your shouted cursive [2/2] for GLITTERDOVES
Title: your shouted cursive (i've been reading) 2/2
Recipient: glitterdoves
Author/Artist: gingerrstar
Rating: pg-13
Word Count: 14,395
Summary: contrary to whatever beliefs mrs. gravitts and the rest of his taste-unconscious, bone breaking fellow classmates had held on the subject, all kurt could think of when it came to his childhood was brando and beethoven.
Part 1
By the next Tuesday, Kurt is running catastrophically late. Or, rather, it certainly feels like he is, considering it’s been raining in sheets since he woke up this morning-deep, warm, Spring rain, but rain nonetheless-and by the time he’s wrenching open the front door at Ms. Winslow’s, the front of his hair has collapsed, his jeans are squishing in his boots, and he’s hoping desperately that none of the rain got inside his bag of music because god that is just what he’d need right now.
He shakes his shoulders when he comes in, letting some of the excess splash off and onto the floor, and on his way down the hallway his boots squeak loudly against the slick of the tile. At the far end of the hall, Ms. Winslow’s door is left slightly ajar and Kurt can hear the sound of slamming chords being played in a way that makes him shiver not only with the rapidly cooling soak of his clothes from the rain, but with the rampant electricity of the noise itself. When he enters, Blaine is seated and playing, and any stupid rambling apology Kurt had written up in his head has disintegrated at this point, because all he can do is stand against the half open door and just.
Blaine doesn’t notice him there at first, just keeps on hammering his way through the chords without any rhythm or rhyme or sheet music to guide him-and Kurt watches him with a swift fascination, the wings of his shoulder blades and the muscles of his arms taut and burning their way into Kurt’s retinas in a manner that makes him shiver with his own body’s meager attempt at producing heat. Even considering, he looks half as soaked as Kurt feels, but Kurt is fairly sure he’s drenched, so it’s not as if either option bodes very well for them. In his bout of sloshy, shaking mess, what Kurt doesn’t notice is his bag sliding neatly off of his shoulder, and its impact with the floor is what prompts Blaine to startle and turn around.
“Hey,” he says, eyes impossibly wide and all that Kurt can focus on, “I was just-do you wanna sit down?” It’s strange to see Blaine so hideously decomposed, but judging by the lasting translucence of his shirt, and his cardigan hanging wet and dark from the back of an armchair, Kurt figures it has a lot to do with the rain, and he reaches down to grab his bag from where it’s fallen, walking over to the bench and sitting down with his knees crossed as much as humanly possible in jeans this wet. Blaine stays still in his stance, but his eyes follow Kurt the whole way and Kurt feels strangely, electrically naked under the burn of his gaze.
“God, Kurt-” Blaine’s voice is smooth but his teeth are chattering, and Kurt is still gripping the edges of the bench with cold fingers, counting the matted tips of Blaine’s eyelashes, “you look terrible.” Kurt raises an eyebrow at him accusingly, though he’s certain the effect of it is a little ridiculous considering the coif of his hair is falling into his eyes and even his bowtie is looking a bit soggy. Blaine rolls his eyes in a way that makes it look like he’s laughing, “Oh my god, you look fine, Kurt-” and he turns his body around to face the piano again with a light punch to Kurt’s wet stack of his knees, “you know what I mean.”
Kurt laughs through his own chattering teeth and swivels around on the bench before Blaine nudges him with a damp shoulder and a “two weeks, two weeks--you ready?” And Kurt wants to say some strange variation between yes and no, because in theory-always in theory-he’s been ready, he was born ready. But he’s certainly not ready to be stupidly freezing and stupidly stupidly close to this ridiculously attractive boy who somehow fell right out of the skies of dreary Ohio and into his life, and wow, okay-yeah. So he just nods his assent with a smile that shakes a bit from the cold and watches as Blaine starts up the first bars of the piece.
Around twenty bars in, Blaine just stops. Kurt is about to ask why or how he somehow forgot, but Blaine beats him. “I almost forgot to remind you!” he says, fingers still poised over the keys but shoulders snapped around to face Kurt, “Ms. Winslow went to deliver some mail to her daughter, but she left teacups on the front counter and-” Blaine spins up off the bench and walks over into the kitchen. Whether he expects Kurt to follow him, Kurt isn’t entirely sure, but he stays put anyway-walking in sopping wet pants is like trying to run on a treadmill covered in water balloons, and just, no. “You want some tea, right?” Blaine calls, followed by the familiar sounds of the tap running and the kettle flaring up, “It’s still so cold in here from the rain,” looking down at his own wet boot lining and frigid toes, Kurt sighs in agreement, “this is the best idea I’ve ever had.”
After some more soft clanking, Blaine returns to the sitting room and Kurt is resting his head on the lid of the piano. Blaine laughs at him and plops back down on the bench, and Kurt pointedly does not look at him or his smile, or think about the way Blaine’s wrist is cold when it brushes over Kurt’s forearm but there is a tired sort of heat emanating from where their knees touch under the keys and it’s spreading through Kurt’s body like a slow syrup.
“From the bridge? Second repeat?” Blaine asks, and Kurt is still sinking into his own skin by way of Blaine’s kneecap, so he poises his fingers over the correct keys and that’s all the answer Blaine needs before he starts in on the chords and Kurt is trilling his fingers except it sounds wrong and he’s not entirely sure why. He looks down at his hands frantically for a second before he realizes that he has no idea what the next note is and great, just great. Blaine stops again, but this time he looks at Kurt with furrowed eyebrows, and Kurt must be projecting because he picks Kurt’s hands up off the keys and places them in his lap with a soft instruction, of “hey, here-watch,” before starting into Kurt’s trills with his own hand a few octaves below.
It sounds different, but not strange-just this oddly sharp edge to Blaine’s style that Kurt probably should’ve picked up on but hasn’t. And Kurt just watches, eyes moving from wide open to heavy as the trill pattern crests and ebbs and it’s like he’s trying to burn the patterns into his eyelids. When Blaine reaches up an octave, Kurt closes his eyes and feels the cool skin of Blaine’s arm brush against the inside of his elbow and it reminds him of all those years of sitting next to his mother in the den, his tiny arm brushing against hers. He opens his eyes again when the sound stops and his right hand has made its way up from his lap to fit over the notches of Blaine’s own, and Kurt is suddenly hyperaware of the cold and of Blaine’s shoulder and his hip and the edge of his ribs just centimeters away.
When he looks up from their hands that don’t move-don’t even twitch-Blaine is looking at him, his eyelashes matted and peaked, his eyes dark and so close that he can see the orange dots around his pupils and feel each outtake of breath hot against his own lower lip. Kurt doesn’t dare move, and barely dares to even breathe, mouth parted slight and shakily and he can still feel their fingers over lapped on the piano keys, his own ice cold, and Blaine glances down at his mouth through lowered lashes that Kurt counts to keep still because oh, god.
He wants to dig his fingers into the hollows between Blaine’s knuckles, and when Blaine, gaze still downcast, breathes out a soft “hey,” all Kurt feels like doing is leaning forward and biting his lips bruised until they plump and bleed. He doesn’t, but Blaine does.
Kurt feels the loss of Blaine’s hand before he registers the press of his lips and Blaine’s fingers move up to cup the back of his neck just below his ear, scorching hot against the damp hair at the base of his skull. He lets Blaine lead at first, sagging closer into his body to soak up the heat, knees shaking, but after a few moments, Blaine catches the meat of Kurt’s lower lip between his teeth and Kurt pushes into it with a strange sense of desperation and urgency, opening his mouth wider against the side of Blaine’s as Blaine reaches up with his balance hand and threads it through Kurt’s hair, tugging him with both hands into a hard press of mouths, and then breathing in short bursts as they slide apart with a light ‘smack’.
Kurt stays close, almost by force of Blaine’s hands in his wet hair, even though part of him wants to pull back and flush scarlet and splotchy for the rest of his young life, and he breathes in and out, in and out for the better part of a few minutes before Blaine tips his forehead up to rest against Kurt’s, their noses brushing hot and cold at the center. Kurt looks up at him, then, eyes blown out impossibly dark-Blaine’s smiling one-sidedly at him, and Kurt’s ribs feel like they’re about to burst from the pressure of his jittering heart and he feels, somehow, like he should say that this is the end of the world. Maybe it is.
Instead he smiles back through chapped lips and says, simply and without much force, “hi.”
---
The space of the next week of his life is the longest he’s ever lived. He wakes up on Wednesday and jitters uncomfortably in his seat all through glee club and Mercedes keeps side-eyeing him from across the room. He spends half of his lunch break on Thursday washing slushie from his tie and the other half texting Blaine exasperatedly about the way Rachel was mocking him during French and how he finally, finally got his trills down on the upright. At the mention of it, he and Blaine laugh for what feels like all the way to Saturday, but is only realistically about two minutes.
On actual Saturday, he wastes four hours of his afternoon imaging the various ways he can convince Blaine to kiss him again, or maybe just ways he can bite harshly on Blaine’s bottom lip, his collar bone, the strong cut of his wrist. Blaine laughs him through three games of skype-uno, and then his dad calls him to dinner and he spends the next three days of his life working out the faulty transmission of a ’92 Ford Taurus.
It’s exhilarating, and nerve-wracking, and still the same as usual.
It’s too damn long.
---
“Remember, I’ll be out of town all next week until Thursday,” Ms. Winslow jots them down a note as she speaks, sipping lightly from a cup of stale coffee, “But I’d like it if you two could still get together and practice a bit for Saturday.” Kurt, hip-to-hip with Blaine on the small couch by the window, nurses sharply from his mug of tea and resists winding their fingers together where he can feel their wrists brushing on top of their pressed knees. “Wouldn’t want your little fingers to forget!” she says, waggling a free hand towards them, after which Kurt feels Blaine chuckle by way of the soft vibrations against his ribs.
She scratches a few more things down as they watch, and then holds the sheet out from between the flats of two of her nails. Blaine pushes up off the couch with a hand anchored on Kurt’s knee and grabs it from her as she moves to the kitchen doorway. “I’m gonna make a quick phone call, boys,” she says, tapping once at her watch even though she isn’t wearing one, “and then I want you to play through it for me before you go, okay?” Kurt nods and smiles, because he’s supposed to but also because he knows he wants to, and he feels Blaine do the same from his left before she moves and the door flits shut behind her.
Once she’s gone, Kurt watches as Blaine folds the note into neat squares and then hooks a finger under his shirt collar and pulls him so close that Kurt can barely see anything beyond his eyelashes. And oh, god, Ms. Winslow is here and Blaine is pressing a kiss to the curve of his jaw with a chapped mouth, curls brushing against the lobe of Kurt’s ear and fingers pushing the note into the tiny checked pocket on the front of Kurt’s button up.
Kurt feels like he’s traveling seven hundred million miles a minute, even though his feet and his heart and the corner of his jaw where he can still feel Blaine’s lips feel faint and nailed to the ground. He hears Ms. Winslow’s heels clicking closer to the door and then Blaine’s laugh of “Now, don’t lose that, Kurt,” hot against his ear, and then Ms. Winslow is walking through and reseating herself and Blaine is somehow already detangled and on his feet, prompting Kurt with innocent eyebrows to come sit next to him on the bench. Kurt feels like he can’t breathe at all, but he rises to his feet and tries anyway.
“Ready, boys,” Ms. Winslow has her hands folded primly in her lap, leaned forward like she’s eager and interested, and Kurt knows they can deliver, but first he has to stay standing and not sink into a heap of melted butter at the still lingering feel of Blaine’s fingers just under the pocket of his shirt.
He sits down in position, back straight, spine perfect, and Blaine nudges him softly with a shoulder and Kurt knows that they can do it. They will. He listens intently as Blaine clears his throat and then begins the intro, rising and rising in octave until the drop down where Kurt poises his hands and flits them, one trill after the other all the way down. He knows they look impressive, in this moment, where their arms weave across each other like telephone wires again and again and again until the sharp separation where they resort quickly to opposite ends of the scale and finish in a timed piece of chaotic contrast that fades out to just the small, soft ping of Kurt’s drawn out high G.
After he takes his hand away, he looks over at Ms. Winslow and she’s looking at them like his mother looked at him the night he played F ür Elise for the first time, like they’re special and rare and like nothing in the world will ever take that away and right now, with Ms. Winslow smiling from in front of him and the heat of Blaine’s thigh and the press of his hand solid and calm against the storm of Kurt’s back, Kurt kind of feels like maybe, just maybe, it might be true.
---
54 s. front st, saturday night. see you then. The text makes its way into Kurt’s message inbox first thing Thursday morning, while he’s in the downstairs bathroom styling his hair. He almost burns his hand on the curling iron when it pings at him, yelping into his fist and scuttling away as he drops the offending object into the sink. Thankfully there’s no water in it-that would be just his luck.
what? he sends back, because why on earth is Blaine now cryptic enough to text him an unknown address at 6:30 in the morning and then thinks to add, where are you sending me? is there hairspray?
He gets no response at first, so he continues with his regimen, curling up his front bang and the hair that hangs over his ear, making sure not to singe any skin, even if his sight is slightly bleary. Just as he’s smoothing it down with mousse, his hips tick tocking back and forth to his in-bath radio, he hears the phone ping again from behind the sink.
piano bar! gotta show off our skills! Kurt laughs-it’s far too early to be that electronically excited about anything, i’ll call before i get to your house
Kurt send off a short gotcha :), spritz-es his hair with hairspray a final time, and clicks the lights off on his way out the door. It’s not until later, when he’s about to turn the ignition in the navigator, that his phone gives a final buzz from his back pocket. He grabs for it and clicks his inbox. Blaine. Of course.
p.s. bring all the hairspray you want ;)
---
Kurt was kind of kidding-he doesn’t bring any hairspray specifically, but he does stand in his bedroom and spray his hair with it for around twenty minutes before Blaine’s call interrupts him. He picks it up on the second ring, sandwiching the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he walks over to grab his bag.
“I’m in your driveway as we speak,” Blaine says, and Kurt is already walking up the basement steps, adjusting his bowtie through sensory memory as he goes, “do I need to come in, or-”
“I’m almost to you,” Kurt grabs his old military jacket from the hook and his grey cowl scarf from the basket near the door, before tugging the latch open with his half free hand and walking out onto the porch, saying “bye,” and re-pocketing his phone.
He slides shotgun into Blaine’s car and tugs the visor mirror down, adjusting his scarf until it hangs just right against the collar of his jacket, and then turns to Blaine with an eyebrow raised expectantly. “C’mon, c’mon-to the land of no hair products we go.”
Blaine just chuckles softly at him, puts the car back in gear, and goes.
---
Musica is much less like a bar, per se , and much more like a coffee shop with a piano in it. It has a backstage, from what Kurt can tell by the door behind a stack of amps and a cordoned off hallway just to the right of it, but he can already see that this place says much more ‘poetry slam’ than it does ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, which is fine by him. The brass paneling on the walls inside is covered in advertisements and drink menus, and according to the big mock-up by the door, tonight is ‘Free Space Amateur Night,’ which means, per Blaine’s suggestion, that they should probably go on now before they get beat out by the drunk college kids who’ll come in later brandishing guitars.
At Kurt’s agreement, Blaine leads him backstage by the hand, Kurt following behind with a near death grip on his bag strap. They end up in a small converted storage closet acting as a dressing room of sorts, and as soon as Kurt sees it he dashes off to the dingy mirror in the corner, wetting his hand and slicking down his bangs frantically, trying not to glance over at Blaine too much because there’s an employee in the room and Kurt’s not going back in the closet for anything or anybody, but his heart is beating fast enough without the added stress of actually kissing a boy in front of someone else, not that he doesn’t want to.
When he does look over at Blaine, Blaine’s smiling back at him and shrugging out of his coat, folding it neatly and holding up a hand, mouthing, “five minutes!” at Kurt as Kurt wrestles with the zipper on his jacket. Blaine laughs at him slightly when he frowns down at himself, and when Kurt looks up to see the employee looking the other way, Blaine walks over and unzips it himself, motioning with a finger for Kurt to twirl around so that Blaine can shrug the jacket off of him.
“You okay?” Blaine asks, and yeah, he is-good, fantastic, excited. It’s funny, this thing he gets about performing, this kick of adrenaline and courage and honesty and-right now-a little bit of stupidity, because he’s not entirely sure if he’s excited about the idea of performing, or the overwhelming urge to haul Blaine forward and kiss him, square on mouth.
Soon enough, though, they’re out there, knocking knees under the piano as Blaine snaps his knuckles once, twice, three times- and Kurt looks at him and he knows the answer.
---
Afterward, they’re practically bubbling over with laughter. Blaine is tugging at his hand as soon as the last note sounds and Kurt trips on their way down to the coffee counter, one of his combat boots catching the stacked heel of the other. He starts to fall forward, but Blaine puts an arm out to keep him upright and Kurt just ends up digging his hands into the fabric at the shoulder of Blaine’s shirt as he catches himself, leaning his face down far enough that his now-burning cheeks are significantly hidden.
Kurt hears Blaine order something lattes from his resting place in Blaine’s shoulder once they get up to the counter, but then Blaine is looking down at him and laughing softly, tugging him up with an arm tucked around his bicep until they’re mashed together, easy and simple in a way that Kurt never thought it would be. As they wait, he tucks his head down and realizes that he never really noticed what Blaine was wearing until just this second, and suddenly all he wants to do is reach over and skew the line of his bowtie, so he does, bisecting his arm under Blaine’s as the barista hands him the coffees.
“C’mon,” Blaine laughs, handing one of the cups to Kurt and swatting his hand away as they weave their way through to the back window. They sit together on a loveseat, Kurt’s legs crossed at the knee and his ankle hooked around the side of Blaine’s leg, and Kurt watches as Blaine takes long sips from his cup.
“Vanilla,” he explains, taking another sip, “simple, but you’ll like it,” and Kurt watches his throat move in another swallow, bowtie still stupidly askew from where Kurt has messed with it and yet. Kurt uncaps the lid to his own and takes a sip like it’s a half empty party cup, and Blaine’s right, it’s simple. It’s good.
Kurt tosses the lid behind him and they sit for a while in companionable silence, ankles lazily linked, watching as some man with glasses larger than Kurt’s palms accompanies himself on the violin and a woman with a graying bun of hair plays through three abridged versions of Beethoven’s symphonies on the piano, her finger-span wide and bruised by the time she finishes.
About a third of the way through a brother-sister duo covering Bob Dylan songs on the harmonica, Blaine leans all the way into Kurt’s space and whispers, “Just remembered I forgot the music backstage,” hot and unintentionally breathy against the skin of Kurt’s throat, “be right back.” Kurt moves to follow him, but Blaine gestures for him to stay seated with a small assurance of, “two minutes-won’t be long,” and Kurt settles back into the cushion for the rest.
When they finally exit the stage, it’s been seven, and Kurt figures he might as well follow Blaine to wherever it was he went. He walks past the cordoned off entryway, watching the tops of his feet to make sure that he doesn’t trip when there’s no one there to catch his fall, and succeeds well enough until he runs, literally runs, straight into Blaine who’s busy snapping his coat shut and looping a knot in his scarf and Kurt looks up at him, hair loosened and cheeks sugar-flushed and good god-- he’s in a hall backstage in some ridiculous coffee shop in some ridiculous non-Lima town in Ohio, and there are people just beyond the archways and people in rooms that could come out at any second and see, but he wants.
So he takes.
Getting up in Blaine’s space in this noisy, smoky place is strange, but he does it anyway-steps forward two steps at a time, his hands knotted in opposite sides of Blaine’s scarf and crowd him against the far wall. He hears Blaine intake a breath, once, twice, feels Blaine’s hands come up to grasp the elbow’s of his jacket, but all he can concentrate on is the puffy pink bow of Blaine’s parted mouth, and Kurt’s just standing here and his ribs are cracking under the hammering of his heart and what is he waiting for?
Blaine presses his tongue out to wet his lips in one broad swoop, eyes dark and blown as he looks at Kurt and Kurt thinks fuck it, and kisses him.
Their mouths are smashed together in what has to be the most inelegant kiss of Kurt’s young life, and he’s fairly certain the way Blaine’s slight stubble is scratching at his chin is going to murder his moisturizing routine for months, but god. The tips of Blaine’s fingers are skimming Kurt’s waist and even through three layers he can imagine the burn of them against his skin, thinks to himself that he’d almost love it if the pads of them just fully marked into his skin for the rest of his life. Blaine pulls back from him with a small ‘pop’ and, wow, okay-in retrospect that statement was kind of creepy.
“I see you found me,” Blaine says, breath coming short, and Kurt looks down to where their boots line up, neat and prim and orderly even though Kurt’s head is feeling about seven times more messy that Finn’s closet right now. He laughs at the thought, and Blaine smiles at him through kiss swollen lips, teeth white and gleaming in the semi-dark.
“I have.”
---
“My bowtie is straight, right?” Kurt has been fidgeting in front of this mirror for what feels like the past hour and a half, re-spraying his bangs, re-buttoning his shirt, refastening the buckle on his belt. When he’d first gotten here, the powder room had been crowded with people-albeit, mostly moms curling their daughters’ hair-and now it’s just Kurt, forced to walk back and forth between the full length on the west wall and the set of mirrored counter tops in front of him. He’s probably certain that he’s adjusted this exact bowtie seven times. He’s also probably certain that it is, in fact not actually straight.
He’s preoccupied with deciding whether to button or unbutton the caps on his sleeves when Blaine walks in. Kurt doesn’t even really notice him at first, oblivious until he sees the tips of Blaine’s shoes come up in the body mirror, feels the fluffy front of Blaine’s hair against the curve at the base of his neck, Blaine sighing out and laughing a quiet “nervous,” against Kurt’s back, and then, “hey,” as he rolls off and goes to stand in front of him. Blaine moves to grab at the lapels of Kurt’s shirt and Kurt bats him away with fast hands.
“Move, move, you’re blocking the mirror,” Blaine just laughs at him and swats back, “Oh my god, Blaine, I’m serious-move.” Kurt’s not sure why Blaine finds this hilarious, because crooked bowties are not hilarious, but even through his continued attacks, Blaine fails to surrender and ends up grabbing onto Kurt’s bowtie and adjusting it for him instead. Fine, then-Kurt thinks-less work for him.
Except when he’s done adjusting, Blaine doesn’t really let go, just keeps running his hands over the top of Kurt’s shirt like he’s brushing off an offending piece of lint, but Kurt knows there are none. He’s sure. He’s checked, but Blaine just keeps smiling with his lashes lowered and his hands on Kurt’s chest and Kurt has to smile back.
Outside, he hears the bell dinging and places being called and, oh god, he’s certain his bangs aren’t straight at all but Blaine tugs at him with a soft “c’mon,” and Kurt will follow him anywhere and he does, out past the hordes of children and into the wings, and Kurt isn’t even sure how his feet are working anymore.
He can see the stage lights shining from behind the crown of Blaine’s head as they huddle close together, and Kurt knows that his dad is out there fidgeting with his video camera, and Carole and Finn and probably Rachel and Blaine is back here, lacing and unlacing their fingers at their sides, and even though he lives and dies for the stage, this is the single most frightening thing he’s ever done in his life-this song with this boy and this stupid, crazy, wonderful life he’s leading himself into.
When he looks up, the announcements have started, Blaine’s got his face turned out towards center stage, and Kurt takes the barest moment to memorize the patterns of his freckles before their names are being called, and the young girl at his back pushes softly on their legs to usher them forward.
The stage is huge when Kurt walks out, big and blinding and everything he’s ever wanted and he feels infinitely smaller for it, but in a warm way. He thinks, momentarily, that he could forget the whole song and the world could still turn somehow, because he’s got Blaine’s fingers tied through his, and his thumb taps out the beat of the piece, steady and solid over top of Blaine’s humming pulse.
The music will save them, he thinks-it always has.
Highest rating preffered: r
Prompts used: 1. a beautiful mess 5. piano
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Recipient: glitterdoves
Author/Artist: gingerrstar
Rating: pg-13
Word Count: 14,395
Summary: contrary to whatever beliefs mrs. gravitts and the rest of his taste-unconscious, bone breaking fellow classmates had held on the subject, all kurt could think of when it came to his childhood was brando and beethoven.
Part 1
By the next Tuesday, Kurt is running catastrophically late. Or, rather, it certainly feels like he is, considering it’s been raining in sheets since he woke up this morning-deep, warm, Spring rain, but rain nonetheless-and by the time he’s wrenching open the front door at Ms. Winslow’s, the front of his hair has collapsed, his jeans are squishing in his boots, and he’s hoping desperately that none of the rain got inside his bag of music because god that is just what he’d need right now.
He shakes his shoulders when he comes in, letting some of the excess splash off and onto the floor, and on his way down the hallway his boots squeak loudly against the slick of the tile. At the far end of the hall, Ms. Winslow’s door is left slightly ajar and Kurt can hear the sound of slamming chords being played in a way that makes him shiver not only with the rapidly cooling soak of his clothes from the rain, but with the rampant electricity of the noise itself. When he enters, Blaine is seated and playing, and any stupid rambling apology Kurt had written up in his head has disintegrated at this point, because all he can do is stand against the half open door and just.
Blaine doesn’t notice him there at first, just keeps on hammering his way through the chords without any rhythm or rhyme or sheet music to guide him-and Kurt watches him with a swift fascination, the wings of his shoulder blades and the muscles of his arms taut and burning their way into Kurt’s retinas in a manner that makes him shiver with his own body’s meager attempt at producing heat. Even considering, he looks half as soaked as Kurt feels, but Kurt is fairly sure he’s drenched, so it’s not as if either option bodes very well for them. In his bout of sloshy, shaking mess, what Kurt doesn’t notice is his bag sliding neatly off of his shoulder, and its impact with the floor is what prompts Blaine to startle and turn around.
“Hey,” he says, eyes impossibly wide and all that Kurt can focus on, “I was just-do you wanna sit down?” It’s strange to see Blaine so hideously decomposed, but judging by the lasting translucence of his shirt, and his cardigan hanging wet and dark from the back of an armchair, Kurt figures it has a lot to do with the rain, and he reaches down to grab his bag from where it’s fallen, walking over to the bench and sitting down with his knees crossed as much as humanly possible in jeans this wet. Blaine stays still in his stance, but his eyes follow Kurt the whole way and Kurt feels strangely, electrically naked under the burn of his gaze.
“God, Kurt-” Blaine’s voice is smooth but his teeth are chattering, and Kurt is still gripping the edges of the bench with cold fingers, counting the matted tips of Blaine’s eyelashes, “you look terrible.” Kurt raises an eyebrow at him accusingly, though he’s certain the effect of it is a little ridiculous considering the coif of his hair is falling into his eyes and even his bowtie is looking a bit soggy. Blaine rolls his eyes in a way that makes it look like he’s laughing, “Oh my god, you look fine, Kurt-” and he turns his body around to face the piano again with a light punch to Kurt’s wet stack of his knees, “you know what I mean.”
Kurt laughs through his own chattering teeth and swivels around on the bench before Blaine nudges him with a damp shoulder and a “two weeks, two weeks--you ready?” And Kurt wants to say some strange variation between yes and no, because in theory-always in theory-he’s been ready, he was born ready. But he’s certainly not ready to be stupidly freezing and stupidly stupidly close to this ridiculously attractive boy who somehow fell right out of the skies of dreary Ohio and into his life, and wow, okay-yeah. So he just nods his assent with a smile that shakes a bit from the cold and watches as Blaine starts up the first bars of the piece.
Around twenty bars in, Blaine just stops. Kurt is about to ask why or how he somehow forgot, but Blaine beats him. “I almost forgot to remind you!” he says, fingers still poised over the keys but shoulders snapped around to face Kurt, “Ms. Winslow went to deliver some mail to her daughter, but she left teacups on the front counter and-” Blaine spins up off the bench and walks over into the kitchen. Whether he expects Kurt to follow him, Kurt isn’t entirely sure, but he stays put anyway-walking in sopping wet pants is like trying to run on a treadmill covered in water balloons, and just, no. “You want some tea, right?” Blaine calls, followed by the familiar sounds of the tap running and the kettle flaring up, “It’s still so cold in here from the rain,” looking down at his own wet boot lining and frigid toes, Kurt sighs in agreement, “this is the best idea I’ve ever had.”
After some more soft clanking, Blaine returns to the sitting room and Kurt is resting his head on the lid of the piano. Blaine laughs at him and plops back down on the bench, and Kurt pointedly does not look at him or his smile, or think about the way Blaine’s wrist is cold when it brushes over Kurt’s forearm but there is a tired sort of heat emanating from where their knees touch under the keys and it’s spreading through Kurt’s body like a slow syrup.
“From the bridge? Second repeat?” Blaine asks, and Kurt is still sinking into his own skin by way of Blaine’s kneecap, so he poises his fingers over the correct keys and that’s all the answer Blaine needs before he starts in on the chords and Kurt is trilling his fingers except it sounds wrong and he’s not entirely sure why. He looks down at his hands frantically for a second before he realizes that he has no idea what the next note is and great, just great. Blaine stops again, but this time he looks at Kurt with furrowed eyebrows, and Kurt must be projecting because he picks Kurt’s hands up off the keys and places them in his lap with a soft instruction, of “hey, here-watch,” before starting into Kurt’s trills with his own hand a few octaves below.
It sounds different, but not strange-just this oddly sharp edge to Blaine’s style that Kurt probably should’ve picked up on but hasn’t. And Kurt just watches, eyes moving from wide open to heavy as the trill pattern crests and ebbs and it’s like he’s trying to burn the patterns into his eyelids. When Blaine reaches up an octave, Kurt closes his eyes and feels the cool skin of Blaine’s arm brush against the inside of his elbow and it reminds him of all those years of sitting next to his mother in the den, his tiny arm brushing against hers. He opens his eyes again when the sound stops and his right hand has made its way up from his lap to fit over the notches of Blaine’s own, and Kurt is suddenly hyperaware of the cold and of Blaine’s shoulder and his hip and the edge of his ribs just centimeters away.
When he looks up from their hands that don’t move-don’t even twitch-Blaine is looking at him, his eyelashes matted and peaked, his eyes dark and so close that he can see the orange dots around his pupils and feel each outtake of breath hot against his own lower lip. Kurt doesn’t dare move, and barely dares to even breathe, mouth parted slight and shakily and he can still feel their fingers over lapped on the piano keys, his own ice cold, and Blaine glances down at his mouth through lowered lashes that Kurt counts to keep still because oh, god.
He wants to dig his fingers into the hollows between Blaine’s knuckles, and when Blaine, gaze still downcast, breathes out a soft “hey,” all Kurt feels like doing is leaning forward and biting his lips bruised until they plump and bleed. He doesn’t, but Blaine does.
Kurt feels the loss of Blaine’s hand before he registers the press of his lips and Blaine’s fingers move up to cup the back of his neck just below his ear, scorching hot against the damp hair at the base of his skull. He lets Blaine lead at first, sagging closer into his body to soak up the heat, knees shaking, but after a few moments, Blaine catches the meat of Kurt’s lower lip between his teeth and Kurt pushes into it with a strange sense of desperation and urgency, opening his mouth wider against the side of Blaine’s as Blaine reaches up with his balance hand and threads it through Kurt’s hair, tugging him with both hands into a hard press of mouths, and then breathing in short bursts as they slide apart with a light ‘smack’.
Kurt stays close, almost by force of Blaine’s hands in his wet hair, even though part of him wants to pull back and flush scarlet and splotchy for the rest of his young life, and he breathes in and out, in and out for the better part of a few minutes before Blaine tips his forehead up to rest against Kurt’s, their noses brushing hot and cold at the center. Kurt looks up at him, then, eyes blown out impossibly dark-Blaine’s smiling one-sidedly at him, and Kurt’s ribs feel like they’re about to burst from the pressure of his jittering heart and he feels, somehow, like he should say that this is the end of the world. Maybe it is.
Instead he smiles back through chapped lips and says, simply and without much force, “hi.”
---
The space of the next week of his life is the longest he’s ever lived. He wakes up on Wednesday and jitters uncomfortably in his seat all through glee club and Mercedes keeps side-eyeing him from across the room. He spends half of his lunch break on Thursday washing slushie from his tie and the other half texting Blaine exasperatedly about the way Rachel was mocking him during French and how he finally, finally got his trills down on the upright. At the mention of it, he and Blaine laugh for what feels like all the way to Saturday, but is only realistically about two minutes.
On actual Saturday, he wastes four hours of his afternoon imaging the various ways he can convince Blaine to kiss him again, or maybe just ways he can bite harshly on Blaine’s bottom lip, his collar bone, the strong cut of his wrist. Blaine laughs him through three games of skype-uno, and then his dad calls him to dinner and he spends the next three days of his life working out the faulty transmission of a ’92 Ford Taurus.
It’s exhilarating, and nerve-wracking, and still the same as usual.
It’s too damn long.
---
“Remember, I’ll be out of town all next week until Thursday,” Ms. Winslow jots them down a note as she speaks, sipping lightly from a cup of stale coffee, “But I’d like it if you two could still get together and practice a bit for Saturday.” Kurt, hip-to-hip with Blaine on the small couch by the window, nurses sharply from his mug of tea and resists winding their fingers together where he can feel their wrists brushing on top of their pressed knees. “Wouldn’t want your little fingers to forget!” she says, waggling a free hand towards them, after which Kurt feels Blaine chuckle by way of the soft vibrations against his ribs.
She scratches a few more things down as they watch, and then holds the sheet out from between the flats of two of her nails. Blaine pushes up off the couch with a hand anchored on Kurt’s knee and grabs it from her as she moves to the kitchen doorway. “I’m gonna make a quick phone call, boys,” she says, tapping once at her watch even though she isn’t wearing one, “and then I want you to play through it for me before you go, okay?” Kurt nods and smiles, because he’s supposed to but also because he knows he wants to, and he feels Blaine do the same from his left before she moves and the door flits shut behind her.
Once she’s gone, Kurt watches as Blaine folds the note into neat squares and then hooks a finger under his shirt collar and pulls him so close that Kurt can barely see anything beyond his eyelashes. And oh, god, Ms. Winslow is here and Blaine is pressing a kiss to the curve of his jaw with a chapped mouth, curls brushing against the lobe of Kurt’s ear and fingers pushing the note into the tiny checked pocket on the front of Kurt’s button up.
Kurt feels like he’s traveling seven hundred million miles a minute, even though his feet and his heart and the corner of his jaw where he can still feel Blaine’s lips feel faint and nailed to the ground. He hears Ms. Winslow’s heels clicking closer to the door and then Blaine’s laugh of “Now, don’t lose that, Kurt,” hot against his ear, and then Ms. Winslow is walking through and reseating herself and Blaine is somehow already detangled and on his feet, prompting Kurt with innocent eyebrows to come sit next to him on the bench. Kurt feels like he can’t breathe at all, but he rises to his feet and tries anyway.
“Ready, boys,” Ms. Winslow has her hands folded primly in her lap, leaned forward like she’s eager and interested, and Kurt knows they can deliver, but first he has to stay standing and not sink into a heap of melted butter at the still lingering feel of Blaine’s fingers just under the pocket of his shirt.
He sits down in position, back straight, spine perfect, and Blaine nudges him softly with a shoulder and Kurt knows that they can do it. They will. He listens intently as Blaine clears his throat and then begins the intro, rising and rising in octave until the drop down where Kurt poises his hands and flits them, one trill after the other all the way down. He knows they look impressive, in this moment, where their arms weave across each other like telephone wires again and again and again until the sharp separation where they resort quickly to opposite ends of the scale and finish in a timed piece of chaotic contrast that fades out to just the small, soft ping of Kurt’s drawn out high G.
After he takes his hand away, he looks over at Ms. Winslow and she’s looking at them like his mother looked at him the night he played F ür Elise for the first time, like they’re special and rare and like nothing in the world will ever take that away and right now, with Ms. Winslow smiling from in front of him and the heat of Blaine’s thigh and the press of his hand solid and calm against the storm of Kurt’s back, Kurt kind of feels like maybe, just maybe, it might be true.
---
54 s. front st, saturday night. see you then. The text makes its way into Kurt’s message inbox first thing Thursday morning, while he’s in the downstairs bathroom styling his hair. He almost burns his hand on the curling iron when it pings at him, yelping into his fist and scuttling away as he drops the offending object into the sink. Thankfully there’s no water in it-that would be just his luck.
what? he sends back, because why on earth is Blaine now cryptic enough to text him an unknown address at 6:30 in the morning and then thinks to add, where are you sending me? is there hairspray?
He gets no response at first, so he continues with his regimen, curling up his front bang and the hair that hangs over his ear, making sure not to singe any skin, even if his sight is slightly bleary. Just as he’s smoothing it down with mousse, his hips tick tocking back and forth to his in-bath radio, he hears the phone ping again from behind the sink.
piano bar! gotta show off our skills! Kurt laughs-it’s far too early to be that electronically excited about anything, i’ll call before i get to your house
Kurt send off a short gotcha :), spritz-es his hair with hairspray a final time, and clicks the lights off on his way out the door. It’s not until later, when he’s about to turn the ignition in the navigator, that his phone gives a final buzz from his back pocket. He grabs for it and clicks his inbox. Blaine. Of course.
p.s. bring all the hairspray you want ;)
---
Kurt was kind of kidding-he doesn’t bring any hairspray specifically, but he does stand in his bedroom and spray his hair with it for around twenty minutes before Blaine’s call interrupts him. He picks it up on the second ring, sandwiching the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he walks over to grab his bag.
“I’m in your driveway as we speak,” Blaine says, and Kurt is already walking up the basement steps, adjusting his bowtie through sensory memory as he goes, “do I need to come in, or-”
“I’m almost to you,” Kurt grabs his old military jacket from the hook and his grey cowl scarf from the basket near the door, before tugging the latch open with his half free hand and walking out onto the porch, saying “bye,” and re-pocketing his phone.
He slides shotgun into Blaine’s car and tugs the visor mirror down, adjusting his scarf until it hangs just right against the collar of his jacket, and then turns to Blaine with an eyebrow raised expectantly. “C’mon, c’mon-to the land of no hair products we go.”
Blaine just chuckles softly at him, puts the car back in gear, and goes.
---
Musica is much less like a bar, per se , and much more like a coffee shop with a piano in it. It has a backstage, from what Kurt can tell by the door behind a stack of amps and a cordoned off hallway just to the right of it, but he can already see that this place says much more ‘poetry slam’ than it does ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, which is fine by him. The brass paneling on the walls inside is covered in advertisements and drink menus, and according to the big mock-up by the door, tonight is ‘Free Space Amateur Night,’ which means, per Blaine’s suggestion, that they should probably go on now before they get beat out by the drunk college kids who’ll come in later brandishing guitars.
At Kurt’s agreement, Blaine leads him backstage by the hand, Kurt following behind with a near death grip on his bag strap. They end up in a small converted storage closet acting as a dressing room of sorts, and as soon as Kurt sees it he dashes off to the dingy mirror in the corner, wetting his hand and slicking down his bangs frantically, trying not to glance over at Blaine too much because there’s an employee in the room and Kurt’s not going back in the closet for anything or anybody, but his heart is beating fast enough without the added stress of actually kissing a boy in front of someone else, not that he doesn’t want to.
When he does look over at Blaine, Blaine’s smiling back at him and shrugging out of his coat, folding it neatly and holding up a hand, mouthing, “five minutes!” at Kurt as Kurt wrestles with the zipper on his jacket. Blaine laughs at him slightly when he frowns down at himself, and when Kurt looks up to see the employee looking the other way, Blaine walks over and unzips it himself, motioning with a finger for Kurt to twirl around so that Blaine can shrug the jacket off of him.
“You okay?” Blaine asks, and yeah, he is-good, fantastic, excited. It’s funny, this thing he gets about performing, this kick of adrenaline and courage and honesty and-right now-a little bit of stupidity, because he’s not entirely sure if he’s excited about the idea of performing, or the overwhelming urge to haul Blaine forward and kiss him, square on mouth.
Soon enough, though, they’re out there, knocking knees under the piano as Blaine snaps his knuckles once, twice, three times- and Kurt looks at him and he knows the answer.
---
Afterward, they’re practically bubbling over with laughter. Blaine is tugging at his hand as soon as the last note sounds and Kurt trips on their way down to the coffee counter, one of his combat boots catching the stacked heel of the other. He starts to fall forward, but Blaine puts an arm out to keep him upright and Kurt just ends up digging his hands into the fabric at the shoulder of Blaine’s shirt as he catches himself, leaning his face down far enough that his now-burning cheeks are significantly hidden.
Kurt hears Blaine order something lattes from his resting place in Blaine’s shoulder once they get up to the counter, but then Blaine is looking down at him and laughing softly, tugging him up with an arm tucked around his bicep until they’re mashed together, easy and simple in a way that Kurt never thought it would be. As they wait, he tucks his head down and realizes that he never really noticed what Blaine was wearing until just this second, and suddenly all he wants to do is reach over and skew the line of his bowtie, so he does, bisecting his arm under Blaine’s as the barista hands him the coffees.
“C’mon,” Blaine laughs, handing one of the cups to Kurt and swatting his hand away as they weave their way through to the back window. They sit together on a loveseat, Kurt’s legs crossed at the knee and his ankle hooked around the side of Blaine’s leg, and Kurt watches as Blaine takes long sips from his cup.
“Vanilla,” he explains, taking another sip, “simple, but you’ll like it,” and Kurt watches his throat move in another swallow, bowtie still stupidly askew from where Kurt has messed with it and yet. Kurt uncaps the lid to his own and takes a sip like it’s a half empty party cup, and Blaine’s right, it’s simple. It’s good.
Kurt tosses the lid behind him and they sit for a while in companionable silence, ankles lazily linked, watching as some man with glasses larger than Kurt’s palms accompanies himself on the violin and a woman with a graying bun of hair plays through three abridged versions of Beethoven’s symphonies on the piano, her finger-span wide and bruised by the time she finishes.
About a third of the way through a brother-sister duo covering Bob Dylan songs on the harmonica, Blaine leans all the way into Kurt’s space and whispers, “Just remembered I forgot the music backstage,” hot and unintentionally breathy against the skin of Kurt’s throat, “be right back.” Kurt moves to follow him, but Blaine gestures for him to stay seated with a small assurance of, “two minutes-won’t be long,” and Kurt settles back into the cushion for the rest.
When they finally exit the stage, it’s been seven, and Kurt figures he might as well follow Blaine to wherever it was he went. He walks past the cordoned off entryway, watching the tops of his feet to make sure that he doesn’t trip when there’s no one there to catch his fall, and succeeds well enough until he runs, literally runs, straight into Blaine who’s busy snapping his coat shut and looping a knot in his scarf and Kurt looks up at him, hair loosened and cheeks sugar-flushed and good god-- he’s in a hall backstage in some ridiculous coffee shop in some ridiculous non-Lima town in Ohio, and there are people just beyond the archways and people in rooms that could come out at any second and see, but he wants.
So he takes.
Getting up in Blaine’s space in this noisy, smoky place is strange, but he does it anyway-steps forward two steps at a time, his hands knotted in opposite sides of Blaine’s scarf and crowd him against the far wall. He hears Blaine intake a breath, once, twice, feels Blaine’s hands come up to grasp the elbow’s of his jacket, but all he can concentrate on is the puffy pink bow of Blaine’s parted mouth, and Kurt’s just standing here and his ribs are cracking under the hammering of his heart and what is he waiting for?
Blaine presses his tongue out to wet his lips in one broad swoop, eyes dark and blown as he looks at Kurt and Kurt thinks fuck it, and kisses him.
Their mouths are smashed together in what has to be the most inelegant kiss of Kurt’s young life, and he’s fairly certain the way Blaine’s slight stubble is scratching at his chin is going to murder his moisturizing routine for months, but god. The tips of Blaine’s fingers are skimming Kurt’s waist and even through three layers he can imagine the burn of them against his skin, thinks to himself that he’d almost love it if the pads of them just fully marked into his skin for the rest of his life. Blaine pulls back from him with a small ‘pop’ and, wow, okay-in retrospect that statement was kind of creepy.
“I see you found me,” Blaine says, breath coming short, and Kurt looks down to where their boots line up, neat and prim and orderly even though Kurt’s head is feeling about seven times more messy that Finn’s closet right now. He laughs at the thought, and Blaine smiles at him through kiss swollen lips, teeth white and gleaming in the semi-dark.
“I have.”
---
“My bowtie is straight, right?” Kurt has been fidgeting in front of this mirror for what feels like the past hour and a half, re-spraying his bangs, re-buttoning his shirt, refastening the buckle on his belt. When he’d first gotten here, the powder room had been crowded with people-albeit, mostly moms curling their daughters’ hair-and now it’s just Kurt, forced to walk back and forth between the full length on the west wall and the set of mirrored counter tops in front of him. He’s probably certain that he’s adjusted this exact bowtie seven times. He’s also probably certain that it is, in fact not actually straight.
He’s preoccupied with deciding whether to button or unbutton the caps on his sleeves when Blaine walks in. Kurt doesn’t even really notice him at first, oblivious until he sees the tips of Blaine’s shoes come up in the body mirror, feels the fluffy front of Blaine’s hair against the curve at the base of his neck, Blaine sighing out and laughing a quiet “nervous,” against Kurt’s back, and then, “hey,” as he rolls off and goes to stand in front of him. Blaine moves to grab at the lapels of Kurt’s shirt and Kurt bats him away with fast hands.
“Move, move, you’re blocking the mirror,” Blaine just laughs at him and swats back, “Oh my god, Blaine, I’m serious-move.” Kurt’s not sure why Blaine finds this hilarious, because crooked bowties are not hilarious, but even through his continued attacks, Blaine fails to surrender and ends up grabbing onto Kurt’s bowtie and adjusting it for him instead. Fine, then-Kurt thinks-less work for him.
Except when he’s done adjusting, Blaine doesn’t really let go, just keeps running his hands over the top of Kurt’s shirt like he’s brushing off an offending piece of lint, but Kurt knows there are none. He’s sure. He’s checked, but Blaine just keeps smiling with his lashes lowered and his hands on Kurt’s chest and Kurt has to smile back.
Outside, he hears the bell dinging and places being called and, oh god, he’s certain his bangs aren’t straight at all but Blaine tugs at him with a soft “c’mon,” and Kurt will follow him anywhere and he does, out past the hordes of children and into the wings, and Kurt isn’t even sure how his feet are working anymore.
He can see the stage lights shining from behind the crown of Blaine’s head as they huddle close together, and Kurt knows that his dad is out there fidgeting with his video camera, and Carole and Finn and probably Rachel and Blaine is back here, lacing and unlacing their fingers at their sides, and even though he lives and dies for the stage, this is the single most frightening thing he’s ever done in his life-this song with this boy and this stupid, crazy, wonderful life he’s leading himself into.
When he looks up, the announcements have started, Blaine’s got his face turned out towards center stage, and Kurt takes the barest moment to memorize the patterns of his freckles before their names are being called, and the young girl at his back pushes softly on their legs to usher them forward.
The stage is huge when Kurt walks out, big and blinding and everything he’s ever wanted and he feels infinitely smaller for it, but in a warm way. He thinks, momentarily, that he could forget the whole song and the world could still turn somehow, because he’s got Blaine’s fingers tied through his, and his thumb taps out the beat of the piece, steady and solid over top of Blaine’s humming pulse.
The music will save them, he thinks-it always has.
Highest rating preffered: r
Prompts used: 1. a beautiful mess 5. piano
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