Glee!fic: Summer Song
Summer Song, Glee!fic
Disclaimer: I would clearly make very different decisions about the show were it mine. It isn't. Feh.
Rating: PG-13, fairly innocent all things considered ^^
Spoilers: It's all fair game; set the summer after New York.
Summary: Maybe he just forgets between summers what hell they are, maybe it's global warming, maybe it's watching Blaine eat too many Popsicles; he's never been so agonisingly hot for so unendingly long.
Note: This was the fic I meant to write immediately after I watched New York but I'm glad I waited before I did, because I think this is what I actually wanted to say with it. I know they both had plans for the summer; *I* always have plans for the summer, but heat makes people lazy . . .
It's the hottest summer he can remember. Maybe he just forgets between summers what hell they are, maybe it's global warming, maybe it's watching Blaine eat too many Popsicles; he's never been so agonisingly hot for so unendingly long. The only relief comes from cool showers and the breeze on a night, and any patch of shade he can find.
Kurt loves winter, really. Loves really well fitted jackets, loves planning layers, loves scarves. He's never been Blaine's boyfriend in the wintertime and he thinks about it probably too much, all the little ways they can stand closer, warm each others' hands, share heat. The summer is hell, hell, hell. Kurt wears factor fifty and lots of sunglasses and hats, and gets headaches from the glare.
Blaine loves it. Loves the heat, loves the sun, loves sprawling out on the grass, eyes closed and blissful. He points out the rainbows in sprinklers (which he can never resist, and Kurt has unexpectedly had his hair soaked more shrieking times than he can count already), has endless playlists dedicated to each exact moment of a summer day (the growing warmth of the mornings, the bright endless noons, the long empty afternoons, the slow-falling evenings, the cooler, closer nights), just wears the summer like it's exactly what is supposed to lay over his skin. He's so natural in the sun that he makes Kurt forget how tense it makes him feel; he looks at Blaine, and everything seems right.
They spend a lot of their days in the park, Blaine crashed out in the sunlight, Kurt sitting next to him in the shade of a tree, mostly just watching him because Blaine's eyes are closed and he doesn't have to know that Kurt's been staring at him breaking only to blink for the last two hours. The sun gleams off him, his skin looks all glossy and golden, sun-shiny and smooth, and Kurt blinks and blinks to try to get the blinding thought of chasing the light over Blaine's skin with his mouth out of his mind. Blaine wears a lot of polo shirts and Kurt tells him he's so damn prep but he loves that little dip at the throat where he can see Blaine's breastbone underneath his polished skin. And oh god the way he smells, his skin and the slight background scent of his sweat - it always makes Kurt feel inexplicably hungry - and that cool lotion smell turned warm in the sun, oh god. He meets Kurt in a morning fresh from the shower and still smelling of shampoo, Kurt has to close his eyes to keep his feet, he smells delicious.
Kurt could stay there forever, side by side and talking now and then, sharing an iPod and one set of headphones, in comfortable silence getting through their summer reading lists. Some days Blaine will bring one instrument or another - a guitar, a ukelele, a keytar, a harmonica - and they'll make music just for themselves, not even really aware of the Frisbee players and sunbathers listening in. Kurt doesn't even notice how itchy the grass is, somehow doesn't mind the bugs. Sometimes for a change they'll go get frozen yoghurt, iced coffee, wander the town talking, Blaine just never seems boring. Even when he's got nothing to say, just his being there keeps Kurt content. And Kurt can glance at a guy in pitiful shorts and catch Blaine's eye and Blaine will crook his eyebrows in an I know and everything will just make sense. Everything does make sense when Blaine's there.
They don't stay in the park on a night. They both have their reasons to be cautious, and when trucks pull up and disgorge packs of loud guys with crates of beer and footballs, they slip away. They head to Kurt's back garden, for Popsicles and companionable bickering on the back porch while the night falls. Sometimes Finn and Rachel are there, sometimes not, sometimes Mercedes comes over but Kurt does see less of her that summer, and is too preoccupied himself to notice much.
August is unbearable. There has never been so hot a month in the history of the planet Earth as that August, it was probably cooler when it was still a molten ball of candle-coloured lava. Kurt retreats to his room, draws the blinds, refuses to leave. No sunblock yet made can save him from this. He'll freckle.
Blaine accepts this announcement without fuss, just puts some music on and throws himself onto Kurt's bed, leaves his scent in the sheets and when he leaves on a night, Kurt's dreams are tangled and feverish and smell like Blaine. All the ways they can't be close in the park they can in the day-darkened solitude of Kurt's room with his dad and Carole at work and Finn out god knows where, Kurt doesn't care where when Blaine's hands are hot on his skin and every breath is warm and full of him, and who invented kissing? It's the best thing ever. Kurt knows every millimetre of the inside of Blaine's mouth now, knows the wet heat and sharp teeth and strong tongue of him with his eyes closed and his hands getting weak. And he smells - and he tastes - and Kurt is beginning to understand not sex itself but the way that people talk about sex. He'd always thought before, how could you be so stupid as to do it without protection, or when you're not sure, or with someone you know it's a bad idea to sleep with? But now he understands not being able to control it because if Blaine pushed, Kurt would fall. He feels so hopelessly opened. But Blaine - pulling himself up, unpeeling his fingers from Kurt's hands and wrists, head tucked to his chest and breathing quick - doesn't push. Kurt closes his eyes and tries to work out if he's glad or if he wishes . . .
Blaine climbs off the bed, the sheets clinging to them both with damp heat, pulls Kurt up by the hand, turns the music up and tugs him gently into his body. They didn't do this even at prom, didn't slow dance together, oh god Kurt had wanted to but they just stood next to each other, not even touching, they did everything right and still -
He doesn't think about that. He slips his hand up Blaine's back, palm to the back of his neck, fingers lost in his damp-at-the-roots hair, holds him close by the waist while Blaine picks up the low sultry rhythm of the song. They dance in the dimmed air of Kurt's bedroom in an ungodly hot August, hip to hip and bare feet on the carpet, and Kurt closes his eyes, lets his breath helplessly loose against the side of Blaine's neck and feels him shiver.
*
Kurt looks out of place in the summer. He looks slightly out of place in any circumstances, the only place he would probably look like nothing out of the ordinary is Middle Earth but in Ohio he's always a little fey and strange in all the good ways. In Ohio in the summer he looks distant, cool and ethereal behind sunglasses, underneath cocked hat brims, he looks like a mirage. He often looks pissed; he hates being too hot. He says the sun gives him headaches. Blaine indulges him with all the shade he can find, slumps out in the sun next to him happy as a dog by a fire and whenever he opens his eyes Kurt's still there and his heart bumps a little. He tests himself, makes himself keep his eyes closed longer and longer, while they share an iPod and Blaine can hear birds and insects and other people's laughing voices through his one open ear, he wets his lips and feels the hard earth under his skull and closes his fingers in the grass and opens his eyes -
And Kurt is still there, regal and in some way untouchable in the shade, and Blaine's heart wags its tail in clumsy relief, even the tenth time he tries it, even the twentieth. Kurt doesn't leave him. Ice sculptures melt but nothing changes Kurt, who flicks him a little smile and leans down, touches a hand to the grass, raises it with a ladybug determinedly climbing the mountain range of his fingers. He holds his hand out and Blaine touches the side of his fingers to the side of Kurt's, feels its tiny insect feet patter over his skin now. Kurt watches, smiles, offers his hand for the ladybug's next arduous journey through the foothills before setting it back to the grass.
When they head back to Kurt's house on the evening Kurt has a freezer full of Popsicles in crazy flavours from the Asian supermarket, and Blaine lets Kurt choose because Blaine's bad luck just keeps getting them lychee. They sit in the back garden watching the night stain everything blue, huge heady moons and heat-hazy stars overhead, licking melon and green tea and unknown pink melt from their fingers. Kurt sits on a slightly higher step, his leg pressed along Blaine's side, Blaine happy leaning into his knee. The grass still smells warm even when curfew's seriously long over and Blaine has to head home; Kurt's goodnight kiss tastes of melon or green tea or unknown pink, sweet and cool.
In the middle of July they get wild thunderstorms, like the sky's trying to tear loose from the ground, the thunder makes the earth shake. The power goes out a couple of nights and Blaine opens his bedroom window, calls Kurt. There's still power where Kurt is, he can hear the music in the background, just, through the hell-bent plunge of the rain. "It's cool," Kurt says, and the thunder cracks the sky above Blaine's window, makes his muscles twitch somewhere between shock and eagerness. "I wouldn't care if it was snowing just so long as it's not that miserably hot anymore."
Blaine sticks his head out of the window, hears the building grumble of thunder on Kurt's end of the line, closes his eyes against the drumming of the raindrops. "It's heading in your direction."
"Mm. What's that sound?"
"It smells really good."
"Have you got your head out of the window?"
"It smells amazing."
"You're like a dog sticking its head out of a car."
Blaine says, a little garbled around his extended tongue, "It tastes great too!"
Kurt laughs, startled and delighted, and Blaine opens his eyes to see jealous lightning clawing along the skyline. "You are ridiculous," Kurt says. "You are just so-"
"Open your window. It smells so good."
"Can you get electrocuted by a cell phone in the rain?"
"Just put your hand out. It feels amazing."
"If I get struck by lightning I want 'I told you so' on my tombstone." Blaine hears the thump of a window opening. "Ah - it's cold -"
"You just spent two months bitching about how hot it is."
Kurt gives a little swallowed shriek on the line. Blaine says, "Have you put your head out?"
"My hair is ruined and it's your fault."
"But doesn't it smell great?"
Kurt starts laughing again, and Blaine blinks the rain from his eyes and thunder booms and reverberates like the whole orchestra just went through the floor, then echoes from Kurt's end of the line, chased by his sweet bright laughter like the sun coming out.
That August is just insane, though. So hot the water from the sprinklers evaporates on tarmac before the spray swings back around, and Blaine calls on Kurt one morning and he refuses to leave the house or open the blinds. Blaine shrugs. It's hot as hell and his boyfriend is here, he's got no reason to leave. Kurt sits next to him on the bed, puts his hand over Blaine's, feels with his fingers across his knuckles and the tendons running back to the wrist like he's learning his anatomy from the outside in. The house is empty but for them; Blaine fans his fingers out, catching Kurt's between them, folds them in, tugs Kurt down. They kiss, slow with heat and kiss-fogged brains, until their skin sticks against each other and when Kurt blinks his eyes open Blaine can hardly see the blue for how huge his pupils are. Blaine -
Could. He can imagine it, heart pumping too hard in too many parts of his body, blood risen so high in this heat, a flimsy layer of skin and then his hot stuttering pulse. He wonders, Kurt laying easy and open under his side, hands caught in Blaine's t-shirt like they're stuck there, eyes half-lidded and dark with kisses if Kurt, would Kurt, would . . .
It feels like it belongs to a different world to them, as yet. There will be time for it, but this summer, this summer is their skin just learning each other's, their bodies just learning themselves, this is enough, for now. They'll know when it's time. There'll be a sign, they'll feel ready, they'll know, it won't be idiot lust made overeager by this airless, endless summer. August will fade, eventually, even though it doesn't feel like it even can right now. The air will cool. The autumn will wake them from this summer stupor and give them their minds back, make it a choice more than foolish greedy flesh made giddy by the smell of Kurt warm, Blaine's tongue wants to be everywhere on him right now, wants to follow those blue shadows against the white skin of his breastbone and behind his jaw, just wants too much.
Instead he hauls himself from the bed, pushes sweat-tangled hair back, takes Kurt's hands and pulls him into a dance, to whatever heavy slow summer track is playing from Kurt's laptop. He folds his arms around him, breathes him in, concentrates on the music and the unquestioning boy in his arms, who would follow him through anything and he knows it. If Kurt's letting him set the pace, this is the pace he chooses: he wants to drag every experience with Kurt out for as long as he can, draw each state out so he can fully appreciate every subtlety of it, watch every shade of unhidden emotion pass over Kurt's face in these moments they share. And right now this is what he wants to draw out long, dancing in Kurt's bedroom with the blinds drawn on a stifling August afternoon, Kurt's breath drawing in and letting loose against his neck, his fingers tightening in Blaine's hair while Blaine closes his eyes and folds his arms closer around him as his body shivers just a little, and whatever he thought love was, he never knew that he even could have this.
*
They follow the rhythm, slow and heavy with August heat, body to body in the odd dusty light casting in around the edges of the blinds. Time used to be measured by clocks but when Blaine touches him like this Kurt could be eighty years old and have danced with him like this his whole life, he could be a child taking his hands for the first time, it could be another and another anniversary, he could be sixteen and in love and hushed all the way through with feeling so much. God knows he's had crushes, but he has never wanted to touch anyone like this, never felt comfortable touching anyone like this. Their hands are simultaneously awed and comforted by each other's warm bodies. Then he was clumsy with all his layers of lies and he just liked the idea of love, and now - love terrifies him a little but he's here and he won't change his mind, he won't be anything but honest now. Blaine is the best thing that has ever happened to him. Nothing else will ever be better than Blaine but that's fine because so long as Blaine is there everything is better anyway . . .
Blaine's skin is warm, a little damp against his cheek, the press of his nose. Kurt closes his eyes against the side of his forehead, feels Blaine's hair on his skin, he could say something but can't catch a word that means enough into his mouth. He just blinks, eyelashes brushing skin, and whispers, the word escaping him low against Blaine's jaw, "Blaine."
Blaine's arm presses him in closer by the waist and his breath comes out a little rough. Kurt closes his eyes again and lets the song turn them, slow as the unending summer afternoons. The room is half-dark and all the world is stilled by heat but for them, dancing unhurried and unconcerned with all the heat-stupid world, with all that sun-crazed air shimmering over the dead streets outside. All they need is the music, and this empty room, and each other's sure arms, and this dance as slow as summer.
When they are eighty, Kurt thinks. When it's another anniversary and another and another. When they've known each other's whole lives and they still dance like this, time will mean only that he is still this sixteen year old so in love with this boy, time will only mean that it's still this moment, just a few summers along. A few summers, a few winters, what difference do they make? The music's still playing, and Blaine kisses, for just one second, the bared side of his throat.
It's the hottest summer he can remember, like it's the first he's ever lived.
Disclaimer: I would clearly make very different decisions about the show were it mine. It isn't. Feh.
Rating: PG-13, fairly innocent all things considered ^^
Spoilers: It's all fair game; set the summer after New York.
Summary: Maybe he just forgets between summers what hell they are, maybe it's global warming, maybe it's watching Blaine eat too many Popsicles; he's never been so agonisingly hot for so unendingly long.
Note: This was the fic I meant to write immediately after I watched New York but I'm glad I waited before I did, because I think this is what I actually wanted to say with it. I know they both had plans for the summer; *I* always have plans for the summer, but heat makes people lazy . . .
It's the hottest summer he can remember. Maybe he just forgets between summers what hell they are, maybe it's global warming, maybe it's watching Blaine eat too many Popsicles; he's never been so agonisingly hot for so unendingly long. The only relief comes from cool showers and the breeze on a night, and any patch of shade he can find.
Kurt loves winter, really. Loves really well fitted jackets, loves planning layers, loves scarves. He's never been Blaine's boyfriend in the wintertime and he thinks about it probably too much, all the little ways they can stand closer, warm each others' hands, share heat. The summer is hell, hell, hell. Kurt wears factor fifty and lots of sunglasses and hats, and gets headaches from the glare.
Blaine loves it. Loves the heat, loves the sun, loves sprawling out on the grass, eyes closed and blissful. He points out the rainbows in sprinklers (which he can never resist, and Kurt has unexpectedly had his hair soaked more shrieking times than he can count already), has endless playlists dedicated to each exact moment of a summer day (the growing warmth of the mornings, the bright endless noons, the long empty afternoons, the slow-falling evenings, the cooler, closer nights), just wears the summer like it's exactly what is supposed to lay over his skin. He's so natural in the sun that he makes Kurt forget how tense it makes him feel; he looks at Blaine, and everything seems right.
They spend a lot of their days in the park, Blaine crashed out in the sunlight, Kurt sitting next to him in the shade of a tree, mostly just watching him because Blaine's eyes are closed and he doesn't have to know that Kurt's been staring at him breaking only to blink for the last two hours. The sun gleams off him, his skin looks all glossy and golden, sun-shiny and smooth, and Kurt blinks and blinks to try to get the blinding thought of chasing the light over Blaine's skin with his mouth out of his mind. Blaine wears a lot of polo shirts and Kurt tells him he's so damn prep but he loves that little dip at the throat where he can see Blaine's breastbone underneath his polished skin. And oh god the way he smells, his skin and the slight background scent of his sweat - it always makes Kurt feel inexplicably hungry - and that cool lotion smell turned warm in the sun, oh god. He meets Kurt in a morning fresh from the shower and still smelling of shampoo, Kurt has to close his eyes to keep his feet, he smells delicious.
Kurt could stay there forever, side by side and talking now and then, sharing an iPod and one set of headphones, in comfortable silence getting through their summer reading lists. Some days Blaine will bring one instrument or another - a guitar, a ukelele, a keytar, a harmonica - and they'll make music just for themselves, not even really aware of the Frisbee players and sunbathers listening in. Kurt doesn't even notice how itchy the grass is, somehow doesn't mind the bugs. Sometimes for a change they'll go get frozen yoghurt, iced coffee, wander the town talking, Blaine just never seems boring. Even when he's got nothing to say, just his being there keeps Kurt content. And Kurt can glance at a guy in pitiful shorts and catch Blaine's eye and Blaine will crook his eyebrows in an I know and everything will just make sense. Everything does make sense when Blaine's there.
They don't stay in the park on a night. They both have their reasons to be cautious, and when trucks pull up and disgorge packs of loud guys with crates of beer and footballs, they slip away. They head to Kurt's back garden, for Popsicles and companionable bickering on the back porch while the night falls. Sometimes Finn and Rachel are there, sometimes not, sometimes Mercedes comes over but Kurt does see less of her that summer, and is too preoccupied himself to notice much.
August is unbearable. There has never been so hot a month in the history of the planet Earth as that August, it was probably cooler when it was still a molten ball of candle-coloured lava. Kurt retreats to his room, draws the blinds, refuses to leave. No sunblock yet made can save him from this. He'll freckle.
Blaine accepts this announcement without fuss, just puts some music on and throws himself onto Kurt's bed, leaves his scent in the sheets and when he leaves on a night, Kurt's dreams are tangled and feverish and smell like Blaine. All the ways they can't be close in the park they can in the day-darkened solitude of Kurt's room with his dad and Carole at work and Finn out god knows where, Kurt doesn't care where when Blaine's hands are hot on his skin and every breath is warm and full of him, and who invented kissing? It's the best thing ever. Kurt knows every millimetre of the inside of Blaine's mouth now, knows the wet heat and sharp teeth and strong tongue of him with his eyes closed and his hands getting weak. And he smells - and he tastes - and Kurt is beginning to understand not sex itself but the way that people talk about sex. He'd always thought before, how could you be so stupid as to do it without protection, or when you're not sure, or with someone you know it's a bad idea to sleep with? But now he understands not being able to control it because if Blaine pushed, Kurt would fall. He feels so hopelessly opened. But Blaine - pulling himself up, unpeeling his fingers from Kurt's hands and wrists, head tucked to his chest and breathing quick - doesn't push. Kurt closes his eyes and tries to work out if he's glad or if he wishes . . .
Blaine climbs off the bed, the sheets clinging to them both with damp heat, pulls Kurt up by the hand, turns the music up and tugs him gently into his body. They didn't do this even at prom, didn't slow dance together, oh god Kurt had wanted to but they just stood next to each other, not even touching, they did everything right and still -
He doesn't think about that. He slips his hand up Blaine's back, palm to the back of his neck, fingers lost in his damp-at-the-roots hair, holds him close by the waist while Blaine picks up the low sultry rhythm of the song. They dance in the dimmed air of Kurt's bedroom in an ungodly hot August, hip to hip and bare feet on the carpet, and Kurt closes his eyes, lets his breath helplessly loose against the side of Blaine's neck and feels him shiver.
*
Kurt looks out of place in the summer. He looks slightly out of place in any circumstances, the only place he would probably look like nothing out of the ordinary is Middle Earth but in Ohio he's always a little fey and strange in all the good ways. In Ohio in the summer he looks distant, cool and ethereal behind sunglasses, underneath cocked hat brims, he looks like a mirage. He often looks pissed; he hates being too hot. He says the sun gives him headaches. Blaine indulges him with all the shade he can find, slumps out in the sun next to him happy as a dog by a fire and whenever he opens his eyes Kurt's still there and his heart bumps a little. He tests himself, makes himself keep his eyes closed longer and longer, while they share an iPod and Blaine can hear birds and insects and other people's laughing voices through his one open ear, he wets his lips and feels the hard earth under his skull and closes his fingers in the grass and opens his eyes -
And Kurt is still there, regal and in some way untouchable in the shade, and Blaine's heart wags its tail in clumsy relief, even the tenth time he tries it, even the twentieth. Kurt doesn't leave him. Ice sculptures melt but nothing changes Kurt, who flicks him a little smile and leans down, touches a hand to the grass, raises it with a ladybug determinedly climbing the mountain range of his fingers. He holds his hand out and Blaine touches the side of his fingers to the side of Kurt's, feels its tiny insect feet patter over his skin now. Kurt watches, smiles, offers his hand for the ladybug's next arduous journey through the foothills before setting it back to the grass.
When they head back to Kurt's house on the evening Kurt has a freezer full of Popsicles in crazy flavours from the Asian supermarket, and Blaine lets Kurt choose because Blaine's bad luck just keeps getting them lychee. They sit in the back garden watching the night stain everything blue, huge heady moons and heat-hazy stars overhead, licking melon and green tea and unknown pink melt from their fingers. Kurt sits on a slightly higher step, his leg pressed along Blaine's side, Blaine happy leaning into his knee. The grass still smells warm even when curfew's seriously long over and Blaine has to head home; Kurt's goodnight kiss tastes of melon or green tea or unknown pink, sweet and cool.
In the middle of July they get wild thunderstorms, like the sky's trying to tear loose from the ground, the thunder makes the earth shake. The power goes out a couple of nights and Blaine opens his bedroom window, calls Kurt. There's still power where Kurt is, he can hear the music in the background, just, through the hell-bent plunge of the rain. "It's cool," Kurt says, and the thunder cracks the sky above Blaine's window, makes his muscles twitch somewhere between shock and eagerness. "I wouldn't care if it was snowing just so long as it's not that miserably hot anymore."
Blaine sticks his head out of the window, hears the building grumble of thunder on Kurt's end of the line, closes his eyes against the drumming of the raindrops. "It's heading in your direction."
"Mm. What's that sound?"
"It smells really good."
"Have you got your head out of the window?"
"It smells amazing."
"You're like a dog sticking its head out of a car."
Blaine says, a little garbled around his extended tongue, "It tastes great too!"
Kurt laughs, startled and delighted, and Blaine opens his eyes to see jealous lightning clawing along the skyline. "You are ridiculous," Kurt says. "You are just so-"
"Open your window. It smells so good."
"Can you get electrocuted by a cell phone in the rain?"
"Just put your hand out. It feels amazing."
"If I get struck by lightning I want 'I told you so' on my tombstone." Blaine hears the thump of a window opening. "Ah - it's cold -"
"You just spent two months bitching about how hot it is."
Kurt gives a little swallowed shriek on the line. Blaine says, "Have you put your head out?"
"My hair is ruined and it's your fault."
"But doesn't it smell great?"
Kurt starts laughing again, and Blaine blinks the rain from his eyes and thunder booms and reverberates like the whole orchestra just went through the floor, then echoes from Kurt's end of the line, chased by his sweet bright laughter like the sun coming out.
That August is just insane, though. So hot the water from the sprinklers evaporates on tarmac before the spray swings back around, and Blaine calls on Kurt one morning and he refuses to leave the house or open the blinds. Blaine shrugs. It's hot as hell and his boyfriend is here, he's got no reason to leave. Kurt sits next to him on the bed, puts his hand over Blaine's, feels with his fingers across his knuckles and the tendons running back to the wrist like he's learning his anatomy from the outside in. The house is empty but for them; Blaine fans his fingers out, catching Kurt's between them, folds them in, tugs Kurt down. They kiss, slow with heat and kiss-fogged brains, until their skin sticks against each other and when Kurt blinks his eyes open Blaine can hardly see the blue for how huge his pupils are. Blaine -
Could. He can imagine it, heart pumping too hard in too many parts of his body, blood risen so high in this heat, a flimsy layer of skin and then his hot stuttering pulse. He wonders, Kurt laying easy and open under his side, hands caught in Blaine's t-shirt like they're stuck there, eyes half-lidded and dark with kisses if Kurt, would Kurt, would . . .
It feels like it belongs to a different world to them, as yet. There will be time for it, but this summer, this summer is their skin just learning each other's, their bodies just learning themselves, this is enough, for now. They'll know when it's time. There'll be a sign, they'll feel ready, they'll know, it won't be idiot lust made overeager by this airless, endless summer. August will fade, eventually, even though it doesn't feel like it even can right now. The air will cool. The autumn will wake them from this summer stupor and give them their minds back, make it a choice more than foolish greedy flesh made giddy by the smell of Kurt warm, Blaine's tongue wants to be everywhere on him right now, wants to follow those blue shadows against the white skin of his breastbone and behind his jaw, just wants too much.
Instead he hauls himself from the bed, pushes sweat-tangled hair back, takes Kurt's hands and pulls him into a dance, to whatever heavy slow summer track is playing from Kurt's laptop. He folds his arms around him, breathes him in, concentrates on the music and the unquestioning boy in his arms, who would follow him through anything and he knows it. If Kurt's letting him set the pace, this is the pace he chooses: he wants to drag every experience with Kurt out for as long as he can, draw each state out so he can fully appreciate every subtlety of it, watch every shade of unhidden emotion pass over Kurt's face in these moments they share. And right now this is what he wants to draw out long, dancing in Kurt's bedroom with the blinds drawn on a stifling August afternoon, Kurt's breath drawing in and letting loose against his neck, his fingers tightening in Blaine's hair while Blaine closes his eyes and folds his arms closer around him as his body shivers just a little, and whatever he thought love was, he never knew that he even could have this.
*
They follow the rhythm, slow and heavy with August heat, body to body in the odd dusty light casting in around the edges of the blinds. Time used to be measured by clocks but when Blaine touches him like this Kurt could be eighty years old and have danced with him like this his whole life, he could be a child taking his hands for the first time, it could be another and another anniversary, he could be sixteen and in love and hushed all the way through with feeling so much. God knows he's had crushes, but he has never wanted to touch anyone like this, never felt comfortable touching anyone like this. Their hands are simultaneously awed and comforted by each other's warm bodies. Then he was clumsy with all his layers of lies and he just liked the idea of love, and now - love terrifies him a little but he's here and he won't change his mind, he won't be anything but honest now. Blaine is the best thing that has ever happened to him. Nothing else will ever be better than Blaine but that's fine because so long as Blaine is there everything is better anyway . . .
Blaine's skin is warm, a little damp against his cheek, the press of his nose. Kurt closes his eyes against the side of his forehead, feels Blaine's hair on his skin, he could say something but can't catch a word that means enough into his mouth. He just blinks, eyelashes brushing skin, and whispers, the word escaping him low against Blaine's jaw, "Blaine."
Blaine's arm presses him in closer by the waist and his breath comes out a little rough. Kurt closes his eyes again and lets the song turn them, slow as the unending summer afternoons. The room is half-dark and all the world is stilled by heat but for them, dancing unhurried and unconcerned with all the heat-stupid world, with all that sun-crazed air shimmering over the dead streets outside. All they need is the music, and this empty room, and each other's sure arms, and this dance as slow as summer.
When they are eighty, Kurt thinks. When it's another anniversary and another and another. When they've known each other's whole lives and they still dance like this, time will mean only that he is still this sixteen year old so in love with this boy, time will only mean that it's still this moment, just a few summers along. A few summers, a few winters, what difference do they make? The music's still playing, and Blaine kisses, for just one second, the bared side of his throat.
It's the hottest summer he can remember, like it's the first he's ever lived.