bag of clothes back up from inside his locker.
“Are you going to let me help clean you up this time?” Blaine asked, feeling his heart start to race at his brazenness.
“You don’t have to,” Kurt said as he closed his locker. He looked down at his ruined clothes and grimaced.
“What if I say I insist?”
Kurt bit his lip, and it made him look absolutely adorable. “Then I guess I’d have to let you,” he said carefully, as if testing the waters.
Blaine grinned, big and wide, and he hoped he wasn’t coming on too strong but didn’t really care if he was. “Here,” he said, grabbing the bag from Kurt’s hand and leading the way to the men’s room.
---
Blaine almost ended up late to homeroom, but it was beyond worth it. Kurt actually seemed to be letting his guard down around him a bit. He had started to do so when they were working together on their French presentation, but he had remained completely closed off outside of class. Blaine felt giddy as he sat through the morning announcements and recited the pledge of allegiance monotonously along with the rest of the room. It wasn’t like anything had actually happened, but it still felt like a huge step in the right direction.
The rest of the day passed in a bit of a happy haze. He forgot to wait until the last minute to find a seat in his first three periods, but it turned out that Kurt wasn’t in any of those classes anyway. He had first lunch this year, and Nick, Jeff, and Wes somehow all managed to get into that same period. They sat together in their usual spot and started the conversation off by grumbling about having to go to class and do homework again.
Well, the other three were complaining. Blaine just sort of sat there, staring off into space with a vague smile plastered to his face.
Jeff elbowed him in the side.
“Hey!” Blaine glared at his friend before pushing him back.
“I wouldn’t’ve had to do it if you were on the same planet as us,” he explained, shrugging.
“Class and homework suck, I know,” Blaine said, trying to show that he had been paying attention.
“The smile on your face says otherwise,” Wes pointed out before taking a bite of his turkey sandwich.
Blaine groaned. “I hate studying as much as all of you do.”
“Then why do you look so happy about it?” Nick asked.
“I heard a girl in my math class say you were seen talking to one Mr. Kurt Hummel at his locker this morning,” Jeff added after giving Blaine a few seconds to speak up for himself. “Care to tell us more about that?”
Blaine rolled his eyes. “There’s nothing to tell. He got slushied, and I helped him get cleaned up. It’s no big deal.”
“Right,” Wes said dryly. “That’s why your face looks like sunshine and kittens.”
“Can you just drop it?” Blaine asked, leaning back in his chair in a huff of annoyance.
“Not a chance!” Jeff said, as he extended a finger to poke Blaine’s arm. “You brought this on yourself.”
Blaine crossed his arms over his chest and looked around the room. A sign by the door caught his eye. “It looks like the glee club’s looking for new members again.”
“Don’t try and change the subject,” Wes chastised.
“But they are!” Blaine said, pointing toward the sign.
Nick looked to be deep in thought for a minute. “I mean, it could be fun...” he said, trailing off. Blaine could have kissed him for saving him from the inquisition. Instead, he stabbed his fork into his salad and brought the resulting bite of tomato and lettuce to his mouth.
Wes nodded slowly. “It would be a great vocal challenge for us. Their dancing always looks pretty complicated, but I’m sure we could pull it off.”
Jeff shrugged. “I’m game if you all are.”
“Me too,” Blaine added. “I think auditions are after school tomorrow. D’you think we can get something put together by then?”
Three incredulous pairs of eyes stared back at him. “Of course,” Wes scoffed.
“Yeah, man,” Jeff said. “We’ve been working on some a capella stuff that they’ll eat up.”
Blaine was struck again by how much spending his summer several states away from his friends had royally sucked. “Sounds awesome. Practice after school?”
“Like always,” Wes said with a nod. The others nodded their agreement, and Blaine felt something good twisting in his stomach.
---
Blaine had French right after lunch, and he breathed a silent sigh of relief when he and Kurt automatically took their seats from the previous two years. Everything was completely normal, and there didn’t seem to be any weirdness between them after the slushie incident before homeroom. That was definitely a good sign.
Kurt was actually in Blaine’s last two classes of the day, too. He sat two rows away during AP English Composition, but that was okay because Blaine was sitting next to Wes, and he really did not need to put up with Wes’s teasing during class. He was sure it would happen, but at least there was a buffer zone that meant Blaine wouldn’t be staring directly at him all the time.
AP US History was a different matter entirely. Wes and Nick had been put into the other section of the class, and Jeff was taking a government class instead. Blaine made it to the classroom with a minute or so to spare, having come from the opposite end of the building. Kurt must of speed walked from their English class, because there was no mistaking the styled chestnut hair of the boy sitting in the second row back. Luckily the seat behind him was free, and Blaine slid into it gratefully.
“Hey,” he said, tapping Kurt on the shoulder.
Kurt jumped about a foot in the air and turned around. “Geeze, Blaine. Give a guy a little warning, would you?”
“Sorry,” Blaine replied, grinning widely and obviously not very sorry at all.
The bell rang then, and Kurt turned back toward the front of the classroom. Blaine took a deep breath, pulling the sandalwood scent he recognized as Kurt deep into his lungs. He gave a valiant effort to listen to what the teacher was saying, but it was the seventh first-day-of-class lecture he’d heard that day so he didn’t feel guilty at all about giving up on listening a minute and a half in.
Kurt’s neck was just barely exposed in the shirt he had changed into that morning. Blaine wanted to run his fingers over it, to test and see if his skin really was as smooth as it looked. He then imagined running his hands out and over Kurt’s shoulders and then down his back, pulling the fabric down over his arms as he went.
He shifted in his seat as he felt himself starting to harden. Of course this was still going to happen to him. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply (Big mistake, Anderson, he thought as Kurt’s scent began to overwhelm him. Big mistake.) He then looked down at the syllabus on the desk in front of him and tried to concentrate on it instead, but that didn’t last too long before he was back to staring at the back of Kurt’s head, wondering how it would feel to run his fingers through his hair without having to contend with stray slushie.
The bell rang far too soon for Blaine’s liking. Kurt stood up and stretched, packing his folder and pen into his bag. “See you tomorrow,” he said quietly before slipping out of the classroom. Blaine smiled at Kurt’s retreating figure and waited a moment longer for everyone else to make their way into the hallway before standing himself and draping his bag conspicuously in front of his body.
---
Somewhere in his mind, Blaine had to have known that the reason he was so interested in joining glee club was because of Kurt. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still a shock to see him sitting in the choir room, right in the center of the chairs lined up against the wall.
“Hi, guys!” Mr. Schue greeted as he walked in with the other guys. (Blaine was pretty sure that was his name; Jeff had mentioned him a couple times when he was talking about his Spanish class.) “Come on in! Have you guys come prepared to audition?”
The boys all stashed their bags by a grouping of chairs near the wall. Wes spoke up for the whole group. “We have. Do you want us to go now, or should we wait for more people to arrive?”
Mr. Schue clapped his hands. “This is it. You guys can go ahead and warm up, and if you have any music, just give it to Brad,” he said, pointing out the man dressed all in black who was sitting at the piano.
“That’s alright, thank you,” Wes replied, nodding at the piano player. “We’ll be singing a capella.”
Mr. Schue nodded his approval. Blaine recognized that loud brunette girl from his math classes, and she appeared to be ready to bounce out of her seat in sheer enthusiasm. Blaine risked a quick smile at the current members (well, mostly to Kurt, but he was far enough away that it looked like he was just smiling at everyone) before turning to talk to the guys.
“You all ready?” Wes asked, and the other three hummed in the affirmative. Blaine walked to the piano and pressed down on the B-flat below middle C to give them their starting pitch before walking back to the front of the group.
He had been surprised at their rehearsal the day before when Wes suggested that he sing the lead. Apparently they had all felt more comfortable harmonizing on the songs they had worked on, and Blaine was able to easily fit his voice in on top of the structure they laid down.
Teenage Dream hadn’t been his first choice of song, but he had listened to enough Katy Perry over the summer that he wasn’t at all upset by it. Besides, it gave him an excuse to sing some pretty awesome lyrics to Kurt. Well, not necessarily to Kurt, but in Kurt’s general direction for sure.
The song came to a close, and the guys, faces flushed and chests heaving from the performance, smiled at their audience and took a bow. They heard a round of applause much larger than Blaine would have thought possible from so few people, and Mr. Schue was walking back toward the center of the room.
“Wow, great job, you guys!” he said, then spun to face the current members. “What d’you think, guys? Are they in?”
There were a few loud “yeah”s and “definitely”s, and the brunette girl had actually jumped out of her seat to show just how much she thought they should be a part of glee club. Blaine would have thought more about what a travesty her clothing choice was (A short-sleeved red sweater with a merry-go-round horse on it? Really?), but he was much more focused on Kurt’s enthusiastic clapping.
They were in, and Kurt had apparently really liked the performance.
---
Part 3
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 22,483
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: I own nothing and am making no money from this.
Summary: On the first day of ninth grade, Blaine develops a crush on Kurt. It causes him a lot of awkwardness as he gradually gets to know the gorgeous boy he sits behind in almost all of his classes.
Author's Notes: This was originally posted in response to this prompt on the glee_kink_meme. I've cleaned it up to post here with the help of my wonderful beta, anodrethlluvine.
---
Summer break had arrived, and Blaine thought he was going to go insane by the end of the first week. He spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys - throwing a football around, fooling around on guitars and pianos, playing video games - but he felt like there was something missing.
He was lying in bed one night, mulling over everything he was planning to do the next day (re-alphabetize his CD collection and… not much else, actually), when he realized what was missing.
He was going through Kurt withdrawal.
He groaned and rolled over onto his side, letting his head fall the handful of inches down to the pillow. It landed with a muted thud. Of course. He was going to end up spending his entire summer break fighting off thoughts of Kurt Hummel.
One night at the beginning of July, though, Blaine gave up. He had tried looking at porn on his computer - and that usually worked, it really did - but for whatever reason it just wasn’t doing it for him that night. He wanted something less rehearsed, less professional.
That’s how he found himself lying on top of his covers with his boxers kicked down around his ankles, his hand wrapped tightly around his erection. He pulled his lower lip between his teeth and let his eyes flutter shut, allowing his mind to play through a series of images as he stroked himself.
Images of Kurt’s ass before that history presentation at the beginning of the year.
Images of Kurt’s lickable neck, sometimes hidden by a scarf, sometimes a naked invitation.
Images of Kurt walking away from him in the parking lot of McKinley, leather pants painted onto his skin.
Images of Kurt on stage, performing his heart out.
Images of Kurt sitting in front of him in various classrooms, a thin shirt stretched by muscles as he changed positions.
His mouth opened in a silent scream as he stroked himself through orgasm. He panted heavily, bonelessly settling down into the mattress as he came back down. Somehow, he had a feeling he’d be watching a lot less porn for the rest of the summer.
---
It was the first weekend in August, and Blaine couldn’t believe how fast the summer had gone by. He was sitting with one foot underneath him in front of the upright piano in Wes’s living room, running his fingers absently over the keys and playing chords at random. Nick was on the floor behind him, leaning against one of the armchairs with a guitar in his lap, plucking out chords as the fancy struck him. Jeff had plopped down on the other armchair and swung a leg over one of the arms and was tapping out rhythms with his fingers. Only Wes was sitting properly on the couch, his feet on the floor and his own guitar held in his arms.
Blaine closed his eyes and listened to the beat being tapped out on the armchair. He internalized it and started up a rhythm in the bass clef of the keyboard. They played in sync for several bars before Blaine heard Nick join in as well. Before long, all four of them were playing together, improvising a tune that sounds surprisingly good.
After a few minutes, they all started to drop out, one by one. Eventually Blaine was the only one still playing, and he continued with two more repetitions of his rhythm before he faded out as well.
They sat still for a minute or more, none of them wanting to move and break the silence.
Nick was the first to speak up. “Awesome,” he said, voice barely above a whisper but somehow still startlingly loud in the room.
Blaine rolled his shoulders back and twisted on the piano bench to face the others.
“We could totally start a band,” Jeff said.
No one said anything for a moment, all lost in thoughts about what that would entail. Eventually, Wes started nodding, and Blaine joined in. “That would be sweet.”
“I’m in,” Nick said.
There was a split second pause before the other three chorused with a “Me too.”
---
The first day of school came around both far too quickly and nowhere near soon enough. Blaine told himself he didn’t care where he ended up sitting this year, but he still found himself loitering outside all of his classrooms until the last minute. He wasn’t waiting to see if Kurt would be in class with him. He just didn’t want to seem too eager to be starting school again. That’s all it was.
If he felt a bit of disappointment after three classes without a single sign of Kurt Hummel, it was because he hadn’t had any classes with Nick, Jeff, or Wes, either.
Just as he thought Kurt had decided not to take French again, he turned the corner and slipped into the classroom with five seconds to spare before the late bell. Blaine let out quick sigh and made it in just as the bell rang. The two of them simultaneously sat down in their same seats from last year, in the row closest to the door; after all, Blaine thought, it had worked out well enough for him before.
Madame DuPont passed out the syllabus, and Blaine found himself losing attention quickly. There was this absolutely incredible smell two feet in front of him, and it was far too distracting to care about grade percentages and gum policies. He wondered absently if Kurt had changed his shampoo over the summer, or maybe cooked something aromatic for breakfast, because he was quite definitely the best-smelling thing in the entire school.
All of a sudden he heard Kurt’s melodic voice, and he really had no idea what he was saying but it sounded really sexy. Blaine bit his lip when he realized a particular part of his body thought it sounded sexy as well.
“Merci, Monsieur Hummel. Monsieur Anderson?”
Blaine’s head snapped up toward the sound of the teacher’s voice when he heard his name. He swallowed, hoping he hadn’t been caught. “Oui?”
“Ton été?” She asked. Blaine frowned and shook his head, trying to make sense of what she was asking him. Été was summer, but he was still kind of distracted by the gorgeous boy in front of him and he really would prefer to just spend the next half hour engulfed in thoughts of him.
“Comment était ton été?” she prompted, probably repeating the question she had asked the class before Kurt had answered.
“Oh,” Blaine responded smoothly, realizing she wanted to know how his summer was. “Bien. J’ai commencé un… band avec mes amis,” he said, telling her about the band.
Kurt had turned around after he had fumbled into English. He noticed a raised eyebrow, and he felt a strange twist in his stomach. Of course Kurt knew the word for band in French - he was easily the best student in the class - but it felt strangely like he was judging Blaine for not knowing.
Once the teacher moved on to the girl sitting behind him, he zoned out again, pondering his short interaction with Kurt, if it could even be called that.
He ended up being the last one out of the classroom when the bell rang, because he was too engrossed in his thoughts to notice the bell (or, really, anything other than Kurt standing up and making his way to his next class).
Blaine waited outside the rest of his classes that day, hoping to have better luck with seeing Kurt in the afternoon, but his luck from last year didn’t hold out. French was the only class they shared, which meant it was going to be a long year.
---
About a week into the school year, Blaine noticed a signup sheet for auditions for the glee club. His mother had really been on his case about getting involved in at least one extracurricular activity, and singing and dancing sounded like it might be a lot of fun. Practices were at the same time as he usually got together with the guys to rehearse, and he noticed a big beefy guy in a letterman jacket watching the signup sheet like a hawk. He decided it wasn’t worth risking getting on the jocks’ radar if he could help it, and finding another time to practice with the guys would be hard since none of their parents wanted to deal with the noise once they got home from work.
He had all but forgotten about glee club when he found himself sitting with the guys in the gym one Friday afternoon for a school-wide assembly. Apparently the glee club needed more members and they were trying to get more people interested in joining. From the way the jocks in the row in front of them were glaring at the stage before the performance began, he knew it was going to be a fruitless effort.
When the mismatched group of singers got up on the stage, Blaine was glad that he had decided not to join. It would have been complete social suicide. He did notice that loud brunette from his math classes, that kid in the wheelchair who was in the same lunch period as him, and… on the end was Kurt.
They started singing - Push It by Salt-n-Pepa - and Blaine felt his mouth run dry. That really, really should not be as hot as it was. At all.
It so, so was. Kurt was actually thrusting his hips, and Blaine had the sudden need to cross his legs to hide just how much he was enjoying the show. Wes and Nick noticed and gave him a pointed look, causing his face to flush and his eyes to glance away from the stage.
“You should talk to him,” Wes whispered in his ear.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Blaine replied, sitting up straighter.
Wes rolled his eyes and went back to watching the performance.
Soon enough, the song was over and the school was shouting and cheering and clapping. Blaine took cover in the crowd and made his way to the bathroom, locking himself into the far stall while everyone else was focused on going home for the weekend.
He leaned back against the stall door and closed his eyes, images of Kurt dancing flashing behind his eyelids. He sucked in a deep breath and… fuck it, Blaine thought. He unzipped his pants and pulled himself out through the flap in his underwear.
His breath stuttered out as he wrapped his fingers around his length and started stroking slowly. He started to groan at how good it felt but caught himself and bit his lip to keep quiet. He really couldn’t afford anyone finding him like this, but somehow that thought just made him even harder.
He slowly built up his pace, pumping harder and faster, focusing much of his attention on the tip until he was coming, strings of white shooting into the toilet in front of him. He collapsed against the stall door, breathing deeply and struggling to stay upright.
Voices started growing louder and he realized that a group of guys had come into the bathroom right as he finished. He forced himself upright, tucked himself back in, flushed the toilet, and exited the stall to wash his hands.
Luckily, none of the guys were paying him any attention. He dried his hands and hurried out of the room to his locker to grab the books he needed for homework over the weekend.
---
Blaine had avoided jerking off in school since the glee club performance. He had gone home that evening and had felt absolutely horrified at how close he had been to getting caught, and he vowed to himself that he wouldn’t do it again.
Oh, he still got off to thoughts of Kurt Hummel several times a week. He just made sure to do it in the comfort of his own bedroom - not somewhere public with a risk of someone finding him.
He had mostly blocked that incident out of his memory - or at least, he had until another assembly was called. This time the marching band and the Cheerios were performing instead of the glee club. Blaine wasn’t sure why he hadn’t realized Kurt would be performing with them since he had been wearing that horrendous red polyester monstrosity for a couple weeks by that point, but it was still a shock to see him in front of the whole school again.
At least this time there wouldn’t be any obscene pelvic thrusting to be had. Blaine shook his head. This was the Cheerios. Of course there would be obscene pelvic thrusting - and likely lots of other obscene dance moves as well. Not that he was complaining. The memory of the aftermath of the glee assembly was suddenly fresh in his mind, and he just didn’t want that to happen again.
He found himself tapping his foot to the beat set up by the brass section, and the cheerleaders looked kind of good. For girls, at least. The performance got ten times better when the vocals started, and it took Blaine way too long to realize that the vocals were coming from Kurt. Well, Kurt and one of the girls he was pretty sure was also in glee.
His pants began to feel tighter quickly. At one point, it seemed like Kurt was actually singing to him, which was absurd. He looked away quickly (focusing on the short skirts the girls were wearing seemed to do a lot to alleviate his problem), and by the time he brought his eyes back to Kurt, the other boy was dancing toward the other side of the gymnasium.
Blaine let out a shaky breath.
The performance was over much too quickly in his opinion, and Blaine had to be imagining that the smile on Kurt’s face was shining directly up at him. He was just on an adrenaline high from the performance, and Blaine was sitting toward the center of the bleachers. Of course it would look like Kurt was smiling at him.
The band and the cheerleaders stayed on the floor while the rest of the student body left the gym. Blaine was glad to be wearing dark pants that didn’t show much of anything, and Wes hadn’t commented again so he thought he was pretty much in the clear. As it was their row’s turn to make their way back out of the gym, Blaine focused his attention on Kurt, who appeared to be in conversation with one of the cheerleaders - a latina girl who was in the same study hall as Blaine.
He wasn’t sure what she was saying to him, but he seemed to be embarrassed by it. His face was redder now than it was when the performance was over. Blaine strained his ears to try to make out any part of their conversation, but he only caught the last thing the girl said before turning and weaving her way back to two blonde cheerleaders: “Get it, Hummel.”
Blaine had no idea what she meant by that, but Kurt seemed to if the color of his face was any indication. He shrugged and decided to forget the conversation. It had nothing to do with him, so why should he care?
If he went home and got off to thoughts of Kurt writhing in that red uniform, well, then that was just his reward for having sat through another school assembly.
---
French class ended up easily being the highlight of his sophomore year at William McKinley High School. The language was gorgeous and, well, so was the student sitting in front of him.
Blaine’s grades had improved over the course of his tenth grade year. He was less distracted in most of his classes, though he didn’t really think of that as an improvement over the previous year. He even kept his French grade up, which he thought was pretty damned impressive, though in reality it was just because the teacher went so slow for the idiots at the school that he still managed to absorb everything while focusing a good ninety percent of his attention on the curves of Kurt’s back muscles. Or the way his hair was styled just so. Or how amazing his skin had to taste, because nothing could look that delicious and not live up to his expectations.
It was precisely this thought that he was jolted out of when Madame DuPont made her way to the center of the classroom and cleared her throat loudly, her wispy black hair a mess behind her head. She said something in rapid-fire French, and Blaine caught a few words here and there. He wasn’t worried about missing anything, because she always repeated herself in English anyway.
Sure enough, she finished speaking, gave a quick glance around the room (Kurt was scribbling something in his notebook but everyone else was staring blankly at her), and switched to English. “As I am sure you are all aware, finals are in three weeks. Instead of a final exam, you will create a ten minute presentation on the topic of your choice. The only requirements are that you include both the passé composé and the imparfait. You will be working in pairs of your choosing, and you have the entire class period today to brainstorm ideas.”
Blaine’s heart sank a bit at the mention of working with a partner. He wasn’t too keen on having his grade brought down by one of the idiots in the class. He wondered for a moment if he’d be able to get out of the partner part of the assignment when suddenly something was moving rapidly in front of his face. He blinked slowly.
“Earth to Blaine!”
He blinked again and felt his face begin to redden when he realized that the object that had been waving around was a hand. Kurt Hummel’s hand, to be precise. He was twisted around in his desk so that he could face Blaine more directly. He had lost the dreadful red uniform a week or two earlier, and today he was wearing a blue sequined vest over a white top. The color of the vest made his eyes pop gorgeously, and the red of Blaine’s face quickly began to retreat toward another part of his body. Not again.
Blaine blinked a third time. “Huh?” Great. He sounded oh-so-intelligent.
Kurt had the nerve to laugh - just for a second, but it was a laugh nonetheless. “I said, do you want to partner up?” He turned his head to the right, glancing over the rest of the room. “I mean, it doesn’t look like we have much choice at this point, so we’re sort of stuck with each other. I could always go talk to Madame DuPont and see if she would let us work on our-“
Blaine couldn’t help it. He reached out and gripped Kurt’s wrist lightly, preventing him from standing and talking to the teacher. The other boy seemed to freeze instantly, and they stared at each other for what had to have only been about five seconds but seemed like much longer. Eventually he dropped Kurt’s wrist as if he had been burned.
“Sorry,” Blaine mumbled. “No, that’s okay. You don’t have to do that. I just- I, uh- I mean- What kind of presentation did you have in mind?”
Kurt relaxed a bit after Blaine finally spat out the question. It was as if he had been preparing himself for rejection. He took a deep breath and started outlining a family tree project that he had already started to think up.
“Sounds like a plan,” Blaine said once Kurt had finished explaining.
---
The presentation ended up going off without a hitch. Madame DuPont had actually given them a lot of class time to work on it (she had said she wanted to be available for questions, but Blaine suspected she just didn’t feel like teaching anymore), so there sadly hadn’t been a need for any meetings outside of school. Blaine would have welcomed any extra opportunity to spend time with Kurt, which wasn’t so horribly frightening now that he had gotten used to it, but perhaps it was for the best. The idea of Kurt sitting on his bed was almost too much to think about, and he didn’t even want to imagine sitting on Kurt’s bed. Where he slept, among other things.
Blaine groaned and turned back to his locker. It was the last day of school and he was fishing out the last few bits of paper and broken pencils that had made their way to the back corner of his locker.
He felt rather than saw someone sidle up beside him. Wes smelled really good today, and wasn’t that a weird thought to have? “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’m coming, Wes. Hold your horses.”
Wes didn’t respond, so he turned to raise an eyebrow at - not Wes. Kurt was leaning against the locker next to him. The smelling-good thing suddenly made a whole lot more sense. He was biting back a grin and Blaine rolled his eyes. “Sorry.”
Kurt waved a hand. “I just wanted to say thanks for partnering with me in French. I don’t know what I would have done had I been forced to work with one of those Neanderthals in our class.”
“We did make a great team, didn’t we?”
Kurt nodded, but all of a sudden he had his back up against the lockers. Blaine realized far too late that someone in a letterman jacket had walked by and shoved him, and that was why he suddenly wasn’t looking at Blaine anymore. His eyes were actually wider than normal, and there was a strange glint in them that Blaine didn’t understand.
Then blue syrupy ice came out of what seemed like nowhere and was dripping down Kurt’s perfect hair and his perfect face onto his perfect clothes. Blaine felt his fists automatically clench in rage, but the rest of his body seemed to be frozen in shock. He turned around in time to see a group of three jocks turning around the corner, laughing and high fiving. Just before they were out of sight, one of them turned around and shouted, “Faggot!” down the hallway.
That seemed to shake Blaine out of his shock. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “Are you okay?”
Kurt lifted his hands to wipe some of the slushie out of his eyes. He brushed what he could onto the floor, and made his way silently across the hall into the men’s room.
Blaine followed. He stood awkwardly behind Kurt while he scrubbed the remaining ice off of his skin and out of his hair, finally thinking to grab some paper towels from the dispenser to help out.
“They’re idiots, you know,” Blaine said, handing over the rough towels. Kurt looked up at him sharply through the mirror. Duh, Blaine. Of course they’re idiots. “I’m sorry,” he added.
“You don’t have to stay,” Kurt said finally, accepting the paper towels and going back to cleaning up. “You’re going to miss your bus.”
Blaine shrugged. He was about to say he could walk home, that it really wasn’t that far (which, actually, it definitely was), but something about Kurt’s stance gave off the impression that he just wanted to be alone. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “It was good working with you in French.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “Have a good summer.”
“You too,” Blaine replied, slinking quickly out of the bathroom before he had a chance to change his mind.
---
The summer passed by slowly for Blaine. About a week in, his mother announced that they would be visiting her sister’s family in Connecticut for a month while his father did business in Boston. After that, they would all be taking a month’s vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. It didn’t matter that the band had been planning on rehearsing all summer long or that they actually had a small gig lined up for mid-August; it was a family trip and Blaine was part of the family, so there was no way he’d be getting out of it.
To top it all off, his cell reception was completely non-existent when they reached their timeshare. He was bored out of his mind and he wasn’t even able to text any of the guys or listen in one of their rehearsals without him. He had even thought about texting Kurt once or twice out of complete boredom (they had exchanged phone numbers in case they needed to get in touch about their French presentation at the end of the school year), but even if he had had proper service, he felt like that would be abusing the trust Kurt had shown in sharing his number.
It wasn’t like they were even friends. They had been French partners and nothing more. Kurt was still just the boy Blaine had been crushing on for the better part of two years, and Blaine was still the silly teenager who couldn’t take his mind off of him.
He ended up spending a lot of time on the beach, either walking along the surf, his pants rolled up to his knees, or sitting on a rock he had found, staring out over the open sea and trying to write out some lyrics to run past the others.
Despite the boredom, when September came, Blaine wondered where his entire summer had gone. He felt relaxed, sure, but he hadn’t spent any time just hanging out, and he wasn’t ready to go back to the grindstone quite yet.
He sighed, glancing one last time at the mirror. He had his hair perfectly gelled down, and he had chosen a new neon green bowtie he had gotten as a present from his aunt when they were in New England. He sprayed on his favorite cologne, grabbed his messenger bag, and sprinted down the stairs and out the door. At the end of his street, he turned right instead of left to meet the guys at Jeff’s house. He was the oldest and had gotten his license while Blaine was away, and his parents were letting him take the car to drive them to school. Getting older was awesome.
“Hey, man. Nice tan,” Wes said when Blaine came into sight.
“You don’t look too bad yourself,” Blaine returned. “I like the haircut.”
“Of course you do,” Nick said from where he was leaning against the fence. “He’s wearing gel.”
Jeff came out the side door then, and Nick called for shotgun. Blaine and Wes grumbled good-naturedly and clambered into the backseat.
“This is so great,” Wes said.
“Yeah,” Nick agreed, “and we get to sleep in a little longer since the bus always gets there so early.”
“I’m all for extra sleep,” Jeff said as he turned into the school parking lot.
The others hummed in agreement.
“Well, here we are!” Jeff announced as he pulled into an empty spot. “Let another year of high school begin.”
Nick groaned. “Did you really have to remind me?”
“It’s not all bad,” Wes replied.
Jeff nodded. “Yeah, there goes Kurt Hummel,” he said, pointing across the parking lot.
“Go get ‘em, tiger!” Nick joked from the front seat.
Blaine groaned, covering his eyes and slouching down in his seat. “There’s nothing to get.”
“Uh huh,” Wes said. “That’s why your eyes were glued to his ass five seconds ago.”
“They were not.”
“Were too!” chimed the other three voices in the car.
Blaine opened the door and climbed out. “I hate you all,” he said viciously before slamming the door and stalking off toward the school.
So what if he had been staring at Kurt Hummel’s ass again? It was a nice ass. A gorgeous ass, really. And the way those pants were painted on… He felt his throat tighten, and he tried to take his mind elsewhere. He was a junior now. He didn’t have time for this little infatuation.
Except he so did. He walked through the front doors of the school and turned down the hallway to get to his locker, and as he made his way around the corner, he noticed one thing: puberty had hit Kurt Hummel over the summer, and it had hit him hard. Blaine stopped in his tracks. Kurt was, like, a thousand - no, ten thousand - times more attractive than he had been the year before. Blaine didn’t know how it was possible, but it definitely was. His face was somehow more angular, and the way he had styled his hair was incredible. He was wearing a short-sleeved lavender button down shirt with a deep purple necktie, the combination of which only served to show off the shape of his neck and arm muscles.
If Blaine didn’t keep moving, he was going to have to swing his bag in front of himself pretty soon, and he really didn’t want to keep doing that this year. He took a deep breath and took a step forward, only to have two big guys jostle past him on either side. He saw the slushie cups in their hands a moment too late, and before he knew what was really happening, Kurt had been doused once again in a bath of syrup and ice and the jocks were high fiving as they continued down the hallway.
Blaine took a deep breath. It was now or never, and he couldn’t take the injustice of it all any longer. “What the hell?” he shouted after them.
They stopped and turned around, and boy, did they look menacing. “What did you just say?” the smaller one asked, advancing a step toward him. Blaine gulped, wondering if this was really what he wanted to do. He glanced at Kurt, who was looking a green and blue mess but was shaking his head slightly back and forth. Blaine ignored him.
“I said,” Blaine spoke as loudly and as confidently as his voice would let him, “what the hell was that? What the hell gives you the right to pick on someone for no reason at all? Who died and made you kings?” he spat and almost instantly regretted it.
The bigger one cracked his knuckles and stepped forward but stopped when a teacher Blaine didn’t recognize came out of a nearby classroom to see what the commotion was. “I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, pointing two fingers at his face and then turning his hand so that they were aimed at Blaine. “I’d watch my back.”
With that, the two boys in letterman jackets turned and made their way down the hallway, laughing loudly as they went. The teacher returned to her classroom, seemingly content that no one was actually fighting anyone else.
Blaine shook off the adrenaline that was pumping through him and went to Kurt’s locker. “You okay?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Kurt replied, his voice strangely cold.
“Of course I should have,” Blaine said. “You don’t deserve-“
“It doesn’t matter what I deserve,” Kurt said, cutting him off. “Everyone will think you’re… you know.”
Blaine blinked, trying to fit the pieces together. When they did, he smiled. Kurt scowled at his reaction.
“But I am,” Blaine responded. “You know.”
“No,” Kurt said. “I don’t think you do know. They’ll think you’re like me.”
Blaine cocked his head to the side. Surely they had to be talking about the same thing. Kurt couldn’t really think…
“I’m gay,” Kurt said in clarification, and he turned back to his locker as if to try to deflect Blaine’s reaction.
Blaine shrugged. “Me too.”
Kurt dropped the bag of clothing he had just picked up. “What?”
Blaine rolled his eyes.
“No, you’re not,” Kurt insisted, shaking his head back and forth in disbelief.
Blaine crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow. “You’re really going to argue me about this?”
Kurt seemed to deflate at that. “No,” he admitted, looking around to see if anyone was paying attention to their conversation. Blaine glanced, too, but everyone seemed absorbed in catching up with friends and talking about their summer vacations. “Really?” Kurt asked.
Blaine laughed. “I don’t, like, shout it down the halls or anything, but yeah. I don’t really feel like it’s anyone’s business, but I’m not ashamed.”
“Okay,” Kurt said, seeming to accept that. He shook a bit of flavored ice from his sleeve and picked the bag of clothes back up from inside his locker.
“Are you going to let me help clean you up this time?” Blaine asked, feeling his heart start to race at his brazenness.
“You don’t have to,” Kurt said as he closed his locker. He looked down at his ruined clothes and grimaced.
“What if I say I insist?”
Kurt bit his lip, and it made him look absolutely adorable. “Then I guess I’d have to let you,” he said carefully, as if testing the waters.
Blaine grinned, big and wide, and he hoped he wasn’t coming on too strong but didn’t really care if he was. “Here,” he said, grabbing the bag from Kurt’s hand and leading the way to the men’s room.
---
Blaine almost ended up late to homeroom, but it was beyond worth it. Kurt actually seemed to be letting his guard down around him a bit. He had started to do so when they were working together on their French presentation, but he had remained completely closed off outside of class. Blaine felt giddy as he sat through the morning announcements and recited the pledge of allegiance monotonously along with the rest of the room. It wasn’t like anything had actually happened, but it still felt like a huge step in the right direction.
The rest of the day passed in a bit of a happy haze. He forgot to wait until the last minute to find a seat in his first three periods, but it turned out that Kurt wasn’t in any of those classes anyway. He had first lunch this year, and Nick, Jeff, and Wes somehow all managed to get into that same period. They sat together in their usual spot and started the conversation off by grumbling about having to go to class and do homework again.
Well, the other three were complaining. Blaine just sort of sat there, staring off into space with a vague smile plastered to his face.
Jeff elbowed him in the side.
“Hey!” Blaine glared at his friend before pushing him back.
“I wouldn’t’ve had to do it if you were on the same planet as us,” he explained, shrugging.
“Class and homework suck, I know,” Blaine said, trying to show that he had been paying attention.
“The smile on your face says otherwise,” Wes pointed out before taking a bite of his turkey sandwich.
Blaine groaned. “I hate studying as much as all of you do.”
“Then why do you look so happy about it?” Nick asked.
“I heard a girl in my math class say you were seen talking to one Mr. Kurt Hummel at his locker this morning,” Jeff added after giving Blaine a few seconds to speak up for himself. “Care to tell us more about that?”
Blaine rolled his eyes. “There’s nothing to tell. He got slushied, and I helped him get cleaned up. It’s no big deal.”
“Right,” Wes said dryly. “That’s why your face looks like sunshine and kittens.”
“Can you just drop it?” Blaine asked, leaning back in his chair in a huff of annoyance.
“Not a chance!” Jeff said, as he extended a finger to poke Blaine’s arm. “You brought this on yourself.”
Blaine crossed his arms over his chest and looked around the room. A sign by the door caught his eye. “It looks like the glee club’s looking for new members again.”
“Don’t try and change the subject,” Wes chastised.
“But they are!” Blaine said, pointing toward the sign.
Nick looked to be deep in thought for a minute. “I mean, it could be fun...” he said, trailing off. Blaine could have kissed him for saving him from the inquisition. Instead, he stabbed his fork into his salad and brought the resulting bite of tomato and lettuce to his mouth.
Wes nodded slowly. “It would be a great vocal challenge for us. Their dancing always looks pretty complicated, but I’m sure we could pull it off.”
Jeff shrugged. “I’m game if you all are.”
“Me too,” Blaine added. “I think auditions are after school tomorrow. D’you think we can get something put together by then?”
Three incredulous pairs of eyes stared back at him. “Of course,” Wes scoffed.
“Yeah, man,” Jeff said. “We’ve been working on some a capella stuff that they’ll eat up.”
Blaine was struck again by how much spending his summer several states away from his friends had royally sucked. “Sounds awesome. Practice after school?”
“Like always,” Wes said with a nod. The others nodded their agreement, and Blaine felt something good twisting in his stomach.
---
Blaine had French right after lunch, and he breathed a silent sigh of relief when he and Kurt automatically took their seats from the previous two years. Everything was completely normal, and there didn’t seem to be any weirdness between them after the slushie incident before homeroom. That was definitely a good sign.
Kurt was actually in Blaine’s last two classes of the day, too. He sat two rows away during AP English Composition, but that was okay because Blaine was sitting next to Wes, and he really did not need to put up with Wes’s teasing during class. He was sure it would happen, but at least there was a buffer zone that meant Blaine wouldn’t be staring directly at him all the time.
AP US History was a different matter entirely. Wes and Nick had been put into the other section of the class, and Jeff was taking a government class instead. Blaine made it to the classroom with a minute or so to spare, having come from the opposite end of the building. Kurt must of speed walked from their English class, because there was no mistaking the styled chestnut hair of the boy sitting in the second row back. Luckily the seat behind him was free, and Blaine slid into it gratefully.
“Hey,” he said, tapping Kurt on the shoulder.
Kurt jumped about a foot in the air and turned around. “Geeze, Blaine. Give a guy a little warning, would you?”
“Sorry,” Blaine replied, grinning widely and obviously not very sorry at all.
The bell rang then, and Kurt turned back toward the front of the classroom. Blaine took a deep breath, pulling the sandalwood scent he recognized as Kurt deep into his lungs. He gave a valiant effort to listen to what the teacher was saying, but it was the seventh first-day-of-class lecture he’d heard that day so he didn’t feel guilty at all about giving up on listening a minute and a half in.
Kurt’s neck was just barely exposed in the shirt he had changed into that morning. Blaine wanted to run his fingers over it, to test and see if his skin really was as smooth as it looked. He then imagined running his hands out and over Kurt’s shoulders and then down his back, pulling the fabric down over his arms as he went.
He shifted in his seat as he felt himself starting to harden. Of course this was still going to happen to him. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply (Big mistake, Anderson, he thought as Kurt’s scent began to overwhelm him. Big mistake.) He then looked down at the syllabus on the desk in front of him and tried to concentrate on it instead, but that didn’t last too long before he was back to staring at the back of Kurt’s head, wondering how it would feel to run his fingers through his hair without having to contend with stray slushie.
The bell rang far too soon for Blaine’s liking. Kurt stood up and stretched, packing his folder and pen into his bag. “See you tomorrow,” he said quietly before slipping out of the classroom. Blaine smiled at Kurt’s retreating figure and waited a moment longer for everyone else to make their way into the hallway before standing himself and draping his bag conspicuously in front of his body.
---
Somewhere in his mind, Blaine had to have known that the reason he was so interested in joining glee club was because of Kurt. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still a shock to see him sitting in the choir room, right in the center of the chairs lined up against the wall.
“Hi, guys!” Mr. Schue greeted as he walked in with the other guys. (Blaine was pretty sure that was his name; Jeff had mentioned him a couple times when he was talking about his Spanish class.) “Come on in! Have you guys come prepared to audition?”
The boys all stashed their bags by a grouping of chairs near the wall. Wes spoke up for the whole group. “We have. Do you want us to go now, or should we wait for more people to arrive?”
Mr. Schue clapped his hands. “This is it. You guys can go ahead and warm up, and if you have any music, just give it to Brad,” he said, pointing out the man dressed all in black who was sitting at the piano.
“That’s alright, thank you,” Wes replied, nodding at the piano player. “We’ll be singing a capella.”
Mr. Schue nodded his approval. Blaine recognized that loud brunette girl from his math classes, and she appeared to be ready to bounce out of her seat in sheer enthusiasm. Blaine risked a quick smile at the current members (well, mostly to Kurt, but he was far enough away that it looked like he was just smiling at everyone) before turning to talk to the guys.
“You all ready?” Wes asked, and the other three hummed in the affirmative. Blaine walked to the piano and pressed down on the B-flat below middle C to give them their starting pitch before walking back to the front of the group.
He had been surprised at their rehearsal the day before when Wes suggested that he sing the lead. Apparently they had all felt more comfortable harmonizing on the songs they had worked on, and Blaine was able to easily fit his voice in on top of the structure they laid down.
Teenage Dream hadn’t been his first choice of song, but he had listened to enough Katy Perry over the summer that he wasn’t at all upset by it. Besides, it gave him an excuse to sing some pretty awesome lyrics to Kurt. Well, not necessarily to Kurt, but in Kurt’s general direction for sure.
The song came to a close, and the guys, faces flushed and chests heaving from the performance, smiled at their audience and took a bow. They heard a round of applause much larger than Blaine would have thought possible from so few people, and Mr. Schue was walking back toward the center of the room.
“Wow, great job, you guys!” he said, then spun to face the current members. “What d’you think, guys? Are they in?”
There were a few loud “yeah”s and “definitely”s, and the brunette girl had actually jumped out of her seat to show just how much she thought they should be a part of glee club. Blaine would have thought more about what a travesty her clothing choice was (A short-sleeved red sweater with a merry-go-round horse on it? Really?), but he was much more focused on Kurt’s enthusiastic clapping.
They were in, and Kurt had apparently really liked the performance.
---
Part 3