just like you; glee
Title: i want a scar that looks just like you
Pairing: Kurt/Sam.
Summary: For this meme prompt: AU. Sam and Kurt are on tour in a (rock or pop) band with Puck and Finn. Sometimes they talk about love and sometimes they just get up to inappropriate things on the tour bus, but everything they do together has to be kept a secret from the fans as per their manager's request. Kurt doesn't love the idea of being pushed back into the closet, but Sam isn't sure he's even ready to come out.
i want a scar that looks just like you
On graduation day Sam pulled him into an empty classroom - theirs, Kurt always thought despite himself, their classroom - shut the door behind them and pressed Kurt back against it, into a smiling kiss. He’d dizzily held onto Sam’s shoulders and thought that would be them, from now on - finally together. Finally happy.
-
In highschool, Sam would write music - sweet, folksy songs he’d play to Kurt with his guitar in the Evans’ basement. His voice sounded softer, then, frail and sometimes a little scared - sometimes he’d sing shaky vibrato on the wrong note with his wide, pale eyes stuck on Kurt’s face. He’d never show Kurt the lyrics or the music - “They’re all a mess,” he’d say, almost flushed. Even now, Kurt rarely remembered a time when Sam wasn’t hideously embarrassed about his dyslexia, or if it wasn’t that, even his handwriting. Music was the only thing that Sam knew he was good at, and the only conventional enough thing he liked that he never had to hide away.
“Why don’t you sing with me?” Sam asked once, bumping their shoulders together. He slung his guitar back over his shoulders and grinned, lazily sprawling himself over the basement sofa and tucking his toes beneath Kurt’s thigh. They had a few days like this. During the Summer, when Finn was visiting their Ohio relatives with his mom and Sam’s parents were busy taking Stevie and Stacey shopping for their first days at school. They’d lounge around Sam’s basement long enough for Kurt to stop complaining about the smell, for Sam to be suddenly contented touching him the little ways he never would outside, never would with anybody else. Long enough for the world to slip away to just Sam Evans, singing to him.
Kurt had shrugged. He’d never really sung. A few years in choir as a kid, but then they moved to Tennessee and there was no real outlet for him besides piano, since he didn’t sound like Sam when he sang country-songs into his pencil case in class or even Finn when he sang bad 80s rock in their shower. It had been a long time since he last tried, and he didn’t want to then, with Sam’s eyes so intent on him - so deeply curious about every little thing, as always - in case it wasn’t anything spectacular, wasn’t anything special.
“Maybe another time,” he said, patting Sam’s knee and trying not to read into his crooked, big smiles.
He strummed out a random chord, slowly, hummed under his breath. “I’ll hold you to that, you know,” he promised, quietly and still smiling.
-
They started the band in junior year, when it was just Finn on his seven-year-old drumkit and Sam on his dad’s guitar in the Evans’ basement. When he visited, Puck would bring his own guitar and all three of them would stay locked down there for hours on end making more noise than music. They’d excitedly drag Kurt down to here them every once and a while, and with them around Sam would sing staring out his bangs to the floor; not to Kurt. But Kurt would applaud anyway, say bravi, leave and let them get back to it.
Sam’s ‘aunt’ Sue showed up during their senior year after her car broke down outside, claiming distant relation, and overheard them in the kitchen. She gave Sam’s dad her card and Sam’s dad gave it to Sam and, for some reason, Sam ended up giving it to Kurt.
“Should I call her?” he’d asked, like it was Kurt’s decision to make, Kurt’s band and Kurt’s future. His smile had been strange, eyes a little searching when they looked into Kurt’s, and Kurt had realized this was about New York: about how Sam knew he’d never make it to a school in NYC, about how Kurt knew he absolutely had to, how they were never very good at being apart. This was Sam’s chance. Their chance.
Kurt had said yes and Sam had beamed at him, squeezed his hand and called Sue the next morning.
-
Every audition Kurt made in New York, Sam snuck in to see. He waved behind hundreds of dozens of rows of empty chairs, brightly; behind the heads of somber producers and directors who could never even try to look as thrilled at the sight of Kurt stepping onstage as Sam always was. And they would never like his voice, his stage presence, his too-obvious ‘limitations.’ They would never want him back.
Kurt stopped auditioning after the first three months, when it became clear living in New York wasn’t going to be what he’d planned, what he’d dreamed of for so, so long. It was two months after Sue had set Sam up with a professional dancer: a pretty blonde girl who seemed to like spending time hanging around Kurt talking about bad television and the proper way to shape her nails far more than dating Sam. Sam had told him in hushed tones a thousand times over it was nothing, it wasn’t real. You still hold hands, Kurt had wanted to tell him, desperately. You kiss. You are.
Instead he’d let it go. He’d let it all go.
-
In New York, Sue set them up pretty well, although Sam said she was intense and a weird kind of mean most of the time. Sam was trying to cheer him up in the hotel room she’d gotten the three of them: building a fort in the space between Finn and Puck’s beds and ordering pillows from room service to stuff it with.
They’d lay inside of it, sprawled over a dozen cushions side by side. Kurt thought about how sure he’d been of New York. About how success always seemed to come to Sam easier, instead, and he couldn’t even feel bitter about it with Sam grinning next to him, only in New York at all on his say so, to be with him. But they weren’t together, either; Sam was dating Brittany, and always too busy with Sue and rehearsals and meetings for Kurt. “Today is our day,” is what Sam proclaimed when Kurt arrived at the hotel room door, then he’d dragged him inside and done his best to make him happy, as always. He could never be mad at Sam, even when he tried his best to be.
“Are you thinking of going back?” Sam asked abruptly.
Kurt turned to find him picking the stitching of the bedspread draped over their heads and frowning. He raised an eyebrow. “No,” he answered, slowly. “Why do you ask?”
Sam shrugged, his mouth thinning.
Tennessee was never Kurt’s home, or Sam’s for that matter. Maybe his parents belonged there - his dad built a better business there, Finn’s mom made better pay - but it was what they’d dreamed of when they married, starting over again somewhere new. Kurt dreamt of New York and Sam but it became achingly more clear every day that passed that he might not have either of them in the end.
“If you go, I go with you.”
This time when he turned to face Sam, startled, Sam was staring right back at him already, looking just like the scared highschool kid he used to be. He reached out and for a moment Kurt thought he’d stroke his cheek, push back his hair, touch him some defining way, his heart pounding, and then it simply fell away again and clenched into a tight fist back at his side. Kurt was watching it instead of Sam when he was asked, softly, “You know that, right?”
Kurt thought of Sam kissing him on graduation day. Sam holding his hand and cleaning up the mess the other boys made of his face. Sam protecting him. Sam crying for him, so much. It was nice that they could still have days like these, wrapped up in each other enough that Kurt could still pretend it was something more, even if he was no longer the same wistful teenage boy.
He swallowed, turned away quickly, just said, “I know, Sam,” and left it at that.
-
Sam told Kurt that Sue said they were missing something. The first time she and Kurt met, she saw it in him - something different, defining, new. She had him sing on the spot, in the middle of Sam, Finn and Puck’s hotel room with everybody around to hear.
There was no other hope for Kurt in New York so Kurt sang - high and soft (and later Sam told him with glossy eyes, “Lovely.”) Sue said Tennessee gave his voice a nice accent. That his sound would contrast nicely with Sam’s.
Kurt asked Sam this time whether he should take up her offer or not and Sam had said yes without missing a beat.
-
Finn and Puck made faces when Sue called them a pop group, but they could never be categorized as rock or metal or anything they actually listened to with using Sam’s lyrics and Kurt’s voice. Sam didn’t seem to care either way. He let Sue tell him he’d need made-over and pulled out of his ‘hillbilly fashion offenses.’ He’d need a haircut, a shave. He’d need to spend less time with Kurt.
That’s when he started to argue, he told Kurt. “I won’t,” Sam told him, sharply. His arms were crossed, face uncharacteristically severe. “I couldn’t.” But Kurt thought it might be for the best to separate, especially if Sam was intent on keeping up the illusion of dating Brittany any longer.
He hummed as Sam complained, turned another page in his magazine. “We don’t want it to look like something it isn’t,” he said, steadfastly keeping his eyes on the page.
It crinkled in his hands when Sam’s hand pulled the the magazine down, away of his face, so suddenly Kurt had to look up at him in surprise.
Sam was staring down at him with hurt in his eyes and his jaw tightly clenched. He squeezed the magazine into his fist and just breathed out Kurt’s name, like that was all he could say. They’d always be doing this. Sam would always be too scared to say he was in love and Kurt would always be too in love with him to say he had to. They’d have their one kiss, a distant, quieting memory that Kurt looked back on like a lie he’d been told, a broken promise Sam made to them both.
Kurt stood and Sam’s hand dangled for a moment, still clutching the magazine with white-knuckled fingers before Kurt took another, dangerous step forward and he let it fall to his feet, forgotten. “Kurt,” he said again, breathless and scared but they were in Kurt’s dingy little apartment then, safe from everybody else and Kurt just wanted to feel him so badly.
Another step. He reached out, more steadily than he thought was possible with his heart hammering the way it was. He measured every breath it took to breach the distance between them. To lean up on his tip-toes and kiss Sam just one more time.
Sam’s arms wrapped around him the moment their lips touched and pulled him impossibly close, and he kissed him impossibly hard. Kurt hesitated, suddenly too light and too caught in disbelief to know what to do before his hands lifted and spread across Sam’s chest, pulling him lower by the fabric of his shirt. Sam made a noise, a whine, his hands sliding into Kurt’s hair, beneath Kurt’s shirt, scrambling to touch every part of him, taste every corner of his mouth.
Kurt bit down on Sam’s bottom lip after four years of highschool dreaming of pressing kisses to it. He tried not to cry when they broke apart, and Sam was looking at him with his wide, pale green eyes, always so terrified of how Kurt could make him feel, and then Sam simply held onto him for a long time, almost completely still until he huffed out a long, shaky sigh and pressed his forehead to Kurt’s, his eyes slipping shut.
“Kurt,” he said again, sounding more scared now than ever.
-
In highschool, Kurt would write snippets of his own plays and long winding monologues as an outlet for everything.
Growing up in Tennessee was hard on all of them - he, Sam, Finn and even Puck couldn’t stand Nashville the handful of times he visited them there. Kurt had it hardest, of course: out and proud and a devastatingly strange being to the entirety of the South. After him it was Sam, always the one to press ice-packs against Kurt’s bruised cheeks with one hand and squeeze Kurt’s with the other. Sam cried a lot in front of Kurt in highschool - because Kurt got hurt, because Kurt was called something vulgar, because Kurt was his best friend; because Sam saw what the world would do to him if he were honest with it, too.
Once, Kurt wrote about that. A highschool superstar’s progression into loneliness, into their reality, living in the closet. It was the only thing he wrote that he’d ever shown to Sam, hopefully, both of them sat upright and tense on his bedspread - Kurt was nervous to actually acknowledge what they both knew Sam was in any form and Sam was nervous when Kurt asked him to read anything at all, had only shrugged and shyly mumbled, “It might take a while but I’ll look at it for you, of course, yeah.”
Looking back Kurt wonders if he was a little sadistic in highschool. If he wanted Sam to experience all the pain he’d been able to escape in five-hundred words of closeted despair, if when Sam’s face collapsed into grief halfway through he’d felt some kind of satisfaction. If he’d liked making Sam cry.
-
Sue knew from the start.
They didn’t act any differently, hardly even at all. The most significant change was how Sam would hold his hand sometimes in the pillow fort between their two beds after Kurt had been moved out of his apartment into the hotel with the others - rooming with Sam with Finn and Puck across the hall. Sometimes at night after they brushed their teeth Sam would stay and look at Kurt in the bathroom mirror while he moisturized and give him goodnight kisses on the softened skin of his forehead, his temple, the backs of his hands. Sometimes Sam would watch him too intently while he folded their clothes, while he ate, while he did anything at all. But they still hadn’t actually talked about it.
Sue tutted about them in rehearsal, called Kurt ‘Yoko-Homo’, said they should do a better job paying attention to her advice. Then they played one of Sam’s songs and she called all of them talentless; heartless ear-murderers; the reason her internal organs were all currently trying to escape her body.
“And when I say practice singing I don’t mean on each others faces,” she snapped afterwards.
-
It only took a little while before Sam started clambering into Kurt’s narrow single at night. He’d bury his face in Kurt’s hair and Kurt would feel his chest rise slowly against the skin of his bare back, his warm, even breath tickling the back of his neck all through the night. The first few mornings they’d stay that way, silently, then Sam started drawing with his fingertips across Kurt’s back and asking Kurt to guess what it was, Sam started laughing at the sensation of Kurt’s fluttering eyelashes whenever he awoke, Sam started smiling into his naked shoulder blade and kissing up to his ear as a way of saying 'good morning.' Kurt was always too hung up on overthinking this, and them, and what any of these mornings really meant at all.
They were harder to get as their schedules became busier, and Finn and Puck became restlessly excited - banging on their room door, barging inside whenever they felt like it and suddenly desperate to see New York, all of it there was. Sue set up meetings. Sue set Finn up with classy Broadway girls and set up Puck with a former beauty pagaent winner. Kurt turned all of her dating suggestions away and watched Sam watching him, Brittany pretty and sweet by his side whenever he left the hotel now.
“He’s nice,” she told Kurt once, tilting her head thoughtfully and absentmindedly fiddling with his polka-dot bowtie. “He’s really into like, talking in a Star Wars voice.” Kurt snorted. She shrugged. “He’s not into anything else. And he’s only kissed me here.” She pointed to her cheek, almost sadly.
Kurt felt so abruptly full of guilt that he agreed to let her paint his nails while they waited for Sam to finish showering. The next morning he woke up to find Sam smiling at him already, brushing his bangs back from his face, and told him he had to break up with her. “For her sake,” he said firmly, although he wasn’t entirely sure that was the case.
-
It passed in a blur. They had an album, a fanbase, a place to live that wasn’t inside of a hotel. Sue worked them for the rest of the year through interviews, articles, publicizing their tour in plastic looking photoshoots and gossip she spread over Finn and his new girlfriend. Sam and Kurt kept their distance at all times; some people actually believed they didn’t get along at all, they didn’t talk, that Sam was homophobic. Sam mentioned in passing to an interviewer that Kurt had been his best-friend since highschool, and when Sue blew up at him he called it ‘damage control’, which, surprisingly enough, calmed her down.
Sam still snuck into Kurt’s bedroom some nights, when Finn and Puck were definitely, definitely asleep. He’d kiss him slowly and languidly and at times Kurt would forget thath they’d come to New York to be together, and ended further apart than ever before.
Sam got drunk one night with Puck and came into Kurt’s room crying about it once. “It’s harder now,” he said, clutching his hair painfully tight into his hands. Kurt tried to ease them off, speaking softly, stroking his thumbs over his knuckles and kissing his tears. Sam had shook his head. “I just made it harder for us, didn’t I?”
“It wasn’t you. It was never you,” Kurt assured him, trying to smile. Then he’d kissed him, again and again.
-
Sam was bad the first night of the tour. Low-spirited and sad and singing without real heart. Kurt wondered what he saw when he looked out at their audience: people who loved him or an obstacle between the two of them, something to blame for the way he felt and the way he was.
-
Sam got drunk, again. This time Kurt did, too, on the tour on a one night stop to some nightclubs that ended in Kurt pulling Sam into a taxi to their hotel. He kept his hands off of him until they reach the hotel room, then he slided their bodies together, grinded Sam back into the wall and kissed him more messily than he ever had before.
“I want you,” he growled into Sam’s neck, pawing at his t-shirt until Sam obligingly stripped it off and threw it away, looking down at Kurt with bright, intent eyes. “I can’t stop wanting you.”
He stripped Sam down to his boxers and let Sam fumblingly undo his shirt buttons and drag it off of shoulders, clumsily sucking kisses into his exposed collarbone and moaning the desperate, despairing way he always did for Kurt. Kurt rolled their hips together and held onto Sam so tightly his fingernails left marks in the skin of his back.
“Come here,” he said, stepping away, and Sam stumblingly followed. “Turn around,” he said, and Sam took a deep breath and turned.
Kurt took hold of his wrists and pinned them at the small of his back, licking a wet stripe up the line of his spine that made Sam shudder. He yanked Sam closer and rocked onto the balls of his feet against him, sighing at the feel of Sam’s ass against him, of Sam pushing back against him and letting out a soft, stuttering moan. “Finally,” Sam breathed, leaning his head back onto Kurt’s shoulder and hitching his breath every time Kurt thrust against him, every time Kurt’s hand would slide an inch further down into his boxers.
Someone banged on the hotel room door.
It was locked, and probably only Finn or Puck announcing their returns, but Sam pulled away like he’d been scalded and stood with his back to the wall, breathing heavily and unevenly and watching Kurt through his terrified eyes.
He’d opened his mouth with nothing to say and shook his head again, like he simply couldn’t be here, couldn’t do this, thrown on all his things and gone.
-
Sam stopped singing the third night of the tour, mid-harmony. Kurt sang alone, didn’t look at him or acknowledge his silence but felt Sam’s eyes heavy on him and something inside of himself aching like a burn.
-
The tour bus was quiet afterwards. Finn and Puck gave them space, Finn watching him worriedly every so often, but eventually Sam appeared at his bedside, kneeling, eyes hidden by his messy bangs, his mouth straining like he was about to cry.
Kurt looked at him, blankly, ignoring the urgent need to push his hair out of his face, to have him smile. He found Sam’s eyes through a mess of blond, overwhelmingly sad and lovely.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry since we were sixteen.” Sam's voice was strange, like he was trying to keep it audible, keep it from breaking. He reached out, tentatively, and curled his hand around Kurt’s.
“Me too,” Kurt said, and he had. Loving Sam hadn’t brought him any of the things he’d always believed real love would have. It made him a little miserable, really, to see pretty New York boys smiling back at him and feel nothing, not ever, like only Sam’s crooked grins were worth anything in the world.
He sat up, legs hanging at Sam’s sides, and Sam looked up at him, biting his lip, before leaning up for a kiss Kurt declined with hand in the air between them like a barrier.
“I think it’s time for me to let you go,” he said quietly.
Sam’s brow furrowed, pained, dry lips parting, hands squeezing both of Kurt’s knees tremblingly. “If you go, I go with you,” he murmured, his voice frighteningly small. He looked into Kurt’s eyes, pleadingly, searchingly. “Don’t leave.” He pressed a kiss to Kurt’s thigh.
“I won’t,” Kurt said. He ran a hand through Sam’s hair and left it cupped against Sam’s cheek, burnt by the stubble there. “I just don’t think I can wait for you anymore, Sam. This isn’t enough for me.” The backs of his eyes burnt with tears and when he looked down at Sam’s face, all the pain and heartbreak inside of him was reflected back in terrifying clarity.
“I love you,” Sam finally said. He gripped Kurt harder. He buried his face into Kurt’s stomach and said, “Please, please.”
“You’ll never be ready,” Kurt told him, shaking his head, but he loved him, too, and he ended up holding onto Sam just as tightly.
Sam promised something more and Kurt lets himself believe it, despite himself.
-
The fifth night of the tour, Sam sang to him. Sang his sweet, folksy lovesongs through his happiest smile that Kurt sang back to him with, and the audience Kurt loved to have loving him slipped away into just Sam Evans, singing to him.
Pairing: Kurt/Sam.
Summary: For this meme prompt: AU. Sam and Kurt are on tour in a (rock or pop) band with Puck and Finn. Sometimes they talk about love and sometimes they just get up to inappropriate things on the tour bus, but everything they do together has to be kept a secret from the fans as per their manager's request. Kurt doesn't love the idea of being pushed back into the closet, but Sam isn't sure he's even ready to come out.
i want a scar that looks just like you
On graduation day Sam pulled him into an empty classroom - theirs, Kurt always thought despite himself, their classroom - shut the door behind them and pressed Kurt back against it, into a smiling kiss. He’d dizzily held onto Sam’s shoulders and thought that would be them, from now on - finally together. Finally happy.
-
In highschool, Sam would write music - sweet, folksy songs he’d play to Kurt with his guitar in the Evans’ basement. His voice sounded softer, then, frail and sometimes a little scared - sometimes he’d sing shaky vibrato on the wrong note with his wide, pale eyes stuck on Kurt’s face. He’d never show Kurt the lyrics or the music - “They’re all a mess,” he’d say, almost flushed. Even now, Kurt rarely remembered a time when Sam wasn’t hideously embarrassed about his dyslexia, or if it wasn’t that, even his handwriting. Music was the only thing that Sam knew he was good at, and the only conventional enough thing he liked that he never had to hide away.
“Why don’t you sing with me?” Sam asked once, bumping their shoulders together. He slung his guitar back over his shoulders and grinned, lazily sprawling himself over the basement sofa and tucking his toes beneath Kurt’s thigh. They had a few days like this. During the Summer, when Finn was visiting their Ohio relatives with his mom and Sam’s parents were busy taking Stevie and Stacey shopping for their first days at school. They’d lounge around Sam’s basement long enough for Kurt to stop complaining about the smell, for Sam to be suddenly contented touching him the little ways he never would outside, never would with anybody else. Long enough for the world to slip away to just Sam Evans, singing to him.
Kurt had shrugged. He’d never really sung. A few years in choir as a kid, but then they moved to Tennessee and there was no real outlet for him besides piano, since he didn’t sound like Sam when he sang country-songs into his pencil case in class or even Finn when he sang bad 80s rock in their shower. It had been a long time since he last tried, and he didn’t want to then, with Sam’s eyes so intent on him - so deeply curious about every little thing, as always - in case it wasn’t anything spectacular, wasn’t anything special.
“Maybe another time,” he said, patting Sam’s knee and trying not to read into his crooked, big smiles.
He strummed out a random chord, slowly, hummed under his breath. “I’ll hold you to that, you know,” he promised, quietly and still smiling.
-
They started the band in junior year, when it was just Finn on his seven-year-old drumkit and Sam on his dad’s guitar in the Evans’ basement. When he visited, Puck would bring his own guitar and all three of them would stay locked down there for hours on end making more noise than music. They’d excitedly drag Kurt down to here them every once and a while, and with them around Sam would sing staring out his bangs to the floor; not to Kurt. But Kurt would applaud anyway, say bravi, leave and let them get back to it.
Sam’s ‘aunt’ Sue showed up during their senior year after her car broke down outside, claiming distant relation, and overheard them in the kitchen. She gave Sam’s dad her card and Sam’s dad gave it to Sam and, for some reason, Sam ended up giving it to Kurt.
“Should I call her?” he’d asked, like it was Kurt’s decision to make, Kurt’s band and Kurt’s future. His smile had been strange, eyes a little searching when they looked into Kurt’s, and Kurt had realized this was about New York: about how Sam knew he’d never make it to a school in NYC, about how Kurt knew he absolutely had to, how they were never very good at being apart. This was Sam’s chance. Their chance.
Kurt had said yes and Sam had beamed at him, squeezed his hand and called Sue the next morning.
-
Every audition Kurt made in New York, Sam snuck in to see. He waved behind hundreds of dozens of rows of empty chairs, brightly; behind the heads of somber producers and directors who could never even try to look as thrilled at the sight of Kurt stepping onstage as Sam always was. And they would never like his voice, his stage presence, his too-obvious ‘limitations.’ They would never want him back.
Kurt stopped auditioning after the first three months, when it became clear living in New York wasn’t going to be what he’d planned, what he’d dreamed of for so, so long. It was two months after Sue had set Sam up with a professional dancer: a pretty blonde girl who seemed to like spending time hanging around Kurt talking about bad television and the proper way to shape her nails far more than dating Sam. Sam had told him in hushed tones a thousand times over it was nothing, it wasn’t real. You still hold hands, Kurt had wanted to tell him, desperately. You kiss. You are.
Instead he’d let it go. He’d let it all go.
-
In New York, Sue set them up pretty well, although Sam said she was intense and a weird kind of mean most of the time. Sam was trying to cheer him up in the hotel room she’d gotten the three of them: building a fort in the space between Finn and Puck’s beds and ordering pillows from room service to stuff it with.
They’d lay inside of it, sprawled over a dozen cushions side by side. Kurt thought about how sure he’d been of New York. About how success always seemed to come to Sam easier, instead, and he couldn’t even feel bitter about it with Sam grinning next to him, only in New York at all on his say so, to be with him. But they weren’t together, either; Sam was dating Brittany, and always too busy with Sue and rehearsals and meetings for Kurt. “Today is our day,” is what Sam proclaimed when Kurt arrived at the hotel room door, then he’d dragged him inside and done his best to make him happy, as always. He could never be mad at Sam, even when he tried his best to be.
“Are you thinking of going back?” Sam asked abruptly.
Kurt turned to find him picking the stitching of the bedspread draped over their heads and frowning. He raised an eyebrow. “No,” he answered, slowly. “Why do you ask?”
Sam shrugged, his mouth thinning.
Tennessee was never Kurt’s home, or Sam’s for that matter. Maybe his parents belonged there - his dad built a better business there, Finn’s mom made better pay - but it was what they’d dreamed of when they married, starting over again somewhere new. Kurt dreamt of New York and Sam but it became achingly more clear every day that passed that he might not have either of them in the end.
“If you go, I go with you.”
This time when he turned to face Sam, startled, Sam was staring right back at him already, looking just like the scared highschool kid he used to be. He reached out and for a moment Kurt thought he’d stroke his cheek, push back his hair, touch him some defining way, his heart pounding, and then it simply fell away again and clenched into a tight fist back at his side. Kurt was watching it instead of Sam when he was asked, softly, “You know that, right?”
Kurt thought of Sam kissing him on graduation day. Sam holding his hand and cleaning up the mess the other boys made of his face. Sam protecting him. Sam crying for him, so much. It was nice that they could still have days like these, wrapped up in each other enough that Kurt could still pretend it was something more, even if he was no longer the same wistful teenage boy.
He swallowed, turned away quickly, just said, “I know, Sam,” and left it at that.
-
Sam told Kurt that Sue said they were missing something. The first time she and Kurt met, she saw it in him - something different, defining, new. She had him sing on the spot, in the middle of Sam, Finn and Puck’s hotel room with everybody around to hear.
There was no other hope for Kurt in New York so Kurt sang - high and soft (and later Sam told him with glossy eyes, “Lovely.”) Sue said Tennessee gave his voice a nice accent. That his sound would contrast nicely with Sam’s.
Kurt asked Sam this time whether he should take up her offer or not and Sam had said yes without missing a beat.
-
Finn and Puck made faces when Sue called them a pop group, but they could never be categorized as rock or metal or anything they actually listened to with using Sam’s lyrics and Kurt’s voice. Sam didn’t seem to care either way. He let Sue tell him he’d need made-over and pulled out of his ‘hillbilly fashion offenses.’ He’d need a haircut, a shave. He’d need to spend less time with Kurt.
That’s when he started to argue, he told Kurt. “I won’t,” Sam told him, sharply. His arms were crossed, face uncharacteristically severe. “I couldn’t.” But Kurt thought it might be for the best to separate, especially if Sam was intent on keeping up the illusion of dating Brittany any longer.
He hummed as Sam complained, turned another page in his magazine. “We don’t want it to look like something it isn’t,” he said, steadfastly keeping his eyes on the page.
It crinkled in his hands when Sam’s hand pulled the the magazine down, away of his face, so suddenly Kurt had to look up at him in surprise.
Sam was staring down at him with hurt in his eyes and his jaw tightly clenched. He squeezed the magazine into his fist and just breathed out Kurt’s name, like that was all he could say. They’d always be doing this. Sam would always be too scared to say he was in love and Kurt would always be too in love with him to say he had to. They’d have their one kiss, a distant, quieting memory that Kurt looked back on like a lie he’d been told, a broken promise Sam made to them both.
Kurt stood and Sam’s hand dangled for a moment, still clutching the magazine with white-knuckled fingers before Kurt took another, dangerous step forward and he let it fall to his feet, forgotten. “Kurt,” he said again, breathless and scared but they were in Kurt’s dingy little apartment then, safe from everybody else and Kurt just wanted to feel him so badly.
Another step. He reached out, more steadily than he thought was possible with his heart hammering the way it was. He measured every breath it took to breach the distance between them. To lean up on his tip-toes and kiss Sam just one more time.
Sam’s arms wrapped around him the moment their lips touched and pulled him impossibly close, and he kissed him impossibly hard. Kurt hesitated, suddenly too light and too caught in disbelief to know what to do before his hands lifted and spread across Sam’s chest, pulling him lower by the fabric of his shirt. Sam made a noise, a whine, his hands sliding into Kurt’s hair, beneath Kurt’s shirt, scrambling to touch every part of him, taste every corner of his mouth.
Kurt bit down on Sam’s bottom lip after four years of highschool dreaming of pressing kisses to it. He tried not to cry when they broke apart, and Sam was looking at him with his wide, pale green eyes, always so terrified of how Kurt could make him feel, and then Sam simply held onto him for a long time, almost completely still until he huffed out a long, shaky sigh and pressed his forehead to Kurt’s, his eyes slipping shut.
“Kurt,” he said again, sounding more scared now than ever.
-
In highschool, Kurt would write snippets of his own plays and long winding monologues as an outlet for everything.
Growing up in Tennessee was hard on all of them - he, Sam, Finn and even Puck couldn’t stand Nashville the handful of times he visited them there. Kurt had it hardest, of course: out and proud and a devastatingly strange being to the entirety of the South. After him it was Sam, always the one to press ice-packs against Kurt’s bruised cheeks with one hand and squeeze Kurt’s with the other. Sam cried a lot in front of Kurt in highschool - because Kurt got hurt, because Kurt was called something vulgar, because Kurt was his best friend; because Sam saw what the world would do to him if he were honest with it, too.
Once, Kurt wrote about that. A highschool superstar’s progression into loneliness, into their reality, living in the closet. It was the only thing he wrote that he’d ever shown to Sam, hopefully, both of them sat upright and tense on his bedspread - Kurt was nervous to actually acknowledge what they both knew Sam was in any form and Sam was nervous when Kurt asked him to read anything at all, had only shrugged and shyly mumbled, “It might take a while but I’ll look at it for you, of course, yeah.”
Looking back Kurt wonders if he was a little sadistic in highschool. If he wanted Sam to experience all the pain he’d been able to escape in five-hundred words of closeted despair, if when Sam’s face collapsed into grief halfway through he’d felt some kind of satisfaction. If he’d liked making Sam cry.
-
Sue knew from the start.
They didn’t act any differently, hardly even at all. The most significant change was how Sam would hold his hand sometimes in the pillow fort between their two beds after Kurt had been moved out of his apartment into the hotel with the others - rooming with Sam with Finn and Puck across the hall. Sometimes at night after they brushed their teeth Sam would stay and look at Kurt in the bathroom mirror while he moisturized and give him goodnight kisses on the softened skin of his forehead, his temple, the backs of his hands. Sometimes Sam would watch him too intently while he folded their clothes, while he ate, while he did anything at all. But they still hadn’t actually talked about it.
Sue tutted about them in rehearsal, called Kurt ‘Yoko-Homo’, said they should do a better job paying attention to her advice. Then they played one of Sam’s songs and she called all of them talentless; heartless ear-murderers; the reason her internal organs were all currently trying to escape her body.
“And when I say practice singing I don’t mean on each others faces,” she snapped afterwards.
-
It only took a little while before Sam started clambering into Kurt’s narrow single at night. He’d bury his face in Kurt’s hair and Kurt would feel his chest rise slowly against the skin of his bare back, his warm, even breath tickling the back of his neck all through the night. The first few mornings they’d stay that way, silently, then Sam started drawing with his fingertips across Kurt’s back and asking Kurt to guess what it was, Sam started laughing at the sensation of Kurt’s fluttering eyelashes whenever he awoke, Sam started smiling into his naked shoulder blade and kissing up to his ear as a way of saying 'good morning.' Kurt was always too hung up on overthinking this, and them, and what any of these mornings really meant at all.
They were harder to get as their schedules became busier, and Finn and Puck became restlessly excited - banging on their room door, barging inside whenever they felt like it and suddenly desperate to see New York, all of it there was. Sue set up meetings. Sue set Finn up with classy Broadway girls and set up Puck with a former beauty pagaent winner. Kurt turned all of her dating suggestions away and watched Sam watching him, Brittany pretty and sweet by his side whenever he left the hotel now.
“He’s nice,” she told Kurt once, tilting her head thoughtfully and absentmindedly fiddling with his polka-dot bowtie. “He’s really into like, talking in a Star Wars voice.” Kurt snorted. She shrugged. “He’s not into anything else. And he’s only kissed me here.” She pointed to her cheek, almost sadly.
Kurt felt so abruptly full of guilt that he agreed to let her paint his nails while they waited for Sam to finish showering. The next morning he woke up to find Sam smiling at him already, brushing his bangs back from his face, and told him he had to break up with her. “For her sake,” he said firmly, although he wasn’t entirely sure that was the case.
-
It passed in a blur. They had an album, a fanbase, a place to live that wasn’t inside of a hotel. Sue worked them for the rest of the year through interviews, articles, publicizing their tour in plastic looking photoshoots and gossip she spread over Finn and his new girlfriend. Sam and Kurt kept their distance at all times; some people actually believed they didn’t get along at all, they didn’t talk, that Sam was homophobic. Sam mentioned in passing to an interviewer that Kurt had been his best-friend since highschool, and when Sue blew up at him he called it ‘damage control’, which, surprisingly enough, calmed her down.
Sam still snuck into Kurt’s bedroom some nights, when Finn and Puck were definitely, definitely asleep. He’d kiss him slowly and languidly and at times Kurt would forget thath they’d come to New York to be together, and ended further apart than ever before.
Sam got drunk one night with Puck and came into Kurt’s room crying about it once. “It’s harder now,” he said, clutching his hair painfully tight into his hands. Kurt tried to ease them off, speaking softly, stroking his thumbs over his knuckles and kissing his tears. Sam had shook his head. “I just made it harder for us, didn’t I?”
“It wasn’t you. It was never you,” Kurt assured him, trying to smile. Then he’d kissed him, again and again.
-
Sam was bad the first night of the tour. Low-spirited and sad and singing without real heart. Kurt wondered what he saw when he looked out at their audience: people who loved him or an obstacle between the two of them, something to blame for the way he felt and the way he was.
-
Sam got drunk, again. This time Kurt did, too, on the tour on a one night stop to some nightclubs that ended in Kurt pulling Sam into a taxi to their hotel. He kept his hands off of him until they reach the hotel room, then he slided their bodies together, grinded Sam back into the wall and kissed him more messily than he ever had before.
“I want you,” he growled into Sam’s neck, pawing at his t-shirt until Sam obligingly stripped it off and threw it away, looking down at Kurt with bright, intent eyes. “I can’t stop wanting you.”
He stripped Sam down to his boxers and let Sam fumblingly undo his shirt buttons and drag it off of shoulders, clumsily sucking kisses into his exposed collarbone and moaning the desperate, despairing way he always did for Kurt. Kurt rolled their hips together and held onto Sam so tightly his fingernails left marks in the skin of his back.
“Come here,” he said, stepping away, and Sam stumblingly followed. “Turn around,” he said, and Sam took a deep breath and turned.
Kurt took hold of his wrists and pinned them at the small of his back, licking a wet stripe up the line of his spine that made Sam shudder. He yanked Sam closer and rocked onto the balls of his feet against him, sighing at the feel of Sam’s ass against him, of Sam pushing back against him and letting out a soft, stuttering moan. “Finally,” Sam breathed, leaning his head back onto Kurt’s shoulder and hitching his breath every time Kurt thrust against him, every time Kurt’s hand would slide an inch further down into his boxers.
Someone banged on the hotel room door.
It was locked, and probably only Finn or Puck announcing their returns, but Sam pulled away like he’d been scalded and stood with his back to the wall, breathing heavily and unevenly and watching Kurt through his terrified eyes.
He’d opened his mouth with nothing to say and shook his head again, like he simply couldn’t be here, couldn’t do this, thrown on all his things and gone.
-
Sam stopped singing the third night of the tour, mid-harmony. Kurt sang alone, didn’t look at him or acknowledge his silence but felt Sam’s eyes heavy on him and something inside of himself aching like a burn.
-
The tour bus was quiet afterwards. Finn and Puck gave them space, Finn watching him worriedly every so often, but eventually Sam appeared at his bedside, kneeling, eyes hidden by his messy bangs, his mouth straining like he was about to cry.
Kurt looked at him, blankly, ignoring the urgent need to push his hair out of his face, to have him smile. He found Sam’s eyes through a mess of blond, overwhelmingly sad and lovely.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry since we were sixteen.” Sam's voice was strange, like he was trying to keep it audible, keep it from breaking. He reached out, tentatively, and curled his hand around Kurt’s.
“Me too,” Kurt said, and he had. Loving Sam hadn’t brought him any of the things he’d always believed real love would have. It made him a little miserable, really, to see pretty New York boys smiling back at him and feel nothing, not ever, like only Sam’s crooked grins were worth anything in the world.
He sat up, legs hanging at Sam’s sides, and Sam looked up at him, biting his lip, before leaning up for a kiss Kurt declined with hand in the air between them like a barrier.
“I think it’s time for me to let you go,” he said quietly.
Sam’s brow furrowed, pained, dry lips parting, hands squeezing both of Kurt’s knees tremblingly. “If you go, I go with you,” he murmured, his voice frighteningly small. He looked into Kurt’s eyes, pleadingly, searchingly. “Don’t leave.” He pressed a kiss to Kurt’s thigh.
“I won’t,” Kurt said. He ran a hand through Sam’s hair and left it cupped against Sam’s cheek, burnt by the stubble there. “I just don’t think I can wait for you anymore, Sam. This isn’t enough for me.” The backs of his eyes burnt with tears and when he looked down at Sam’s face, all the pain and heartbreak inside of him was reflected back in terrifying clarity.
“I love you,” Sam finally said. He gripped Kurt harder. He buried his face into Kurt’s stomach and said, “Please, please.”
“You’ll never be ready,” Kurt told him, shaking his head, but he loved him, too, and he ended up holding onto Sam just as tightly.
Sam promised something more and Kurt lets himself believe it, despite himself.
-
The fifth night of the tour, Sam sang to him. Sang his sweet, folksy lovesongs through his happiest smile that Kurt sang back to him with, and the audience Kurt loved to have loving him slipped away into just Sam Evans, singing to him.