a system of touch (2/6)
masterpost
July 2010
What Kurt is doubtlessly thankful for at the current moment, is that the condo-complex lawn guy, who tends to spend the better part of everyday whacking and hacking and making as much noise as is apparently humanly possible, is out on vacation for the day because he’s pretty sure his eardrums were about to explode from the constant barrage. Today, he’s got his iced tea and his red Chanel sunglasses and his vintage plastic lawn lounge making sticky ladder marks into the back of his legs, but he still feels like a regular Vogue summer beach-front editorial-except with far less leg and far better hair than his magazine model counterparts.
Rachel was supposed to call him today, for some advice on some stage show or another but he figures he’d rather not listen right now to the endless rants of Rachel Berry on which female leads she will get and Kurt will undoubtedly not get, because it mostly makes him want to stage a one man gender roles protest in front of the community theatre and he knows that no matter how many wrinkled old ladies walk by and coo at the blushed red of his cheeks, none of them are actually going to care. He’d left his phone on the counter inside. No one would hear it-he’d text her back later.
What he’s more focused on at the moment, anyways, is whether or not the sun cream he’d put on the back of his ankles was still holding. The sun won’t reach them for a few more hours, but he really can’t rock the prison issue ankle cuff look. Not, at least, when paired with seersucker shorts.
He’s contemplating getting up to grab the bottle from the kitchen when a sharp crash distracts his attention to the front gate. He really hopes it’s not another one of the neighbor’s kids ramming their scooter into the hedge again because the amount of time’s he’d had to call the lawn repair to get that fixed last time had been heinous, but he slides his sandals on and walks over anyway, swatting at a bee in his path as he stands up. When he’s nearly there, he hears a muffled ‘ow, fuck,’ from over the hedge and he readies himself to curtly reprimand whatever child has ruined it this time-they can make the calls after this many accidents, courtesy be damned.
Or at least he was ready to reprimand. As he peers around the bars of the gate, it’s not a small unruly child collapsed on the ground with a scraped knee, but that stupid boy he keeps seeing, and oh wow, okay-he’s certainly just as distracting up close. His hair is rucked up and loose, curling in wide loops, and his bike is chipped and half-buried in the side of the hedge, its back tire still spinning next to the boy’s splayed leg. “Shit, shit-,” he curses to himself, unaware of Kurt’s eyes on him, and Kurt unlatches the gate and slides through the space it opens with a metallic creak-careful not to knock the metal bar into the guy’s outstretched foot.
“Hey, um-do you need a little-,” Kurt begins, watching the guy as he snaps his head around at the point he realizes he’s not alone, but he clearly has not noticed the cuts on the back on his calf, “those look horrible, oh wow-do you want me to get cream for that or?” He feels so awkward, suddenly, because he’s not even sure that they have cream for that kind of thing-he’s been lucky enough to escape injury all summer, and he’s fairly sure his grandmother hasn’t set foot on a bicycle in twenty odd years. The guy looks at him a bit curiously and Kurt gestures to his leg.
“Oh-no, I’ll be fine,” the guy brushes dotted sand off of his arms and scrambles to his feet, “I think I’ve fallen five times in the past two weeks. I sometimes don’t understand why I keep riding this old thing around.” The sugary sound of his tenor is soothing with a hint of laughter, and Kurt just wants to listen to him talk for the rest of the afternoon. He also kind of wants to swipe his hair down in a mirror for a moment because this guy is the kind of boyish-gorgeous he’s never going to flirt his way into with his bangs this full of so much salty humidity.
Almost as if he’s sensed the awkward pause of brainwaves, the boy wipes his hand on his shorts and sticks it out, “Sorry, sorry-I’m Blaine.” Kurt shakes it with a hand that’s soft but slightly clammy and Blaine’s hand is warm, his grip firm like he’s a boy who’s been raised to know that a handshake seals a deal. He probably ties a perfect necktie, too-Kurt is preemptively impressed.
“Kurt.”
Blaine swipes the back of his hand across his lips before he speaks, and Kurt has a sudden and inexplicable urge to back him against the bushes and bite his mouth red and plump. He refrains, though, if only because he can tell at a glance-lemon yellow henley, firm handshake, winning smile-this is not the type of boy you just plant unsuspecting kisses on mid-accident near your half-open front gate. You wait, you test the waters-he takes his coffee black with one cream and two cinnamons and he ties his scuffed up saddle shoes with a clever hook and you learn that, take those weeks and months to know. Today, though, he’s just a stranger-cute, welcoming, but a stranger nonetheless. “It’s nice, I like it-“ Kurt feels faintly flush at the compliment, but Blaine is still smiling like an overripe camp counselor and he almost wants to smack him, “the hedge was nice, too-uh, sorry again.” He scratches a hand across the back of his neck, sheepish. Kurt hangs tighter to the bar of the gate he’s leaning on.
“It’s not a problem,” It is. Kurt will have to jump through hoops for the rest of the day to both get ahold of the lawn guy and get out of paying the damage himself, but he just can’t say no to this guy who’s essentially a stranger, but has eyes like warm syrup and a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ sticker on his bike seat and the brightest smile Kurt’s seen in six years.
When he focuses again, Blaine is grabbing his bike by the front bar and hoisting it up. Kurt reaches down to help, grasping softly at the back tire, other hand still tethered to the gate like he’s wobbling on the precipice of two worlds in this moment as Blaine says, “Look, um-I really have to-I was supposed to be back with onions five minutes ago.” And Kurt knows what that’s like, the obligation to be a good son, to be the kind of kid that parents and grandparents always hope you’ll be when you’re five years old and trotted off to kindergarten with naught more than a knapsack and a hopeful smile, so he lets him go-watches for a second from where he stands as Blaine, stranger who likes to recycle and has pink shoulders and licorice loops for hair, climbs shakily onto his bike and pushes off, the tires crunching sand in small bursts against the concrete.
Kurt stays there against the gate in the hot sun, half tethered and half floating, only turning to go back inside when from just down the street he hears a jovial, “It was nice to meet you!” and he looks up to see Blaine’s shoulder turned, his hand raised in greeting.
--
Kurt is walking along the tide a few days later when he runs into him again. He’s been walking nearly all morning, first along the sidewalks near the pool gates and then down here on the waterfront, his pants rolled up above his ankles and his feet sinking into the cool, wet morning sand with each heavy step. He almost doesn’t recognize him-Blaine is sitting farther up on the sand than Kurt is normally accustomed to looking, his hair loose and his body wrapped up in some short sleeved sweatshirt thing that looks almost like a blanket from where Kurt is standing. Kurt can’t blame him really, for mid-summer in Southwest Florida it’s been unnaturally cold these past couple of days-he’d even woken up this morning and put on a pair of long pants himself, happy to be able to enjoy the early morning swell without the blistering heat that was regularly sure to follow.
As he gets closer, his phone buzzes with a text from Mercedes: date 2night!!! i’ll spill on it later xoxo and he chuckles at the irony, stopping a few feet over from Blaine and shooting her a quick succession of exclamation points back in return before pocketing his phone.
“Hey-,” Blaine looks up at the sound of his voice, though soft, placing the book he’d had his face buried in beside him in the sand, dog-eared. He looks lovely against the cool morning sun-smooth and open like the sweet froth of a wave. Kurt wants to slide into the spaces he creates and rest his head against the striped cotton of his sweater like someone who’s known him for a long spread of time. “I’m not interrupting?”
Blaine curls a few errant fingers through his own hair as Kurt sits down, careful to leave a sufficient space between their thighs, suddenly aware of himself and his spacial presence in a way he’s never really been here, in the sweltering freedom of the gulf coast. He feels young, so young and thoughtful and new. “No, no not at all-“ he shifts, criss-crossing his legs in Kurt’s direction and leaning forward on his knees, and Kurt feels like they’re two young children about to share secrets at summer camp, “this is just required stuff-not that I don’t like it-but A.P. Lit.”
It’s another thing Kurt gets-feeling an obligation to succeed, to excel-even though you’re stupid and sixteen and yes, yes, it’s ok to be just that sometimes. “Which is it?” He leans forward slightly, looking around Blaine’s bent left knee to see while still pointedly avoiding catching his cheek against the side of Blaine’s hair. He leans back again without an answer but the scent of Blaine follows him-a mix between homemade soap and sea salt and lemon sugar, as if he’d bathed in some curious Pacific lemonade, and it tingles all the way up through the warm skin of Kurt’s eyelids.
“Old Man and the Sea-,” he reaches down to brush a small shell from Kurt’s ankle into his palm and Kurt feels the touch hot on his skin, “fitting, I know.” Blaine laughs, easy, as he turns the shell over and over in his hand and Kurt watches his fingers shift around it, notices the matching string of woven shell beads tethered around his wrist.
“Do you make those?” He asks, gesturing a hand to it. Blaine stops twirling his fingers and looks up at him.
“Oh, uh-no,” he runs a few fingers under the catch of the bracelet, and the small shell slips from his palm. Kurt watches it go, “this was my mom’s.” Kurt imagines it-a woman with small bones and dark eyes and large hair, tiny curly haired little boy on her hip, her string of shells digging into his back. He thinks of all the little reminders of his mother he stashes around her house-the dresser in the bedroom, the perfume on his counter, the tiny collection of purple time-clocks on the shelf in the kitchen. Each time he gets up in the middle of the night to get tea from the stove he looks up at the clocks and imagines himself a tiny, world-worn little child, his father scooping him up into his lap and placing the smallest of the clocks in the palm he had curled against his cheek. He’d listened to it tick steadily until the battery had gone indeterminately dead. His father had found him clutching it the next morning and staring at her bedroom door and he’d been neatly shuffled off to his own bed.
He’s looking at Blaine a little oddly, far away, when Blaine says, “Um, so-are you from the Island?” still twisting his bracelet around his wrist like a nervous tick.
“I’m staying in a suite with my grandmother at the condos you ran into the other day, but no-just summer.” He purposely doesn’t mention where he actually hails from-like little Lima, Ohio is some big secret he has to shade from the rest of the world, lest he forever be pegged as the little boy who wants out. Not that he’s not that boy, but it’s best if he lets them think he’s a fully realized individual rather than a shard of an oft-used parody. He likes the ingénue status, really.
“Summer with the grandparents for me too, actually,” Blaine’s smile is friendly and easy and Kurt can feel the beginnings of the sun hitting his back as he watches the corners of Blaine’s mouth curl up, “it’s nice.” Kurt notes that he, too, doesn’t mention where he’s actually come from and Kurt entertains for a short moment the idea that Blaine is one of those kids like he is-like he hails from Pennsylvania or Indiana or Ohio or somewhere else decidedly unspectacular. He figures the silence of the words they don’t say speak volumes, so much that it’s almost become his M.O. here. Don’t let them in and they won’t shut you out. Besides, he can deal with shutting himself out just fine on his own.
--
Two hours later and they’re laying side by side in the sand-exchanging stupid pleasantries about the amount of times Kurt’s forgotten to do up his hair in the morning-none so far-and the amount of times Blaine’s fallen off of his bike-five times too many. Kurt’s had his hand resting between their bodies and within inches from Blaine’s own hand for about fifteen minutes but he hasn’t done anything. It’s almost stupid, considering he’s not even entirely sure if Blaine is the kind of boy who’s actually available for this kind of thing, let alone interested, but it feels objectively nice to leave the opportunity there, if he’s wont to pick it up.
About half an hour ago, when he’d offhandedly questioned Blaine’s choice of outerwear, Blaine had cupped his hands together like a shovel and tossed a scoop of sand in his hair that Kurt is still trying his hardest to pick out when he sees one of Thea’s friends heading towards them from up by the pier.
“Thea told me to find you,” he says when he gets within shouting distance, brushing a hand through his hair, and Kurt sits up on his hands, “said your phone is off or something.” It’s not, but Kurt probably hasn’t actually answered his texts for the past few hours, considering his phone is lying face down on Blaine’s Hemingway novel.
“What does she need?” Kurt just hopes it’s not something urgent-he doesn’t feel much like dealing with impatient Thea and her rapidly gesticulating hands right now.
“Party on Friday at the pier-Thea says to bring friends.” Kurt swipes a hand over his eyes to block the glare of the sun sparking through the clouds, and watches at the guy shifts from foot to foot in the sand.
“Duly noted,” Kurt makes to lie back down, his arm feeling stiff from leaning back on it, but the guy doesn't make to leave yet, just stands shifting.
“Hope to see you-“ he finally says, moving a foot back to turn around, but not before Kurt catches the barest quirk of a wink as he did so. Behind him, Kurt can feel Blaine moving, and when he spins his body around to rest facing him he feels himself go warm all over at the small smile Blaine is giving him.
“Did you fall inexplicably asleep in those last five minutes or something?” At this, he watches Blaine laugh, light and rough like he is incredibly fond of the sounds of the words coming from Kurt’s mouth.
“No, no--,” he raises himself up on his own arm so he is mirroring Kurt’s position, blowing sand from his own cheek, “just thinking.” He looks decidedly un-contemplative, but Kurt doesn't dare press. It isn’t really his place to know the every inner working of the brain of a boy he’d not so much as seen a mere two weeks prior. Curious was one thing, invasive was quite another.
“Mmm,” he nods, lips in a calm line, “so would you put any thought in coming to the pier party this weekend?”
“I would,” Blaine shifts up to sit criss cross again, looking down at Kurt from above and rustling his hands through his own hair. Kurt notes that he looked like a particularly coy, but very curious child. “What are these parties like, anyway? I don’t really-“
Kurt hadn’t much assumed that he had, really. Though his manner was certainly jovial, his eyes friendly enough and warm enough to place him as the type of boy who could sweetly command a room of drunks to some devious decisions, Kurt has known that a boy who shook hands like he’d been taught by a host of businessmen and apologized profusely for damaging only a foot or so of a plant with the front of his bike tire was not the kind of boy who regularly got tipsy in crowded living rooms. Even Kurt hadn’t been that boy until a couple of years ago, and he still hadn’t done quite that much until last year’s Fourth of July party when he’d ended up doing a half-drunk seven minutes in heaven with a straight guy who’d apparently lauded Kurt’s claims to fame around the island quite quickly, as two weeks later he’d ended up crowding a friend of a friend into the corner of the patio’s couch until his mouth was kiss red and the sides of his shirt were wrinkled up from where the boy had dug his hands.
“Too many drunk idiots tripping over each other and themselves, really-“ he watches as Blaine’s eyes widen with some mix of interest and warmth, his eyebrow quirking up, and Kurt imagines walking him through the door for the first time, feeling the dip of his spine stiffen and watching his honey syrup eyes take in the lights and the sound and the fucked up microcosm of the teenage universe for the first time. His eyes manage something between reassuring and full of bad ideas as he speaks and he reaches over and places a palm against the bone of Blaine’s knee, feeling his muscles stiffening in real time, “don’t worry,” he says, “you’ll be just fine.”
--
“C’mon, Kurt-let me mix you another one,” Meg tugs against his wrist and pouts her mouth, slats of thick blonde hair falling down into her eyes, “please?”
“Not yet, not yet boo,” Kurt says, stroking a soft finger across her wrist to get her to release the hold, “waiting for someone.” For Blaine, who’d swung by on his bike a couple days before and let Kurt write the party details on the sunburnt skin of his wrist with a soft blue pen, smiling with teeth that shone bright against the sun. Kurt sits here, lounging back in someone’s abandoned beach chair and thinks that it’s kind of stupid how intrigued he is by this Blaine, this guy who’s from somewhere other than Florida, and bikes to the grocery store and has sometimes freckles. It’s wildly unremarkable, but maybe that’s the catch-that even though he’s twenty one long hours from Lima, Ohio all he’s subconsciously looking for is that same comfortable un-remarkability. Or maybe he’s simply a different kind of remarkable.
At any rate, Kurt hopes he still comes-it’s getting tiring to look up and consistently see Blaine reflected in the surfaces of others, in the lights strung around chairs and the way someone laughs long and bright when Kurt raises a haughty brow in their direction. Tiring and a bit obsessive. Maybe.
“Who?” Meg asks, shuffling a beach chair up next to his until the arms clack together, “someone special?” She draws the word out, emphasizing it like Mercedes might if she was fishing for some non-existent gossip on Kurt’s Lima love life.
“Mmm, just a boy--,” she sits down and he pats along her arms where it lay next to his own, busying his hands so he doesn’t start up something insane like twiddling his thumbs. With each minute that passes he gets less and less sure that the look in Blaine’s eyes had been interest and not fright or judgment or a myriad of other unfavorable thoughts he could have been having in that moment. It’s been a half of an hour since the time he’d inscribed on Blaine’s wrist, a half of an hour that he’s been sitting here nursing something orange until the cup was empty. He’ll wait another half until he really gives up-maybe Blaine got caught up.
“There’s a lot of boys,” Kurt looks around, twists to behind himself for a moment, and yes there are. Some attached, some standing alone, a few he knows he’s been told the name of, and a number he’s probably kissed over the couch of some friend or another. They all blur into a big blob of sunny skin and salty hair, like little sunspots that merge in your vision if you spend too much time looking.
“Yeah,” he says, twisting back around, “there are.”
She makes a soft noise and lays her head on his shoulder, sinking down, and they stay like that for some indeterminate amount of time. Her breath smells like tequila where it flutters against his left cheek and he half listens as she mumbles off silly observations about the boys that pass by in front of them. The other half of Kurt sits and counts the seconds and minutes, like a ticking time bomb, an alarm that leads up to the moment he gets to give in to his weird sense of disappointment. After a while he just lets himself stop counting and lets some redhead who comes over hiking up his shorts introduce himself as Ryan and slink Kurt up out of his chair with a wink and a grab of his wrists. Kurt watches the freckles on his shoulders shift as he drags him behind and pointedly doesn’t think about the disappearing freckles on the bridge of Blaine’s nose-not at all.
--
Ryan’s mouth is warm-a wet mix of tequila and salt and hot air that blows into the roof of Kurt’s mouth when their tongues tangle together. Kurt has his hands threading through shaggy strands of half dry red hair, though he keeps sneakily batting Ryan’s hands away from his own, keeping them firmly gripped inside his pants pockets instead, cupping his ass as he lay spread leg over Ryan’s lap.
The people around them keep moving, swirling in bites of sound and laughter that Kurt hears through the edge of his ear, not focusing on any sound in particular but letting it wash over him as he lets himself wash over the boy beneath him. Last time he checked, Ryan had maneuvered them into a lounge chair set up by the drink coolers, the only abandoned one that they could spread back in. Kurt hadn’t been very drunk then, not really, but he figures by now he probably is by sheer osmosis. Every fifteen minutes or so one of who he assumes are Ryan’s buddies shows up to wolf whistle at them, and Ryan pulls back to take a quick swig of his drink, though the majority of it ends up as just an extra slicker for their open mouth kisses.
Eventually, out of the din he hears Thea whooping and saying, “drinks are over there by the makeout bandits, baby!” to who he assumes is a newcomer and a few seconds later he’s jostled slightly at the feeling of a body knocking into the side of his chair. He’s ready to pointedly ignore whatever drunk idiot decided to be that clumsy but perks up when he hears a familiar voice saying “shit, shit-sorry.”
He looks up-it’s Blaine, standing there above his chair with a glazed over expression that makes him look like a child who just caught his parents stealing a toy. His eyes are bright and wide and Kurt imagines how he himself must look-his mouth kiss wet and strawberry red, eyes glassy. The freckles on Blaine’s nose are back, his cheeks pink beneath them. Shit.
“Hi,” Kurt says, voice raspy, instead of what he really wants to do which is apologize like a complete idiot. Say ‘I waited, I waited, I did, sorry’ like he’s some scolded child even though Blaine is just some boy with good eyes and without a last name that Kurt knows of. He can feel Ryan’s hand hot on the side of his neck and Blaine just standing there, still unmoving, like maybe he’s teetering on the edge of two options. Kurt is torn on whether he hopes one of those options is ‘run.’
“Uh, hey,” he finally says, raising a hand to scratch at the back of his hair awkwardly like all that’s running through his mind is that they didn’t teach the answer to this kind of situation in private school. Kurt feels like he can’t stop staring.
After a pause, two, three, Ryan’s mouth hits sharp against his neck, sliding up to under his ear with a murmured, “c’mon, Kurt, let the boy get his drink.” Kurt can hear the pounding in his own ears as Blaine’s eyes turn slowly away from his and he lets himself be dragged back down.
--
The next Monday, Kurt’s grandmother ushers him out front to get the mail from the box by the gate, and he notes that he hasn’t seen Blaine ride by all weekend. The hedge is still slightly shoddy when he peeks around the gate, the imprint of Blaine’s front tire in the sand below it still woefully intact, so Kurt is positive he hasn’t simply been hallucinating the daily rides past the house for the past two weeks.
When he thinks of Blaine now, some of the only things he can think about are the taste of Ryan’s mouth and the look of Blaine’s lip pinking up from where it had been caught in his teeth, and how Kurt had wanted to reach out and pull him down and pink it up even more, to bite at the clean, clear line of his jaw. Mostly he thinks about how he didn’t-how he looked for Blaine after, had remembered the grey of his shirt and the ruffled mess of his hair as he’d stared with what Kurt had thought then was just some strange form of culture shock but was probably misunderstanding, and had only found that he had most probably left. Not that the girl with blue dreads-for whom Kurt had never really learned a name-was much of a reference, but she’d recalled a guy to that description sitting in on the jam circle for a few minutes with a nearly full beer before excusing himself.
She hadn’t learned his name, but he wasn’t surprised-most of them don’t.
--
“Are you sure you don’t want to get in, Kurt?” Thea asked, tightening the tie on her bikini top and spluttering water at him, “I promise it’s not ice cold like before!” He was sure. Sitting on the edge with his ankles crossed neatly would do him just fine, thanks. While the water was certainly enticing under the near grotesque heat of the midday sun, there was no way even his SPF 75 could hold up properly under the reflection of the rays.
All in all, though, today was a nice day to be at the pool. It was the middle of the week so not too many people were messing about or intent on pushing unsuspecting victims into the deep end, so Kurt could comfortably people watch from the water’s edge while still letting his bare feet dip in. Thea had been a bit under the weather at the start of the week, but today she was looking and acting like a whirligig of a woman-spinning about and splashing clouds of water at Kurt’s knees when he wasn’t paying too much attention. Currently, she was perched up against the side of the pool, her elbows resting on either side of Kurt’s locked knees and prattling at him about some shenanigan her and Meg had gotten into at the pier on Friday.
“She just screamed like-bloody murder at me,” he hears her say, “and I was like, ‘jesus! I’m naked, be quiet!’” Kurt laughs and tosses his head to the side, chuckling softly into his sun warmed shoulder. Thea continued speaking but Kurt kept his head turned, enjoying the satisfying stretch of his neck for a moment before raising his head and noticing a body sat on the sidewalk just outside the pool’s gate. Before the guy had even turned around, he knew it was Blaine. He could see the stupid earth day stickers and the bike that was propped up on its kickstand, still working despite it’s seemingly rather accident-prone owner. Kurt watched as he reached into a satchel that was crumpled in a heap beside his hip and pulled out a bottle of water, dipping his finger in it and spreading the moisture along the inside of his wrists in a gesture that Kurt had never seen before but suddenly found increasingly enticing.
“Kurt?” Thea says, tapping at Kurt’s knee, and he turns back towards her, albeit a bit slowly, “who’s that?” He doesn’t answer her and isn’t sure if he at first plans to, but she says it probably a bit too loud because the second Kurt chances a glance back up he finds Blaine meeting his gaze eye for eye and freezes. He isn’t sure what tradition dictates that he do here. It’s not as if he’s nominally involved or even heavily aware of Blaine’s character quite yet, but he’s still mostly felt like this past week has been some weird form of awkward avoidance. The last time he saw Blaine, Blaine was staring down at him with wide eyes and a sucked in lip and not saying much at all. Kurt’s not sure decorum insists that the best thing to immediately follow that situation is to go start up a jovial chat.
Blaine doesn’t say hi, but he doesn’t look away either. Kurt feels his eyes burn like sunspots, though he hardly looks accusatory in any way.
“Aren’t you gonna go say hello, boo?” Thea’s voice is a touch quieter this time, for which he is endlessly thankful. Attracting the attention in the first place was embarrassing enough. “He’s cute.” She winks softly at him and snickers to herself like the whole thing is hilarious and adorable. Kurt mostly just begs to himself that he can stop looking up and meeting Blaine’s eyes sometimes soon.
“Nothing, nothing-“ he says, brushing at his bangs and adjusting his hat for the twelfth time in the past fifteen minutes. It doesn’t need it-he knows that. “It’s no one.” Thea rests her chin on his knees for a moment and stares at him like she’s trying to dissect all of his inner workings in the span of a split second, before pushing off and diving away. Kurt stares, determined, at the lock of his ankles in the water as the ripples circle around them and tries not to think about whether or not he hopes Blaine is still watching.
--
By Friday he feels like he’s imagined the entire thing. Meg and Thea have been touting him around all day looking for a replacement pair of shoes to match the shorts he wants to wear to the party tomorrow, because he broke the strap last night and he doesn’t have the needle handy to properly fix it, but so far their luck has been zilch. For the past hour they’ve mostly been dragging him along between them as they banter up and down the island sidewalks about the weather or the guys who stole the margarita mix from Thea’s kitchen or something like that. He’s not entirely paying attention-not that he has to, as they’ve put him on duty of alerting them when they get to the ice cream parlor on seaside. He hasn’t actually been here for about four years, mainly because the last time he’d come in and tried to order fat-free sorbet the cashier had looked at him like he had a second head and had sent him off empty handed, but he recognizes the candy pink sign still, at any rate. When they get within a block or so, he taps their arms in soft unison and they lead him laughing to the parking lot.
The entire place has been renovated a bit, from what he can see as they step inside. The chairs are repainted, the tiles buffed clean, and the menu over the counter is sprawling with options he’s certain they didn’t have all those times his grandmother toted him here as a child. He’s happy to note that they actually have soy mix-ins, which almost makes him feel like the upscale, health conscious New Yorker he’s sure he’ll become some day, and raspberry sorbet which makes him generously consider working out four days of the week instead of five if any of it is as good as the can he’d found stashed in the condo’s freezer last month.
Meg pushes him gently up a place in line, and he listens gently as she and Thea argue back and forth about flavors, and whether they can get the old lady that’s usually behind the counter to put malt in a pineapple shake. The man in front of him is hefty and tall enough to block his view of the board, though he himself is wearing a couple inches of heel, so he settles for plucking gently at his cuticles, soft enough that it won’t damage the skin in a way he can’t fix with a buffer later, and drowning out the high whine of the little boy who dropped his cone in the corner behind him.
Before he knows it, the man in front of him is paying for his order and Kurt has picked through each cuticle about five times, now content to stand gently cocked with one foot tapping a beat into the linoleum as he waits for the man to shit off to the side. When he finally does, Kurt looks up and notes that the old lady Thea and Meg had been back and forth about has apparently gone AWOL for the day and has been replaced by some boy in a hideously pink ball cap and a matching apron. The cap obscures his face, but Kurt already feels sorry for this poor kid. Lurid bubblegum in that concentration is a crime against civilized sartorial beings.
“Do you think you could add a soy mix in to a raspberry smoothie?” he asks, staring up at the menu section on the far wall again, contemplating how hard he really wants to go here, “or actually-“
“Um, actually, Kurt-“ the guy interrupts, and wait, what.
“How do you know my--?” Kurt pauses mid sentence as he looks down, because the guy’s face is raised and it’s Blaine staring back at him from under that horrendous uniform. His eyes look amused, if a bit awkward, and Kurt is momentarily stunned of speech, if only because he’d forgotten for a second that the last time he’d said anything to Blaine he’d just had his tongue in some other guy’s mouth. “Oh, hey, I didn’t know you work-“
“Yeah, uh-I do, “ Kurt can see the path this is going on, just like their stilted conversation while Kurt had been mid-makeout or their strange stare-off at the pool, straight into extremely awkward territory, and after a week of practically bathing in some weirdly deep sense of awkward tension Kurt is kind of done with it. It’s time to throw this a different way, especially since teetering semi-avoidance really isn’t working. He centers himself and leans forward on the counter with crossed wrists, lowering his eyes a bit. The dip he feels his spine settling into is warm and deep and he knows that if Blaine were to trade places with Thea right now he’d have a sinful snapshot of the curve of Kurt’s ass in his white capris.
As it stands, he has an eyeful of the broom of Kurt’s lashes instead, and Kurt watches as he clenches his fingers together in the face of Kurt’s gaze. “So, I’ll take a raspberry smoothie-small,” he rolls his consonants out, slower with his words like he remembers his mildly inebriated self can be sometimes because he knows it’s effective.
“Anything else in that?” he watches Blaine wet his mouth shakily, keying the price into the machine, and he smirks in response, his dimple twisting up.
“Whatever you think will be best-“ he says, coy and yet stupidly obvious, because at this point he’s pretty much passed the step where he acts as if he’s not trying to affect the straight line of Blaine’s spine and somehow will him with rolls of his shoulder and the sharp twist of his eyes to keep running into the front of Kurt’s condo gate every hour on the hour. Blaine, for all he knows next to nothing about him, practically screams private school gone horribly, terribly wrong and Kurt just wants to unbutton him from every angle, all innuendos aside.
Blaine flusters some numbers into the register and totters away to fill up a cup, likely making a point in the way that he doesn’t watch as Kurt stares after his ass as he goes. Kurt switches his ankles back and forth as he waits, watching the line of Blaine’s back and the small scoop of his waist under the strings of his apron. Thea and Meg are notably silent behind him.
When Blaine reappears with his cup in one hand and a straw in the other, Kurt watches him place it on the counter and moves his hand so it overlaps Blaine’s as he slides the smoothie across. Blaine’s fingers don’t jerk away or move at all but Kurt can feel them shake and warm slightly under his hand as he rests it for a second before pulling back to grab money from his back pocket and hand it over. As he pops the straw in the smoothie and takes a drink, moving off to the side to let the girls step up to order, Blaine glances between him and the cash drawer with his mouth parted.
“Kurt you forgot your--,” he sputters and Kurt has a sudden urge to want to lick into his open mouth, bite his plumped out lower lip.
“It’s delicious,” he says instead, turning a heel and shifting so he can lean against the glass cabinet full of ice cream tubs, “keep the change.” He accents it with a quirk of his lip and another long sip of his smoothie and watches Blaine pocket the change in his hideous pink apron and turn his far from hideous smile on the girls as he catches their orders.
--
The clear coat on the ends of Kurt’s toes is near to being dry when Kurt sees him. He’s been sitting here for the past hour or so in his roll-ups, letting his freshly washed hair catch the glow of the sun so he can yet again go back to Lima in September with some undeniable proof that he didn’t spend his summer on the couch dreaming about leaving his yard, even if it is just in the form of slightly lightened sections of his own hair. When he sees Blaine, he’s down the beach a bit, his feet buried in the swell of the tide and what appears to be a cheap disposable camera raised to his face.
Kurt chuckles, softly, at the idea that this boy who interests him so is just another sun-state summer tourist, whittling away the hours snapping picture after picture of the tide swell and the sunset and his own stupid feet making heart prints in the soft island sand. He probably has a nametag in the shape of a flip-flop on his key ring and a postcard collection on his bulletin board back home, tacked up in year-to-year or place-by-place order.
Kurt watches him as he steps closer and closer, snapping little shots and leaning down over and over in a sad pattern that makes Kurt hope he’s not simply wasting each frame on the same blurry photo of the waves swirling around him. He’s laughing maybe a bit too loud by the time that Blaine gets close enough to notice, because Blaine turns his body around and focuses his little camera lens on Kurt. “Don’t you need my permission to do that?” he calls out, quirking his mouth up like he’s begging Blaine to challenge him, not that he much cares in the first place.
“Oh-um, sorry I wasn’t-“ Blaine clearly doesn’t get the jest, or maybe he’s just not quite up to par with this game Kurt’s got running on him, and Kurt sits up to cross his legs in response.
“Well you have it,” Kurt raises an eyebrow as Blaine hesitates to step much closer, leaning back on his hands like he would if Blaine were some beach-boy about to climb into his lap, “for future reference.”
“Have-?”
“Use me, c’mon!” Kurt gives a short shake of his shoulders and perches his glasses down a bit on his nose, looking at Blaine over the tops of them in the best pinup impression he can muster wearing this much clothing, “you’ve been taking photos of the same strip of water for the past five minutes, you’re clearly in need of a subject.” Blaine finally takes the opportunity to walk close enough that Kurt can see his eyes and the tan on his wrists, looking marginally less awkward about the whole ordeal, and Kurt lays back on his blanket, raising his arms above his head and sliding his bare foot up and down against his adjacent calf.
He watches Blaine take slow steps towards him, fingers clenched tight against the rim of his camera as he raises it back to his eye with a small smile and a hint of an ‘okay’ on his lips. Kurt cranes his neck back languidly and then forward again, wetting his lip and adjusting the angle of his sunglasses in one of the seven perfect poses he used to practice in front of his vanity mirror while his dad mowed the lawn loudly from just outside the window. He’s done this for Mercedes a few times, posed in various combinations of his wardrobe though he’s never fancied himself a model at heart. He’s thankful he at least brought his Dior stripe beach blanket out today because the cream and grey stripes are likely doing wonders for the flush he can feel developing on the apples of his cheeks.
He lets his lips fall in a soft pout when Blaine snaps the shutter button again, but his heart is hammering louder and louder in his chest, his breath coming deep in a way that is making his head dizzy just from the thought of such a thing. He wants to laugh, suddenly self-conscious, like he’s a tiny little bug under a really big microscope, but he knows that it’s likely to break the moment-whatever the moment is. Unfortunately, when Blaine steps a leg on either side of him his nerves are about to be sick with anticipation of something he can’t name, and he can’t help but let out a laugh, like this is the silliest and stupidest thing he’s ever done. Blaine snaps a picture of him with his eyes crinkled and the white of his teeth showing. Of course he does.
“Hey-hey, that was not an actual pose!” he says, scrambling to his feet and reaching out for the camera still caught in Blaine’s fingers, “gimme that!” Blaine just laughs at him and throws his hand behind his back, fingers locked, when Kurt lunges at him.
“Mm-you did offer yourself to me, though, so,” Kurt chokes for a moment at Blaine’s choice of words and stumbles slightly on the edge of his blanket as Blaine backs up even further. When, after a beat, Blaine brings his hands back down to his sides, Kurt jumps forward at him a final time, but his laughter quickly turns to a sort of wild flailing motion as his toes catch and he tumbles forward, avoiding a true fall only because Blaine throws his arms out to catch Kurt under his biceps, pulling Kurt up again into a righted position with his palms cupped gently just under Kurt’s ribs.
Kurt clears his throat. “You don’t have any errands today do you?” he asks, voice a bit pitchy and eyes still staring everywhere but at Blaine’s own which are-oh god-just less than a foot from his own. He’s close enough to count the stupid freckles on his cheeks and he’s torn between attempting not to and just rushing forward and kissing at his open mouth. Maybe doing it would solve this insane fixation he’s been having, finally tasting the fruit makes it less exotic, right? That’s the general rule?
Blaine releases his ribs mere moments later, eyes darting and wide, and Kurt wishes he didn’t still want them on him. “Um, I don’t think so, no,” Blaine coughs lightly and steps to the side in a way that makes the sand that was covering the tops of his feet shift up onto Kurt’s ankles, “I was mostly wandering.”
At the assurance that this is all a go, Kurt’s mind begins its spinning once more, his feet moving him back to place his phone and his polish in his pants pocket and to begin to fold up a corner of his beach blanket as he says, “Well come back to the condo with me, then-clearly you need something to fill the day with and I can assure you my suitcase is full of much more photograph-able outfits than this one.” He gestures down to his loose fitting rollups and striped tank. Blaine laughs out a soft ‘ok’ and assists him in folding the rest of the blanket, placing it under his own arm before Kurt raises a haughty eyebrow at him and takes it back for himself.
“Not that all of my outfits aren’t highly photographable, mind you,” he says, as Blaine follows beside him through the sand and up to the sidewalk, “I’m just feeling particularly selective.”
--
“So, Blaine,” Kurt asks, jiggling his key in the door to open it and following Blaine inside, “what is it we’re going for with this photoshoot?” Blaine, who’d been tottering lazily in front of him, his backpack shifting back and forth against the top swell of his ass, stops and turns to Kurt with a mildly confused expression.
“Um, I wasn’t really--,” he says, fiddling with his bag strap for a moment, “this is your idea, really, feel free to decide for me.” He laughs softly as he says it and Kurt, he’s proud to say, only lets himself stare as the crinkle of his mouth for a quick moment before grabbing him by the elbow and leading him through the open space living room to his room.
“Now, feel free to sit on the bed-and don’t comment on the shoes; I didn’t have any time at all to clean them up after yesterday,” Kurt knows Blaine’s eye was likely drawn to the large mound of about a million shoes by the window the second he walked in, he was and they’re his damn shoes, but whatever-if a boy feels like going through his shoe suitcase at two am while he’s on vacation he certainly well can. “Hmm,” he muses for a moment, sliding the door open on his closet and inspecting for a quick moment, “I’m thinking Vivienne Westwood?” He pulls the shirt and hanger out of the line and holds them up to Blaine for approval, but Blaine mostly shrugs and his eyes go warm and glassy. Kurt hopes it’s a pleased reaction, at any rate, but upon further speculation of the shirt in question he decides against it and puts it back.
He turns away from his closet to consider, leaning on the adjacent door frame with his ankles crossed, and watches as Blaine pulls his legs up onto the bed and underneath him, noting happily that he’s untied his Keds and left them neatly on the floor. When Blaine looks up at him he’s smiling a warm smile and Kurt takes one look at the unmade state of his bed covers and then back to Blaine’s windswept curls and his sunburn and his stupid sweet smile and almost thinks to hell with this whole clothing ordeal in favor of manhandling Blaine back down onto his back and figuring out once and for all just how buttoned up he really is.
He’s struck, though, by an idea not a moment later, tapping quickly at his own hair and shuffling off into his bathroom as Blaine calls a soft “What on earth are you getting from in there?” that grows in quick decibels so Kurt knows he’s followed him. When he turns back to the doorframe, Blaine is leaning on it with his arms crossed in front of him. “You do know a shower curtain doesn’t count as an outfit, right?” Kurt fixes him with a look, “even if it is Dior-wait is that Dior? I can’t believe that.” Blaine’s come even further inside the space, fingering at his shower curtain that no, is not Dior, but yes, is dyed to look that way. Kurt isn’t even certain that Dior makes shower curtains-the idea is kind of ridiculous.
“What? Blaine, no,” Kurt is near the stage of just cracking up because wow, if Blaine weren’t the most gorgeous, prep school-iest tourist he’d ever met he’d mostly be left with crazy as shit, as Kurt is quickly realizing, “does Dior make shower curtains-oh my god-I’m just grabbing this shirt I had hanging.” He shoves the shirt into Blaine’s hands and maneuvers past him and back to his closet, pulling open the drawer compartments below and grabbing out a pair of shorts that he shoves into Blaine’s grasp as well.
“You can get these wet right?” Blaine asks, standing still like a coatrack in the center of the room as Kurt whirls around to his accessories corner to rifle through a rack of belts. Kurt turns back around on him after a beat with a belt in his hand and an eyebrow quirked up.
“Oh, we’re getting wet now, are we?” he asks, amused as he strides closer to Blaine and hangs the belt over his arm holding Kurt’s clothes. He watches Blaine’s throat as he gulps in a breath. “I see how it is.” They’re standing so close now that Kurt’s stepped into his space and Kurt is watching the way Blaine’s eyes look like little firecrackers as he fidgets.
“Oh um,” Blaine breaks a bit awkwardly from the invisible hold and sits back down on the bed, setting the outfit in his hands in a neat pile next to him and running his hands up and down his thighs repetitively, “I just meant-beach and all-didn’t want you to get sand on something, um, something valuable.” Kurt’s looking down at him with light amusement, even for the moments after he stops speaking and then he grabs the clothes up in his hands and starts with them over to the bathroom.
“I’ll just be in here a second,” he steps onto the tile, but hangs back in the doorway a moment before closing it, “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Blaine doesn’t respond.
By the time that Kurt’s out of the bathroom, five minutes of second guessing and figure analyzing and ‘what am I doing’ past, Blaine’s sitting criss cross on his bed again and fiddling with his phone, engrossed in whatever interests him from the screen. He glances up when Kurt walks out and slides of the bed, toeing on his shoes and tying them once more. “You look good,” he says, eyeing Kurt up as he clinches the knot on his shoelace, “very photo-worthy.” Kurt wonders if his mother taught him to compliment, back when he undoubtedly began his run at one of those schools where you call the teachers ‘miss’ and ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ without fail and you never forget to buckle your belt on the way out of the bathroom after lunchtime. In any sense, it makes his cheeks hot, especially with the accompanying flash of a smile, and he turns to the door with shoes in hand, motioning Blaine to follow.
He closes the door after Blaine again when they leave and follows him down the stairwell and out into the courtyard where he slips on his sandals and watches Blaine’s legs cross each other and he slows his pace on his way to the front gate. At one point, Blaine slows almost to a stop and Kurt walks briskly to catch up with him, patting his shorts pocket to make sure he still has his phone and then checking Blaine on the shoulder with a hint of a smile in a motion for him to lead the way. “Well,” he says, beginning a few more steps forward, “lead on.”
Blaine leads them out onto the sidewalk, only pausing a moment to figure the latch of the front gate, which Kurt unlatches in a matter of seconds anyhow-it’s deftly easy from the inside. Once they’ve managed it, though, and Kurt’s turned around to check the latch again from the outside, they’re quickly advanced upon by a voice that calls, “Hey! Kurt-I was looking around for you.”
Kurt turns around and it’s Ryan, walking towards them from across the empty street, hand raised in a genial greeting and smile affixed on his freckled face before wrapping his arms around Kurt in a hug. “Oh, hey-“ he says, awkward from his position under a guy who’s nearly as tall as Finn, waiting stock still until Ryan steps back, “what’s up?”
“Big party tonight at Percy’s!” he waves his arms out in a gesture typical of these boys that he’s come to recognize as meaning ‘party’, “It’s Saturday, so it’s gonna be ace for sure-lots of tequila, I hear.” He accentuates the last of it with a wink that Kurt associates mostly with guys like Puck when they really want to get laid. In Puck’s case he-unfortunately-understands, but here he’s really not so sure, not that he can blame him. He remembers his mouth-and Blaine’s eyes in between.
Looking back at Blaine, Kurt can sense some stilted shyness radiating off of him in waves, his feet shifting back and forth and his hands twisting on his backpack straps as Kurt stands hip out and Ryan undoubtedly eyes the both of them, all three silent until Kurt speaks. “So we are invited to this, yes?” He shoots a pointed look between Blaine and Ryan, though he’s not entirely sure either notices.
Kurt watches Ryan look over to Blaine for a quick moment, but Blaine doesn’t speak. “Oh, um-yeah, yeah totally guys,” he begins to step off the curb, “Eight o’ clock! Gotta get back to work-see ya’.” He jogs back across the street and Kurt turns back to Blaine whose face looks like a mix of inherently awkward and plastered church smile. Kurt taps him on the wrist and jiggles his bag strap until he looks up.
“Coming?” he asks, releasing his hold on the bag strap and smoothing the fabric of his pants out with his palms.
“Um, actually I have to--,” Blaine’s speaking quietly, and Kurt notes that his eyes flicker around from the sidewalk to Kurt’s hair and his collar and cheeks and anywhere but his eyes, “I got a call that said I have to run to the store.” Kurt looks at him for a beat, as if he can sense hesitance or fear or any other thing with merely a glance. Blaine merely rubs his hand across the back of his neck, and Kurt’s stomach starts in on knots he rarely gets anymore.
“For what? We can swing by on the way it’s not a-“
“Actually, I think I’ll just go-,” Kurt glances at Blaine again and now he truly looks like Kurt’s insides are starting to feel. “I’ll see you later-at the um, at the party.” Kurt watches him take careful steps back before turning around and walking down the sidewalk proper, a bit confused at how he’s gone from congenial and warm to this twisted ball of discomfort that makes Kurt feel like he’s back in sixth grade and everyone is refusing to pick him for their field hockey team again. Not that he’d cared that much at the time, but that awkward knot of rejection awkwardness remains-and it continues to remain now, as Kurt walks back through the courtyard, and stays well until after he slides his key in the front door.
--
“Kurt!” Thea shouts, pushing her way through the already half-drunk crowd as Kurt pushes his way through the side door, brandishing in one arm a tall bottle of Limoncello and in the other naught but a frantically waving hand, “Kurt! Where have you been? I have things for you!” Kurt laughs in bemusement as she shoves the bottle into his arms and spins in a half circle, the dress she’s wearing fanning out around her like a bright red strawberry explosion. She sounds a mess, drawing out her words like she’s been drinking them for the past half hour, but she has kiss marks on her shoulder and a smile on her face-she seems happy in it, Kurt can’t begrudge her that.
“Mmm, well thank you miss-“ He glances again at the label on the bottle and tucks the bottle tight into his fist, relishing the way that he knows it’ll later bubble down his throat, warm and sugary. The room around him is awash with activity-with laughter, someone playing the piano in the corner clad only in green underwear, people throwing a ukulele around a circle of what looks to be playing cards, each person subsequently plucking out a string and then dropping it to the next as if it were on fire. In some ways, Kurt feels like he is on fire, or at least he will be once he gets a bit of drink in him.
“No, no, no! That’s not your gift! C’mon--,” Thea grabs him around the wrists and tugs at him until he stumbles after her, tripping over his boots as she maneuvers them through the throng of partygoers, “follow!” Kurt struggles to keep ahold of his bottle and keep a bearing on his center of gravity as he’s basically dragged along.
“Oh?” he’s a bit out of breath from the push of the people around him, but he manages the correct inflection and rightly raised eyebrow just as Thea looks back to check that he’s still there.
“Mmm, nope-c’mon boo, out here,” they’ve come to an area of relief, where only a few people mill about around a cooler of ice and a scattered group looks to be playing beer pong on the corner of the deck. There are a few more dotted persons out on the sand, but Kurt can’t see any of them clear enough to really know if they’re involved in the hubbub or not.
She slides open the door to the deck and the warm air hits him in a wide gust, the sound from inside the house bubbling out and expanding in waves like a river hitting its mouth. The inhabitants of the deck stay engrossed in their games or their cups as they pass, though a few glance up with a quick ‘hey’ or a short hand wave. Kurt watches the sunspots from the sunset out in the distant reflect and refract in the squint of their collective smiles.
Once they get down in the sand, Thea sets off running, skipping around from foot to foot like a small, carefree child. Though the weight and tooth of Kurt’s boots slows him down, he reaches her eventually, laughing soft at her antics. She’s led him up close to the shoreline, where he can see a group of about six seated near the tide, all of them with cup in hand and a few of them laughing loud and abrasively at something that one of the others has assumedly said.
“I found Kurt-“ Thea screams, though she needn’t really-it’s nowhere near as full out here as it is inside, and pushes her hands against the small of Kurt’s back to trip him forward, “my job here is done!” He manages not to fall, though when he looks back at the group all of them are looking at him-Meg, Thea’s younger sister, a few nameless girls, and- Blaine. The girls laugh again, one of the girls he doesn’t know flopping backwards into the sand, and Blaine raises a hand in greeting, smiling out the side of his mouth in a way that could’ve been a smirk at some point but is mostly just amused. Kurt understands-he knows how this group can get. He wonders if they’ve attempted to throw him in yet-though whatever the answer it’s likely they will before the night is out. They never could resist fresh meat to play with. And Blaine-well, Blaine is cute meat at that.
Kurt walks over and deposits himself beside Blaine, putting his bottle in the sand between his knees and thanking god he’d chosen jeans tonight and not something flimsy and cotton that was sure to soak through to the skin the second it got wet. “Hey,” Blaine says, knocking their bare shoulders together and Kurt feels warm after he rocks back into his own space. Sometimes Kurt wonders what Blaine is thinking, watches his eyes flicker back and forth and his smile shift and wonders if Blaine is the type of boy who’s sitting there with his emotions on his nonexistent sleeve or if he’s maybe just a little unstable under that choir boy tourist façade he’s got going for him.
Whatever the reason, now is not one of those times, if only because they’re sitting nearly hip to hip and Kurt is focusing very little on anything but the possibility that if he drinks enough of this bottle, by the end of the night their hips could be for real touching, overlapping even. And wow, okay-he’s getting ahead of himself. Kurt smiles at him in response instead, watches as he takes a long sip from his cup that comes away smelling like a mix of vodka and some kind of indeterminate juice. They sit in silence for a moment, then-watching the girls leap and bound in the waves, Meg rolling on her back in the wet of the tide-before Kurt speaks.
“They treating you okay?” he asks, popping open the top to his liquer and balancing it in his hand as he leans over his knee.
“Huh?” Blaine pauses mid sip and then notes that Kurt is gesturing lightly to the girls now spinning ring-around-the-rosy style in the water, “Oh, yeah-they’re fine. Nice.” He laughs a polite laugh, like it’s funny to him and not many others, like Kurt might not get it much. Kurt just ducks his head and smiles before taking a long burning swig of lemon and letting it settle deep in his gut. When he looks up Blaine is wiping the back of a wrist against his nose and then back through his hair. “You know, I thought everyone here would be kind of insane.”
Kurt fixes him with a look. They’re totally insane.
“No, no-I mean, like--,” he runs a hand through his hair yet again and Kurt notices that it looks as though he’s been doing that nearly as much as he’s been taking sips tonight, “Where I’m from you’re either totally naïve to the world or you pretend you are in public and in private you’re just--,” he laughs out again on a hot breath that Kurt feels on his knees, and flourishes with a hands wide gesture, “insane.”
Kurt regards him softly for a moment before prying, “oh?” he asks, feeling his mouth quirk up, “and which of those would you be?” Blaine laughs for real at him then, chuckling to Kurt like a secret-one that Kurt can definitely get used to.
“Neither, really, “ Blaine answers, and then rubs his eyes at the ridiculous contradiction of his statements, “I don’t know, I mean-I’m not naïve I’m just-mildly sheltered.” Kurt thinks back to the day he pegged this, that Blaine was tiny private school du jour, the nice kid who learns to tie his own shoes quickly and buckles a fast belt and shakes fathers’ hands. Except he kind of isn’t at the same time-Kurt can sense the barest hint of wild longing in his eyes, amber and glowing like firecrackers in the sink of the sun. Kurt wants to reach out and wind his fingers in the hair just behind his ear and tug-tug him forward into a kiss that makes him drown and gasp, like a man who’s not just someone with clear cut goals and sugary sweet dreams of perfectly tied ties and A+ report cards, but with wild, untamed ones-dreams where they build mountains out of origami foil and kiss their way into an apartment in the urban jungle and fuck-but Meg takes the moment to shout over to them and get Blaine hopping to his feet to join her in the tide strip and he just-doesn’t in the end.
part three