Fic: "100 Days" [Glee, Kurt/Blaine, 3.1/10]
Title: 100 Days
Author: dazzlebug
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Kurt and Blaine have been best friends (and nothing more) since the age of six. Now 22-year-old college graduates, they take a roadtrip around the USA, visiting every state in 100 days. Fifty states. Two boys. One love story.
Disclaimer: I paint the pictures; I just borrow the names.
Notes: Thank you to my betas, Axe and Rachie.
This fic will be updated weekly on Wednesdays at 4pm EST/9pm GMT (estimated). Also available on ffnet, Tumblr, S&C and AO3 (complete chapters only).
Previously: T-Minus One | ME | NH | VT | MA | RI | CT | NY | NJ | PA | DE
Day 021: Sunday 7th October, 2012
Tsunami (Maryland)
“Does it even count if only one scene of the movie was filmed there, though?”
“Kurt, it’s Hairspray. Of course it counts.”
“If you say so…”
“Are you really sure about my Halloween costume?” Blaine asked as he idly plucked scales, shaking out his hand every now and then. He hadn’t played seriously in nearly two weeks, and though his fingertips were aching as new calluses blossomed on top of the old ones, the feeling of the black cocobolo and white spruce of his father’s Baranik Meridian in his hands was like undiluted magic.
Kurt glanced up from the crate of vinyl records he was flicking through, seated on the rich crimson overstuffed couch that stretched along the opposite wall of the music room in the Andersons’ basement, where they had been since shortly after a surprisingly easy and pleasant dinner with Blaine’s father and stepmother, Alison. Surprisingly easy and pleasant seemed to be the theme of the dinner, and Blaine had caught himself wondering numerous times throughout the day when the other shoe was going to drop.
“Why? That costume is fabulous,” Kurt said. “Much better than your original idea of us going as a tube of lube and a condom. I mean, really.”
“April told me it made me look like Elmo at a gay bar,” Blaine replied.
“She’s just jealous that she doesn’t get to wear a Kurt Hummel original, too,” Kurt said lightly, directing his gaze back to the LPs. “Besides, why are you worrying about Halloween now? It’s weeks away. Unless-oh, you really are unsure about your costume, aren’t you?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. You know I love my costume. I don’t know; it’s just been bugging me ever since she said it.”
“Well, you could always go with the Freddie Mercury instead. But don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing,” Kurt said lightly, and as he reached the last LP in the crate he flipped them back into place and looked Blaine in the eye, bracing his hands on either side of the crate’s plastic edges. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“Where you nit-pick out all the little things that you think are wrong in order to avoid the big thing that’s actually wrong.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Blaine muttered to the guitar, focusing back on the grain of the wood beneath its perfect layer of varnish.
“Don’t you dare give me that, Blaine Devon Anderson. There’s obviously something that you’re not dealing with, and you and I both know what it is,” Kurt said. “So you’re going to sing it out, and I’m going to listen, and then we’re going to try and figure it out together. Deal?”
Blaine worried the inside of his cheek for a moment or two, then resettled the guitar across his lap and dropped one foot from the stool’s footrest to the heavy rug. Silently, he ran his left hand along the neck of the guitar and found a chord, and retrieved a plectrum from the narrow, chest-height shelf bar that ran the length of the room. He strummed the guitar once, the pitch and timbre rich and utterly perfect, and Blaine knew immediately the song that he needed to sing: the song that had been looping in the back of his mind all day, and to which Kurt had introduced him in the early hours of a windswept morning almost seven years earlier.
He began to strum, quietly at first, then louder as he grew more sure of himself, and after the first few bars of swallowing down the constriction in his throat, he did the only thing he’d ever truly known to do when it all got too much.
“Son, what have you done? You’re caught by the river, you’re coming undone,” he sang, feeling Kurt’s eyes on him and letting his own voice carry him to the relief of escape, if only for six minutes of eight-bar measures. “You and I were so full of love and hope. Would you give it all up now? Would you give in just to spite them all?”
And that was the real crux of the matter: forgive or forget? The problem was that it wasn’t just his father that Blaine needed to forgive-it was also himself. Logically, he knew that his coming out to his parents wasn’t the reason for their divorce. It was just hard to believe it.
The song was over too quickly, the last strains of it swallowed in the soundproofing panels that covered the walls, and Kurt gently cleared his throat.
“When you’re at a crime scene, and you’re looking for the guilty one, where do they say you should look first?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You look for the person running away, Blaine.”
“Okay…”
“And isn’t that exactly what you’ve done ever since it happened?” Kurt asked, his voice forgiving but firm. “You’ve been punishing your father for something he did seven years ago because it was too big for you to process at the time, but since then it’s only gotten bigger and now you’re just too scared to open the box you shoved it into. Look, he can’t undo it. But with all his heart, he’s sorry. I can see it in his eyes, and you would too if you just took the time to look.”
Kurt moved closer, stopping just before Blaine and laying his palm in the hollow of his neck; Blaine almost leaned into the touch, but let the hesitancy have him instead.
“Don’t waste the relationships that you could have, Blaine,” Kurt said softly, and he swallowed thickly as his thumb rubbed absently just beneath Blaine’s jaw. “Not all of us get that chance.”
“You boys having fun down there?”
Blaine’s head whipped towards the door to the basement and the sound of his father’s voice. He froze, all at once feeling like he’d been backed into a corner while also knowing that Kurt was right. He should have stopped running years ago, but had never quite figured out what to do with the momentum.
“Yeah, Dad,” he called out, keeping his voice light. Kurt’s hand was gone from his neck, and Blaine avoided his eyes.
There was a beat of silence followed by footsteps padding softly down the carpeted stairs.
“You mind if I join in?” George asked as he poked his head through the door. “I’ve been meaning to get down here again for a while.”
“You know, I think I might go find Alison. She mentioned her roses earlier, and Carole’s always looking for gardening tips,” Kurt said quickly, and with one last sharp glance at Blaine, made a hasty exit.
George stepped fully into the room and cleared his throat, gesturing to the guitar. “You play even better than the last time I heard you.”
“Thanks,” Blaine said, unable to dampen the small thrill in his chest at his father’s proud tone, and it made him want to tell him more, tell him everything. “I was, um-I had a band in college.”
“Yeah? Let me guess, you were the rock-star front man,” George said knowingly as he seated himself where Kurt had been sitting only a minute earlier.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but-yeah, I sang and played guitar,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “We actually had our last gig together at The Cannery, the day before Kurt and I left.”
“I bet that place still looks exactly the same.”
“Same gnarly old fishers nursing beers under the marlin in the corner.”
George chuckled, and things were easy… And Blaine should have known it was too good to last.
“That was always your mom’s favorite place, and I could never figure out why. How’s she doing, now?”
A body-wide sweep of tension; Blaine tried not to outwardly bristle. “She’s fine,” he said.
“Did I hear that she just got a promotion?” George asked.
It was nothing. It was small talk. And yet Blaine could feel the old anger dredging itself up, churning in his gut and rising, rising, rising, high enough to flood and overwhelm the dam he’d carefully and painstakingly constructed to protect himself from it.
“Yep. Three weeks before we left.”
“Well, that’s fantastic! How did you celebrate?”
“Dinner at The War Horse.”
“Ah, another favorite,” George said, a note of wistful nostalgia laced throughout his tone before he grew serious, eyebrows drawn down over his eyes. He leaned forward in his seat slightly and asked, “And is she doing alright since your grandfather passed?”
“Do you mean, ‘Is she back on the meds?’” Blaine asked hotly, setting the guitar deliberately in its stand and staring his father square in the eye. “Because no, she’s not. She doesn’t need them anymore.”
“Well, that’s-that’s good to hear,” came the mollified reply. “And how was the, uh… The service? I would have liked to have been there to pay my respects, but-“
“Grandpa wouldn’t have wanted them even if you’d been invited to pay them,” Blaine cut him off, and the room went very still.
“Blaine, there’s no need to be so rude,” George said, his steely tone one that would usually have Blaine backing down, but this time it only fueled the hot wash of anger roiling in the pit of Blaine’s stomach.
“Dad, I’m not a child anymore. You can’t just tell me I’m being rude every time I tell you something that you don’t want to hear.”
“Now wait just a minute-“
“No. No, I won’t. I’m an adult now-“
“You don’t look like much of an adult to me-“
“And that’s because you ran away! You never got to see me become an adult because you weren’t there to see it! You cheated on Mom, and then you ran away because you couldn’t deal with the consequences when she found out, and I bet you don’t even have any idea of how bad it got, how she lost all of her friends, how she had a psychotic break while you were living it up with your secretary in fucking Rockland-“
“Blaine, stop,” Kurt’s voice came from the doorway, and Blaine whipped his head around at the sudden intrusion, not even having realized that he’d jumped to his feet. Kurt moved to step forward, but Blaine held up his hand.
“No, he needs to hear this,” he said quietly, and turned back to his father, who was sitting with the fingers and thumb of one hand stretched across his brow, his face mostly hidden from view. He continued, in a disarmingly low and controlled voice, “Dad, what you did almost killed her. I lived at Kurt’s house for six months of sophomore year while they kept her in that place full of crazy people to make sure that she wouldn’t try to kill herself again, and where were you? Why didn’t you come back?”
“I was too ashamed.” His father’s voice was gravel-rough and bitten off. “Blaine, there’s nothing I can do now that will fix what I did to both of you, but I’m so sorry.”
“Not good enough,” Blaine said, shaking his head. “I was ashamed of you too, but I still needed you. I hated you because of how much I still needed you, even after you broke everything.”
And in the silence that followed, Blaine pushed past Kurt and ran from the room without so much as a backward glance, even when Kurt called after him. He took the stairs two at a time and made his way through the kitchen where Alison had poured them lemonade that afternoon. Passing through the wide archway into the grand foyer, Blaine’s bare feet slapped against the smooth maple wood flooring and the marble of the wide, curving staircase that served as the foyer’s focal point.
Before long, he had found his way to the guest room where he had left his things, fully aware of the fact that what he was doing entirely contradicted adult behavior. The door slammed shut behind him and he mentally cursed himself for having brought everything inside from the R.V. before really having a true hold on the temperature between himself and his father. He stood at the foot of the bed for a moment, fists opening and closing, and then gave in to the urge and collapsed face first on top of the duvet.
He lay there for hours, picking the day apart into its component minutiae as he watched the muted glow of the lanterns outside the window. Wind howled wildly outside the window, the sound of it like it was being blown across the lip of a beer bottle, and he could only just hear the music playing quietly from his laptop, on the floor by the side of the bed.
The day had washed over him in bright pockets of time that had burned pictures into his mind’s eye with flashbulb precision: the scent of Old Spice that accompanied the first hug he had shared with his father in years; George nervously clearing his throat and suggesting a tour of the house; Kurt’s thrilled expression when Blaine agreed that it would be a shame to waste such beautifully-appointed guest rooms; Alison’s bright and pleased smile as she shooed all three of ‘her boys’ out the door for an afternoon drink, saying she had errands to run and that they should enjoy a guys’ afternoon; a window table at Frazier’s On The Avenue, and the startling amber clarity of his Heritage Bourbon juxtaposed against the swirling fog of Kurt’s Grey Goose martini as his dad sipped an orange juice; laughing until his sides hurt and his dad’s eyes were streaming at one of Kurt’s perfectly timed Eddie Izzard references on the way back from the bar; giggling awkwardly around the dinner table at Alison’s misapprehension that he and Kurt were an item.
The entire day, all of the smiles and the easy laughter, the renewed faith he’d felt blossoming in some deep and forgotten place… It all felt like a gargantuan joke had been played on him, and that the person behind it had taken an ice cream scoop to his insides, gouging out every last shred of his essence until nothing but a husk was left behind.
Why isn’t this more satisfying? Blaine thought. I’ve been waiting years to say all of this to him. Now what?
He changed into his pajamas and attempted to write an entry on his blog; he tried counting sheep. He even briefly considered jerking off to work out his frustration before thinking better of it-none of it was any use. Time dragged on by the second, and Blaine rolled onto his back, pillowing his head on his arms and counting the number of tiles from the wall to the small chandelier and back again.
The soft cotton of the sheets was too hot against Blaine’s skin, and they tangled around his legs as he rolled onto his side in search of a cooler and more comfortable position. He wasn’t even angry anymore, not really. The anger had been overtaken by a deep and encompassing sadness instead, one that took all its joy from reminding Blaine of everything he had forgotten. It had been so easy to hold onto the anger for so long that the good things had slipped his mind-his dad’s pride at the things Blaine had accomplished, his ever-present and slightly ridiculous sense of humor that found the funny in almost everything, even his deep and abiding love for throwing Monty Python quotes into everyday conversation. It had all fallen by the wayside. He had missed his father, and it was hitting him all at once just how much.
Blaine had been expecting two days of a bite-swollen tongue and an awkward knot in his throat, and instead, he’d gotten his dad back-right before he caused the chasm to widen further, ultimately unnecessarily. He should have moved on from this long ago-after all, in their own separate ways, both of his parents had-but for so many years he had been holding onto the anger and loss and utter heartbreak that it was burned into his skin; it had become part of who he was, and he was scared of finding out who he would be without it. Most of all, Blaine was scared that he would one day become his father, that he would end up breaking someone so badly that there was no recovering. He was like his father in a lot of ways-they shared the same sense of humor, the same infatuation and affinity with people, the same practical way of looking at things. Why should matters of the heart-and heartbreak-be any different?
Tap-tap-tap, came the knocks on the door, and Blaine threw back the covers. He straightened his pajamas and crossed the room, cracking open the door to see Kurt standing before him with his arms crossed over his chest. They regarded one another for a long moment, and within a split-second of Blaine starting to speak, Kurt stepped forward and placed his hand over Blaine’s mouth. Their faces were only centimeters apart and a moment had Blaine suspended, heart racing in his chest and blood rushing in his ears.
“Aren’t you tired, yet?” Kurt asked, his eyes soft around the edges. After a pause, Blaine nodded, inhaling deeply and stepping back.
“Is anyone still awake?” he asked.
“Alison went to bed, but your dad’s still out on the lanai,” Kurt said, leaning against the doorframe and looking down at Blaine. “As proud as I was of you for using your words earlier, I think-“
“I know,” Blaine cut him off, taking a deep breath and squaring his shoulders. “I know I have to fix this.”
Kurt nodded, and stepped aside. “I’m going to bed, but I’ll be up for a while if you want to talk afterwards, okay? Maybe we could watch our movie.”
Blaine gave him a tight, crooked smile, murmured a thank you, and made his way downstairs. As promised, he found his father sitting in the middle of the curving taupe couch, one socked foot resting on the upholstered top of the coffee table. Blaine stood awkwardly half in, half out of the doorway out onto the lanai and looked at his father-really looked at the man before him, with his usually tidy salt-and-pepper hair slightly mussed, his eyes bloodshot and beset by dark circles, and the wrong kind of lines around his mouth. He looked more tired than Blaine felt.
Slowly, he moved toward the end of the couch and perched on the arm. He glanced out over backlit silhouettes of the roses bordering the waist-height wall separating the lanai from the yard, and searched for the words.
George sat straight and leaned forward, forearms resting along his thighs and his fingers splayed. Cautiously, he said, “Son, about what happened downstairs. Everything you said-“
“Dad, wait,” Blaine interrupted, turning fully to his father but not yet able to meet his eyes. “I’m-really sorry. I completely embarrassed myself, and I was unforgivably rude to you and Alison… I usually have better manners than that, I swear.”
“Blaine, the fact is that I let you down in the worst way a father can let his son down. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most, and I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am.”
“I-you know, I thought it would feel really great to finally get all of it out, but…” Blaine trailed off, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and scrubbing his hand across the back of his neck. “But things are actually… Things are good now, for both of you. Mom has Stephen, and you have Alison, and I feel like I just watched a video of myself as a toddler throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store.”
“You had every right,” George said gently, and Blaine shook his head.
“No. No, what I said earlier was right. I’m not a kid anymore, so I should stop acting like one.”
Blaine knew that his father couldn’t disagree, and he didn’t, silence falling heavily between them like a curtain, tapestry-thick. But he also knew that his father desperately wanted to fix what he’d rendered asunder, and Blaine was finally beginning to admit to himself that it was a desire they shared.
“Do you miss being home?” George asked, the question throwing Blaine off and causing him to consider it for a moment.
“No. Brunswick, it… Never really felt like home, not even when-when things were good. Before,” Blaine said, the words sounding stilted and awkward and true.
“Where does feel like home?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Well, whether you use it or not, you’ve always got a home here,” George said, and Blaine’s throat closed. “Do you think we could start fresh?”
Blaine shook his head, glancing down at the front of his threadbare Bowdoin tee and blinking back the prickle. “No. But-“ Blaine stopped, looked up to meet his father’s gaze, and said, “I think we can move forward.”
Distance: 1,451 miles
*
Next: Virginia
Author: dazzlebug
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Kurt and Blaine have been best friends (and nothing more) since the age of six. Now 22-year-old college graduates, they take a roadtrip around the USA, visiting every state in 100 days. Fifty states. Two boys. One love story.
Disclaimer: I paint the pictures; I just borrow the names.
Notes: Thank you to my betas, Axe and Rachie.
This fic will be updated weekly on Wednesdays at 4pm EST/9pm GMT (estimated). Also available on ffnet, Tumblr, S&C and AO3 (complete chapters only).
Previously: T-Minus One | ME | NH | VT | MA | RI | CT | NY | NJ | PA | DE
Day 021: Sunday 7th October, 2012
Tsunami (Maryland)
“Does it even count if only one scene of the movie was filmed there, though?”
“Kurt, it’s Hairspray. Of course it counts.”
“If you say so…”
“Are you really sure about my Halloween costume?” Blaine asked as he idly plucked scales, shaking out his hand every now and then. He hadn’t played seriously in nearly two weeks, and though his fingertips were aching as new calluses blossomed on top of the old ones, the feeling of the black cocobolo and white spruce of his father’s Baranik Meridian in his hands was like undiluted magic.
Kurt glanced up from the crate of vinyl records he was flicking through, seated on the rich crimson overstuffed couch that stretched along the opposite wall of the music room in the Andersons’ basement, where they had been since shortly after a surprisingly easy and pleasant dinner with Blaine’s father and stepmother, Alison. Surprisingly easy and pleasant seemed to be the theme of the dinner, and Blaine had caught himself wondering numerous times throughout the day when the other shoe was going to drop.
“Why? That costume is fabulous,” Kurt said. “Much better than your original idea of us going as a tube of lube and a condom. I mean, really.”
“April told me it made me look like Elmo at a gay bar,” Blaine replied.
“She’s just jealous that she doesn’t get to wear a Kurt Hummel original, too,” Kurt said lightly, directing his gaze back to the LPs. “Besides, why are you worrying about Halloween now? It’s weeks away. Unless-oh, you really are unsure about your costume, aren’t you?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. You know I love my costume. I don’t know; it’s just been bugging me ever since she said it.”
“Well, you could always go with the Freddie Mercury instead. But don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing,” Kurt said lightly, and as he reached the last LP in the crate he flipped them back into place and looked Blaine in the eye, bracing his hands on either side of the crate’s plastic edges. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“Where you nit-pick out all the little things that you think are wrong in order to avoid the big thing that’s actually wrong.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Blaine muttered to the guitar, focusing back on the grain of the wood beneath its perfect layer of varnish.
“Don’t you dare give me that, Blaine Devon Anderson. There’s obviously something that you’re not dealing with, and you and I both know what it is,” Kurt said. “So you’re going to sing it out, and I’m going to listen, and then we’re going to try and figure it out together. Deal?”
Blaine worried the inside of his cheek for a moment or two, then resettled the guitar across his lap and dropped one foot from the stool’s footrest to the heavy rug. Silently, he ran his left hand along the neck of the guitar and found a chord, and retrieved a plectrum from the narrow, chest-height shelf bar that ran the length of the room. He strummed the guitar once, the pitch and timbre rich and utterly perfect, and Blaine knew immediately the song that he needed to sing: the song that had been looping in the back of his mind all day, and to which Kurt had introduced him in the early hours of a windswept morning almost seven years earlier.
He began to strum, quietly at first, then louder as he grew more sure of himself, and after the first few bars of swallowing down the constriction in his throat, he did the only thing he’d ever truly known to do when it all got too much.
“Son, what have you done? You’re caught by the river, you’re coming undone,” he sang, feeling Kurt’s eyes on him and letting his own voice carry him to the relief of escape, if only for six minutes of eight-bar measures. “You and I were so full of love and hope. Would you give it all up now? Would you give in just to spite them all?”
And that was the real crux of the matter: forgive or forget? The problem was that it wasn’t just his father that Blaine needed to forgive-it was also himself. Logically, he knew that his coming out to his parents wasn’t the reason for their divorce. It was just hard to believe it.
The song was over too quickly, the last strains of it swallowed in the soundproofing panels that covered the walls, and Kurt gently cleared his throat.
“When you’re at a crime scene, and you’re looking for the guilty one, where do they say you should look first?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You look for the person running away, Blaine.”
“Okay…”
“And isn’t that exactly what you’ve done ever since it happened?” Kurt asked, his voice forgiving but firm. “You’ve been punishing your father for something he did seven years ago because it was too big for you to process at the time, but since then it’s only gotten bigger and now you’re just too scared to open the box you shoved it into. Look, he can’t undo it. But with all his heart, he’s sorry. I can see it in his eyes, and you would too if you just took the time to look.”
Kurt moved closer, stopping just before Blaine and laying his palm in the hollow of his neck; Blaine almost leaned into the touch, but let the hesitancy have him instead.
“Don’t waste the relationships that you could have, Blaine,” Kurt said softly, and he swallowed thickly as his thumb rubbed absently just beneath Blaine’s jaw. “Not all of us get that chance.”
“You boys having fun down there?”
Blaine’s head whipped towards the door to the basement and the sound of his father’s voice. He froze, all at once feeling like he’d been backed into a corner while also knowing that Kurt was right. He should have stopped running years ago, but had never quite figured out what to do with the momentum.
“Yeah, Dad,” he called out, keeping his voice light. Kurt’s hand was gone from his neck, and Blaine avoided his eyes.
There was a beat of silence followed by footsteps padding softly down the carpeted stairs.
“You mind if I join in?” George asked as he poked his head through the door. “I’ve been meaning to get down here again for a while.”
“You know, I think I might go find Alison. She mentioned her roses earlier, and Carole’s always looking for gardening tips,” Kurt said quickly, and with one last sharp glance at Blaine, made a hasty exit.
George stepped fully into the room and cleared his throat, gesturing to the guitar. “You play even better than the last time I heard you.”
“Thanks,” Blaine said, unable to dampen the small thrill in his chest at his father’s proud tone, and it made him want to tell him more, tell him everything. “I was, um-I had a band in college.”
“Yeah? Let me guess, you were the rock-star front man,” George said knowingly as he seated himself where Kurt had been sitting only a minute earlier.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but-yeah, I sang and played guitar,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “We actually had our last gig together at The Cannery, the day before Kurt and I left.”
“I bet that place still looks exactly the same.”
“Same gnarly old fishers nursing beers under the marlin in the corner.”
George chuckled, and things were easy… And Blaine should have known it was too good to last.
“That was always your mom’s favorite place, and I could never figure out why. How’s she doing, now?”
A body-wide sweep of tension; Blaine tried not to outwardly bristle. “She’s fine,” he said.
“Did I hear that she just got a promotion?” George asked.
It was nothing. It was small talk. And yet Blaine could feel the old anger dredging itself up, churning in his gut and rising, rising, rising, high enough to flood and overwhelm the dam he’d carefully and painstakingly constructed to protect himself from it.
“Yep. Three weeks before we left.”
“Well, that’s fantastic! How did you celebrate?”
“Dinner at The War Horse.”
“Ah, another favorite,” George said, a note of wistful nostalgia laced throughout his tone before he grew serious, eyebrows drawn down over his eyes. He leaned forward in his seat slightly and asked, “And is she doing alright since your grandfather passed?”
“Do you mean, ‘Is she back on the meds?’” Blaine asked hotly, setting the guitar deliberately in its stand and staring his father square in the eye. “Because no, she’s not. She doesn’t need them anymore.”
“Well, that’s-that’s good to hear,” came the mollified reply. “And how was the, uh… The service? I would have liked to have been there to pay my respects, but-“
“Grandpa wouldn’t have wanted them even if you’d been invited to pay them,” Blaine cut him off, and the room went very still.
“Blaine, there’s no need to be so rude,” George said, his steely tone one that would usually have Blaine backing down, but this time it only fueled the hot wash of anger roiling in the pit of Blaine’s stomach.
“Dad, I’m not a child anymore. You can’t just tell me I’m being rude every time I tell you something that you don’t want to hear.”
“Now wait just a minute-“
“No. No, I won’t. I’m an adult now-“
“You don’t look like much of an adult to me-“
“And that’s because you ran away! You never got to see me become an adult because you weren’t there to see it! You cheated on Mom, and then you ran away because you couldn’t deal with the consequences when she found out, and I bet you don’t even have any idea of how bad it got, how she lost all of her friends, how she had a psychotic break while you were living it up with your secretary in fucking Rockland-“
“Blaine, stop,” Kurt’s voice came from the doorway, and Blaine whipped his head around at the sudden intrusion, not even having realized that he’d jumped to his feet. Kurt moved to step forward, but Blaine held up his hand.
“No, he needs to hear this,” he said quietly, and turned back to his father, who was sitting with the fingers and thumb of one hand stretched across his brow, his face mostly hidden from view. He continued, in a disarmingly low and controlled voice, “Dad, what you did almost killed her. I lived at Kurt’s house for six months of sophomore year while they kept her in that place full of crazy people to make sure that she wouldn’t try to kill herself again, and where were you? Why didn’t you come back?”
“I was too ashamed.” His father’s voice was gravel-rough and bitten off. “Blaine, there’s nothing I can do now that will fix what I did to both of you, but I’m so sorry.”
“Not good enough,” Blaine said, shaking his head. “I was ashamed of you too, but I still needed you. I hated you because of how much I still needed you, even after you broke everything.”
And in the silence that followed, Blaine pushed past Kurt and ran from the room without so much as a backward glance, even when Kurt called after him. He took the stairs two at a time and made his way through the kitchen where Alison had poured them lemonade that afternoon. Passing through the wide archway into the grand foyer, Blaine’s bare feet slapped against the smooth maple wood flooring and the marble of the wide, curving staircase that served as the foyer’s focal point.
Before long, he had found his way to the guest room where he had left his things, fully aware of the fact that what he was doing entirely contradicted adult behavior. The door slammed shut behind him and he mentally cursed himself for having brought everything inside from the R.V. before really having a true hold on the temperature between himself and his father. He stood at the foot of the bed for a moment, fists opening and closing, and then gave in to the urge and collapsed face first on top of the duvet.
He lay there for hours, picking the day apart into its component minutiae as he watched the muted glow of the lanterns outside the window. Wind howled wildly outside the window, the sound of it like it was being blown across the lip of a beer bottle, and he could only just hear the music playing quietly from his laptop, on the floor by the side of the bed.
The day had washed over him in bright pockets of time that had burned pictures into his mind’s eye with flashbulb precision: the scent of Old Spice that accompanied the first hug he had shared with his father in years; George nervously clearing his throat and suggesting a tour of the house; Kurt’s thrilled expression when Blaine agreed that it would be a shame to waste such beautifully-appointed guest rooms; Alison’s bright and pleased smile as she shooed all three of ‘her boys’ out the door for an afternoon drink, saying she had errands to run and that they should enjoy a guys’ afternoon; a window table at Frazier’s On The Avenue, and the startling amber clarity of his Heritage Bourbon juxtaposed against the swirling fog of Kurt’s Grey Goose martini as his dad sipped an orange juice; laughing until his sides hurt and his dad’s eyes were streaming at one of Kurt’s perfectly timed Eddie Izzard references on the way back from the bar; giggling awkwardly around the dinner table at Alison’s misapprehension that he and Kurt were an item.
The entire day, all of the smiles and the easy laughter, the renewed faith he’d felt blossoming in some deep and forgotten place… It all felt like a gargantuan joke had been played on him, and that the person behind it had taken an ice cream scoop to his insides, gouging out every last shred of his essence until nothing but a husk was left behind.
Why isn’t this more satisfying? Blaine thought. I’ve been waiting years to say all of this to him. Now what?
He changed into his pajamas and attempted to write an entry on his blog; he tried counting sheep. He even briefly considered jerking off to work out his frustration before thinking better of it-none of it was any use. Time dragged on by the second, and Blaine rolled onto his back, pillowing his head on his arms and counting the number of tiles from the wall to the small chandelier and back again.
The soft cotton of the sheets was too hot against Blaine’s skin, and they tangled around his legs as he rolled onto his side in search of a cooler and more comfortable position. He wasn’t even angry anymore, not really. The anger had been overtaken by a deep and encompassing sadness instead, one that took all its joy from reminding Blaine of everything he had forgotten. It had been so easy to hold onto the anger for so long that the good things had slipped his mind-his dad’s pride at the things Blaine had accomplished, his ever-present and slightly ridiculous sense of humor that found the funny in almost everything, even his deep and abiding love for throwing Monty Python quotes into everyday conversation. It had all fallen by the wayside. He had missed his father, and it was hitting him all at once just how much.
Blaine had been expecting two days of a bite-swollen tongue and an awkward knot in his throat, and instead, he’d gotten his dad back-right before he caused the chasm to widen further, ultimately unnecessarily. He should have moved on from this long ago-after all, in their own separate ways, both of his parents had-but for so many years he had been holding onto the anger and loss and utter heartbreak that it was burned into his skin; it had become part of who he was, and he was scared of finding out who he would be without it. Most of all, Blaine was scared that he would one day become his father, that he would end up breaking someone so badly that there was no recovering. He was like his father in a lot of ways-they shared the same sense of humor, the same infatuation and affinity with people, the same practical way of looking at things. Why should matters of the heart-and heartbreak-be any different?
Tap-tap-tap, came the knocks on the door, and Blaine threw back the covers. He straightened his pajamas and crossed the room, cracking open the door to see Kurt standing before him with his arms crossed over his chest. They regarded one another for a long moment, and within a split-second of Blaine starting to speak, Kurt stepped forward and placed his hand over Blaine’s mouth. Their faces were only centimeters apart and a moment had Blaine suspended, heart racing in his chest and blood rushing in his ears.
“Aren’t you tired, yet?” Kurt asked, his eyes soft around the edges. After a pause, Blaine nodded, inhaling deeply and stepping back.
“Is anyone still awake?” he asked.
“Alison went to bed, but your dad’s still out on the lanai,” Kurt said, leaning against the doorframe and looking down at Blaine. “As proud as I was of you for using your words earlier, I think-“
“I know,” Blaine cut him off, taking a deep breath and squaring his shoulders. “I know I have to fix this.”
Kurt nodded, and stepped aside. “I’m going to bed, but I’ll be up for a while if you want to talk afterwards, okay? Maybe we could watch our movie.”
Blaine gave him a tight, crooked smile, murmured a thank you, and made his way downstairs. As promised, he found his father sitting in the middle of the curving taupe couch, one socked foot resting on the upholstered top of the coffee table. Blaine stood awkwardly half in, half out of the doorway out onto the lanai and looked at his father-really looked at the man before him, with his usually tidy salt-and-pepper hair slightly mussed, his eyes bloodshot and beset by dark circles, and the wrong kind of lines around his mouth. He looked more tired than Blaine felt.
Slowly, he moved toward the end of the couch and perched on the arm. He glanced out over backlit silhouettes of the roses bordering the waist-height wall separating the lanai from the yard, and searched for the words.
George sat straight and leaned forward, forearms resting along his thighs and his fingers splayed. Cautiously, he said, “Son, about what happened downstairs. Everything you said-“
“Dad, wait,” Blaine interrupted, turning fully to his father but not yet able to meet his eyes. “I’m-really sorry. I completely embarrassed myself, and I was unforgivably rude to you and Alison… I usually have better manners than that, I swear.”
“Blaine, the fact is that I let you down in the worst way a father can let his son down. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most, and I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am.”
“I-you know, I thought it would feel really great to finally get all of it out, but…” Blaine trailed off, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and scrubbing his hand across the back of his neck. “But things are actually… Things are good now, for both of you. Mom has Stephen, and you have Alison, and I feel like I just watched a video of myself as a toddler throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store.”
“You had every right,” George said gently, and Blaine shook his head.
“No. No, what I said earlier was right. I’m not a kid anymore, so I should stop acting like one.”
Blaine knew that his father couldn’t disagree, and he didn’t, silence falling heavily between them like a curtain, tapestry-thick. But he also knew that his father desperately wanted to fix what he’d rendered asunder, and Blaine was finally beginning to admit to himself that it was a desire they shared.
“Do you miss being home?” George asked, the question throwing Blaine off and causing him to consider it for a moment.
“No. Brunswick, it… Never really felt like home, not even when-when things were good. Before,” Blaine said, the words sounding stilted and awkward and true.
“Where does feel like home?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Well, whether you use it or not, you’ve always got a home here,” George said, and Blaine’s throat closed. “Do you think we could start fresh?”
Blaine shook his head, glancing down at the front of his threadbare Bowdoin tee and blinking back the prickle. “No. But-“ Blaine stopped, looked up to meet his father’s gaze, and said, “I think we can move forward.”
Distance: 1,451 miles
*
Next: Virginia