![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmTitle: What the Spiders Wove
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~3,000
Summary: Sometimes what people want only becomes clear when it seems like it's not going to happen. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Phoenix.
The series so far:
Boston: Following Home | These Thousand Names for Gratitude | All the Honesty of Politics | Circles as the Dark Winds Down | The Distance Between Ohio and Boston | All the Pretty Little Horses | Languages You Don't Even Know | Fauna and Flora | Where Water Doesn't Speak | Under Glass We Are Expected to Blossom | You Were Someone Else Before We Came Here
D.C.: Strategies and Tactics | The Many Shades of Sugar | When Sea Levels Rise | The History of Sand | Tales of Minor Gods | A Little Bit Ruined | The Numbers Held by Ghosts | Weights and Measures | Anamnesis | Hello, I Must Be Going | And I Have Heard You Speaking | More Honored Than the Other Animals | Melissa, Mellonia, or Deborah | On the Throwing of Stones
Whatever happens in Los Angeles, Jay doesn’t tell Kurt about it. He makes it back on time for Tuesday’s show and he seems neither disappointed nor elated. Other than the data vacuum -- which he finds innately sinister, like silence in the woods of a horror movie or the halls of a high school – Kurt is relieved.
They stay out of each other’s way for the rest of the San Francisco run, Kurt dodging him with a minimum of awkwardness, until Brittany takes him to a fundraiser for a Burning Man encampment on the show’s last full week in town.
He doesn’t understand the appeal, not of the people making out under the large metal spiders shooting flames in the absolute middle of nowhere – this is, he’s sure, somehow exactly what his father was afraid of when he left Ohio – and not of the event in the desert itself. It actually makes him nervous, to think of his skin that dry in a world that bright.
Jay makes him nervous now too. Because Kurt realizes that, aside from some legitimately useful advice on tour living and some deeply unavoidable camaraderie, the only thing the man has consistently provided him with has been instructions on how not to offend him. And Kurt has, most certainly, offended him now.
He doesn’t know the price of that; he also doesn’t know how to stop. Because instead of ignoring him when he sees him through the metal spider flames of the party as Brittany prattles on beside him about how they should totally build fire-breathing lobsters and a memorial Lord Tubbington toaster next year, Kurt raises his glass to him. And smirks.
*
“I just don’t think you should do anything, Blaine. You can’t fix this, because it’s not a problem. It’s just Kurt,” Tina says, well beyond frustration.
“I don’t –“
“You don’t like that, because in your world Kurt is perfect and you’re broken, but Blaine? Kurt is weird. Kurt has always been weird. And needs you more for having you. I just… the problem isn’t Jay, the solution isn’t you. Kurt, on tour, was always going to be a disaster, and I’m not really sure how either of you missed that.”
“I think we were worrying about me flipping out,” he mumbles.
“And?”
“Me cheating on him,” he adds, still mumbling.
“And?”
“Me freaking out some more.”
“Right,” Tina says. “So. You two are idiots, although I’ve very glad that you haven’t cheated…. You haven’t, right?”
“No! Jesus.”
“Well there was that thing….”
“Who the hell told you about that?”
“Everyone.”
“Fucking Santana.”
“Mercedes, actually.”
“Does anyone from New Directions ever call anyone for reasons other than gossip or despair?”
“No. Duh.”
“Fuck.”
“Look, maybe you should call one of Kurt’s friends? I mean, not that I’m not, but … it’s been a long time since we were close like you want for this conversation, and I’ve got nothing. But frankly, unless he wants to me to call him Rachel for the rest of eternity, what he needs to do is get over his shit and stick this out.”
“Right,” Blaine sighs. “Fuck.”
*
“How’s LA?” Blaine asks, around a spoonful of banana pudding ice cream.
“What are you eating?” Kurt asks.
“Ice cream.”
“Tell me that’s not dinner.”
“It’s almost midnight here. Not dinner. How’s LA?”
“Absolutely no idea. I think I’ve hit my social quota for a long while.”
“Brittany,” Blaine supplies helpfully.
“Not just Brittany,” he says, but neither of them name names.
“Any word on that?”
“No.”
“Do you still want it not to happen?”
“Yes? No? I don’t know. I mean, if it were gonna happen, I assume it would have by now, not that I really know how these things work. I just… I just want to do what I came here to do and get home to you as soon as I can.”
“You went there to make your career. And in twelve weeks, you’re home, working and home for a little while, so let’s just focus on that.”
“Can you come to Omaha? For Thanksgiving?”
“I bet that was a question you never thought you’d ask, and yes, I will have Thanksgiving with you in Omaha even if it’s turkey sandwiches from an all-night gas station.”
“Thank you. I’m never doing this again, you know.”
“I know,” Blaine says solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. It just seems polite.”
*
“You did the right thing, you know,” the girl says as Kurt gets in the elevator.
“Huh?” he asks without looking up. He’s deep in a text war with Henry about the latest HBO series they’re both obsessed with.
“Breaking up with Jay.”
That makes Kurt look up. It’s Misty, the second female lead that he doesn’t have a single interaction with on stage either as Simon or as his generic ensemble vampire. They’ve never talked much. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“We weren’t dating.”
“You were doing something.”
“Um. No. I’m engaged. Blaine? Short? Curls? Awkward JFK Jr. thing?”
She shrugs. “Look, I know he’s been giving you the we all have to be social every night speech, but seriously, didn’t you ever wonder where everyone who doesn’t hang out in Jay’s room spends their evenings?”
Kurt’s jaw drops a little more.
Misty pats his cheek. “See, sweetie? He gave you good advice, but you’ve clearly been failing on the execution.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes in his hand again as the elevator stops and dings, the doors opening to let Misty out.
He looks down at his phone and starts frantically thumbing out a new message. I think I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd.
*
Of all the topics Blaine expects to focus on with his therapist, Kurt can’t quit the tour isn’t one of them, but it’s there, and it’s inescapable, and it’s not even about Kurt’s well-being. It’s about Blaine’s.
“Look. Don’t get me wrong. I miss him, and I am bad at this. Like he’ll catch me eating ice cream when I’m on the phone with him and I’ll totally assure him that it’s later here and that it’s totally not dinner, but it’s totally dinner. Like, even if I’m living like a sixteen-year-old with a lack of proper supervision and too many Papa John’s coupons, I actually don’t feel like we’re playing house for a change and that feels kinda good.”
“What do you mean by playing house?”
“That I like sloppy clothes and not shaving for a week sometimes?” Blaine says, his hand scrubbing across his jaw, and it’s clearly been more than a week. He takes a deep breath. “We moved in together, with absolutely no clue and a remarkable lack of advance planning at eighteen because everything was crazy and it was the only thing my father could give me and the only thing I could give Kurt. And we’ve been going through all the right motions ever since – study abroad, graduation, Christmas. I mean, the kitchen got painted buttercup yellow, and I proposed. I can’t remember when I wasn’t an adult. Sometimes I just wish we’d lived in the dorms and had friends and –“
“Don’t you have friends now?”
“Yes. Adult, couple-ly friends that don’t really make up for the too tiny chunk of time we spent in Boston getting high and having people crash on our floor every weekend and making terrible choices and feeling like we had family like a nest of… what’s an animal that lives in groups?”
“You said nests. Birds?”
“No. Something fuzzy. Like bears? Rats? I don’t know. Something. Collective animals. Anyway, I’m failing analogies today. My point is, we don’t even know any of those people anymore.”
“Most people don’t. You’re mourning a fantasy, more than a real thing. Typical college experiences aren’t necessarily easy – and often have a much weaker support system than what you and Kurt had and have.”
Blaine sighs. “Right. I still need him not to come home early. I need to know we can do this. And I need to know that the only person I have to blame for not having whatever it is I think being on my own for the first time experiences should be is myself. Also, ice cream is awesome dinner. Just, you know, as an aside.”
*
Kurt copes by making lists for himself of small talk to offer all the people he’s spent the last several months effectively ignoring thanks to Jay’s exhortations to be social. While he is certain he must seem fake and insincere, a compliment here, an inquiry there, an exchange of complaints about the coffee in the lobby, all seem to land well and without offense.
People are, he knows, however, in their own world. Jay hadn’t been lying about auditions and agents and a little bit of madness setting in, in LA.
*
“Would I like it?” Blaine asks a week in.
Kurt smiles. “I wish I could say no. In another world, you’re a runaway here, flirting your way on and off the pier.”
Blaine bites his lip.
“Say it,” Kurt says, “Because I can hear you thinking it.”
“That just sounds like an awesome sex fantasy set up.”
“Well,” Kurt notes, trying to be sanguine, “it’s a lot less depressing than the alternative.”
Blaine chuckles. “Hey, can we do serious business for a moment?”
“What? Did I get another collections notice on the library book you lost?”
“Yeah, actually, but…. No. I just… are you going to be able to stick this thing out?”
Kurt takes a deep breath. “I’m working on it. It’s getting a little better. Although Jay still hasn’t said two words to me since it happened, and I’m frankly terrified of what it’s going to look like when that changes. Why?”
“Because I need you not to come home early.”
Kurt is silent.
“And now I think I need you to say something,” Blaine adds.
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you don’t hate me for that.”
“I don’t… I don’t hate you for that. I could never hate you for anything.”
“And if you need to come home, I’d welcome you with open arms and I miss you so much, but I think I’m doing everything I didn’t do in Shanghai and –“
“Not Thomas, I hope,” Kurt says dryly.
Blaine starts laughing and can’t stop. “No, not Thomas. Not anyone. I’m just, eating badly and staying up all night and drinking too much with Kate and Henry and maybe finally getting it through my head that the fact that I’ve been an adult since I was like fourteen isn’t actually the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“The house is a mess, isn’t it,” Kurt says.
“Kind of?”
“And you’re scruffy.”
“Totally scruffy.”
“If you’ve worn sweatpants in public, don’t tell me.”
“I love you,” Blaine says.
“I love you too,” Kurt replies, serious, and hoping it translates beyond the call and response nature of the exchange. “I think we should start planning the wedding.”
*
Three people get off the tour before they leave Los Angeles. None of them are Jay, who he secretly, and probably unfairly, expects to opine nastily on their chances at failing in their new endeavors and winding up in porn before the end of the year.
They arrive in Phoenix Halloween week, and Kurt wishes they could somehow be somewhere cooler for it, but at least, he hopes, it will guarantee a sell-out crowd, even at matinees.
He needs something to make up for drawing the short straw on the backstage tours. Kurt is sure he’s the last person who should be telling anyone – much less fourteen-year-olds with perfect noses, second place trophies in regional dance team competitions, and the doe eyes of prey – that their perfectly ordinary dreams absolutely can come true.
I was always strange, he finds he wants to say to them. I was always dead. And my boyfriend has eyes like you; he’s decided to go into politics instead.
*
Jay is ferocious in Phoenix from the very first rehearsal, and Kurt has no idea why, but the performance is angry, powerful, and the space between his Simon and Kurt’s own is the smallest he’s seen.
It makes Kurt proud.
It makes Kurt jealous.
*
“And I thought LA did nothing for me,” Kurt intones to Blaine on the phone.
“How are the new people?” Blaine asks.
“Professionals.”
“Aren’t you all?”
“No,” Kurt says, then softens. “Not all in the same way, I guess. It’s weird here.”
“How?”
Kurt shrugs. “I think it’s me. I miss you.”
“Is that new and weird?” Blaine teases.
“Maybe. This girl hugged me today. After the tour, after we posed for photos with them.”
“She was grateful.”
“Yeah.”
“What was she like?” Blaine asks, clear that whatever story Kurt has to tell, he needs help forming it into words.
“Sad,” Kurt says. “Just sad. She thought I was beautiful.”
“You are.”
“It wasn’t desire,” Kurt says, and it takes Blaine a moment to work it out.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t call her she?” he asks, not certain of his guess.
“Maybe,” Kurt says, non-committal. “She asked if I’d always been a boy.”
“What did you say?”
“That sometimes I wasn’t sure.”
“You’re so good,” Blaine says.
“What would you have said?”
“Only by accident.”
*
The first words Kurt says to Jay in the wake of their sex party blow up is to hiss at him to get off his damn cell phone during the Entr’acte on the Tuesday after Halloween. Jay just holds up a hand and then turns away, pressing a finger tight into his free ear.
Kurt throws up his hands, which is, he knows, what he should have done regarding this whole mess from the very beginning. Even so, he breathes a sigh of relief as Jay disconnects the call and then crouches down to skid the phone out of the way and in to a corner.
“Thank you,” Kurt mouths at him.
Jay snorts. “You don’t even know,” he says, low and tight under his breath.
An ache wells up in Kurt then, because he’s missed this man, or, at least, the idea of his friendship. Before he can say anything – not that he knows what it would be – they each plunge onto the stage, as they do every day, every night, into the dark.
*
After their bows, Jay grabs Kurt’s arm and pulls him into the same dark corner he’d banished his phone to earlier.
Kurt rolls his eyes, even as his heart speeds up and the drama is, unfortunately, expected.
“Do we have to do this in costume?” he asks, defensive, tired, and well detached now from his earlier moment of longing. He’s sweaty, and the touch of anyone who isn’t Blaine is particularly unbearable for it; it feels too intimate.
“I have to be on a plane tomorrow, so yes.”
“What?!”
“Los Angeles,” Jay says, enunciating each syllable like Kurt is stupid.
“Oh my god, congratulations,” Kurt says, and surprising them both, launches himself at him, hugging him hard.
Jay kisses his hair, and whispers, “Don’t be scared.”
It’s absolutely, and powerfully, erotic. Kurt feels guilt. It tingles, novel, on the barest edge of his fingertips.
*
“There are moments,” Kurt says on the phone that night with Alex – it is 10am in Rome – “when I know I’ll only feel alone if I try to explain it to another person.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“Because you may as well be on Mars.”
“Blaine’s alone too. You should call him.”
“Not yet,” he says, curling onto his side, his face barely in the frame of the Skype call. “Not today.”
“Are you pretending to hold me?” she asks, looking at the curve of his body and the stripe of skin between his battered black jeans wrinkled t-shirt.
Kurt makes a non-committal noise. “You were always so warm,” he says.
“So were you.”
*
“How have you been?” his therapist asks. It’s a working question, disguised as a social nicety. For an activity about learning how to be more clear on your own needs with yourself and others, Blaine remains fascinated by how much of the process is tacit and unnamed, a symptom at least of his own disease.
“Well, we’re back to the first problem,” Blaine says brightly.
“Which is?”
“Kurt’s on tour, and I feel desiccated without human contact.”
“So no risk of him coming home early?”
“I suppose there’s always a risk. But, no. Not now. The guy he was understudying for quit the tour. He got a sitcom in LA.”
“So the role is Kurt’s?”
“Full time,” Blaine says, cheerfully.
“You must be proud of him.”
“No. Not really. I never expected anything else.”
“When will you see him?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Soon.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it will really be us though. I don’t know if it really gets to be us until this thing is over.”
“Do parts linger with him, when he’s performing?”
Blaine pauses to think about it. Oddly, it’s not something he and Kurt have ever really discussed. “No. Not particularly. Although this one has. It’s pretty haunting, no pun intended. Ugh. But I guess, we’re both performing this absence, right? So that’s hard. I guess I just have to let this be a thing that we’re doing.”
“Are you worried about whether he comes back to you?” his therapist asks.
Blaine shakes his head. “No. Not at all. It’s way more like a horror movie. I worry about what he’ll bring back with him. You know,” he pauses to laugh, “other than another suitcase filled with new clothes.”
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~3,000
Summary: Sometimes what people want only becomes clear when it seems like it's not going to happen. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Phoenix.
The series so far:
Boston: Following Home | These Thousand Names for Gratitude | All the Honesty of Politics | Circles as the Dark Winds Down | The Distance Between Ohio and Boston | All the Pretty Little Horses | Languages You Don't Even Know | Fauna and Flora | Where Water Doesn't Speak | Under Glass We Are Expected to Blossom | You Were Someone Else Before We Came Here
D.C.: Strategies and Tactics | The Many Shades of Sugar | When Sea Levels Rise | The History of Sand | Tales of Minor Gods | A Little Bit Ruined | The Numbers Held by Ghosts | Weights and Measures | Anamnesis | Hello, I Must Be Going | And I Have Heard You Speaking | More Honored Than the Other Animals | Melissa, Mellonia, or Deborah | On the Throwing of Stones
Whatever happens in Los Angeles, Jay doesn’t tell Kurt about it. He makes it back on time for Tuesday’s show and he seems neither disappointed nor elated. Other than the data vacuum -- which he finds innately sinister, like silence in the woods of a horror movie or the halls of a high school – Kurt is relieved.
They stay out of each other’s way for the rest of the San Francisco run, Kurt dodging him with a minimum of awkwardness, until Brittany takes him to a fundraiser for a Burning Man encampment on the show’s last full week in town.
He doesn’t understand the appeal, not of the people making out under the large metal spiders shooting flames in the absolute middle of nowhere – this is, he’s sure, somehow exactly what his father was afraid of when he left Ohio – and not of the event in the desert itself. It actually makes him nervous, to think of his skin that dry in a world that bright.
Jay makes him nervous now too. Because Kurt realizes that, aside from some legitimately useful advice on tour living and some deeply unavoidable camaraderie, the only thing the man has consistently provided him with has been instructions on how not to offend him. And Kurt has, most certainly, offended him now.
He doesn’t know the price of that; he also doesn’t know how to stop. Because instead of ignoring him when he sees him through the metal spider flames of the party as Brittany prattles on beside him about how they should totally build fire-breathing lobsters and a memorial Lord Tubbington toaster next year, Kurt raises his glass to him. And smirks.
*
“I just don’t think you should do anything, Blaine. You can’t fix this, because it’s not a problem. It’s just Kurt,” Tina says, well beyond frustration.
“I don’t –“
“You don’t like that, because in your world Kurt is perfect and you’re broken, but Blaine? Kurt is weird. Kurt has always been weird. And needs you more for having you. I just… the problem isn’t Jay, the solution isn’t you. Kurt, on tour, was always going to be a disaster, and I’m not really sure how either of you missed that.”
“I think we were worrying about me flipping out,” he mumbles.
“And?”
“Me cheating on him,” he adds, still mumbling.
“And?”
“Me freaking out some more.”
“Right,” Tina says. “So. You two are idiots, although I’ve very glad that you haven’t cheated…. You haven’t, right?”
“No! Jesus.”
“Well there was that thing….”
“Who the hell told you about that?”
“Everyone.”
“Fucking Santana.”
“Mercedes, actually.”
“Does anyone from New Directions ever call anyone for reasons other than gossip or despair?”
“No. Duh.”
“Fuck.”
“Look, maybe you should call one of Kurt’s friends? I mean, not that I’m not, but … it’s been a long time since we were close like you want for this conversation, and I’ve got nothing. But frankly, unless he wants to me to call him Rachel for the rest of eternity, what he needs to do is get over his shit and stick this out.”
“Right,” Blaine sighs. “Fuck.”
*
“How’s LA?” Blaine asks, around a spoonful of banana pudding ice cream.
“What are you eating?” Kurt asks.
“Ice cream.”
“Tell me that’s not dinner.”
“It’s almost midnight here. Not dinner. How’s LA?”
“Absolutely no idea. I think I’ve hit my social quota for a long while.”
“Brittany,” Blaine supplies helpfully.
“Not just Brittany,” he says, but neither of them name names.
“Any word on that?”
“No.”
“Do you still want it not to happen?”
“Yes? No? I don’t know. I mean, if it were gonna happen, I assume it would have by now, not that I really know how these things work. I just… I just want to do what I came here to do and get home to you as soon as I can.”
“You went there to make your career. And in twelve weeks, you’re home, working and home for a little while, so let’s just focus on that.”
“Can you come to Omaha? For Thanksgiving?”
“I bet that was a question you never thought you’d ask, and yes, I will have Thanksgiving with you in Omaha even if it’s turkey sandwiches from an all-night gas station.”
“Thank you. I’m never doing this again, you know.”
“I know,” Blaine says solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. It just seems polite.”
*
“You did the right thing, you know,” the girl says as Kurt gets in the elevator.
“Huh?” he asks without looking up. He’s deep in a text war with Henry about the latest HBO series they’re both obsessed with.
“Breaking up with Jay.”
That makes Kurt look up. It’s Misty, the second female lead that he doesn’t have a single interaction with on stage either as Simon or as his generic ensemble vampire. They’ve never talked much. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“We weren’t dating.”
“You were doing something.”
“Um. No. I’m engaged. Blaine? Short? Curls? Awkward JFK Jr. thing?”
She shrugs. “Look, I know he’s been giving you the we all have to be social every night speech, but seriously, didn’t you ever wonder where everyone who doesn’t hang out in Jay’s room spends their evenings?”
Kurt’s jaw drops a little more.
Misty pats his cheek. “See, sweetie? He gave you good advice, but you’ve clearly been failing on the execution.”
Kurt’s phone buzzes in his hand again as the elevator stops and dings, the doors opening to let Misty out.
He looks down at his phone and starts frantically thumbing out a new message. I think I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd.
*
Of all the topics Blaine expects to focus on with his therapist, Kurt can’t quit the tour isn’t one of them, but it’s there, and it’s inescapable, and it’s not even about Kurt’s well-being. It’s about Blaine’s.
“Look. Don’t get me wrong. I miss him, and I am bad at this. Like he’ll catch me eating ice cream when I’m on the phone with him and I’ll totally assure him that it’s later here and that it’s totally not dinner, but it’s totally dinner. Like, even if I’m living like a sixteen-year-old with a lack of proper supervision and too many Papa John’s coupons, I actually don’t feel like we’re playing house for a change and that feels kinda good.”
“What do you mean by playing house?”
“That I like sloppy clothes and not shaving for a week sometimes?” Blaine says, his hand scrubbing across his jaw, and it’s clearly been more than a week. He takes a deep breath. “We moved in together, with absolutely no clue and a remarkable lack of advance planning at eighteen because everything was crazy and it was the only thing my father could give me and the only thing I could give Kurt. And we’ve been going through all the right motions ever since – study abroad, graduation, Christmas. I mean, the kitchen got painted buttercup yellow, and I proposed. I can’t remember when I wasn’t an adult. Sometimes I just wish we’d lived in the dorms and had friends and –“
“Don’t you have friends now?”
“Yes. Adult, couple-ly friends that don’t really make up for the too tiny chunk of time we spent in Boston getting high and having people crash on our floor every weekend and making terrible choices and feeling like we had family like a nest of… what’s an animal that lives in groups?”
“You said nests. Birds?”
“No. Something fuzzy. Like bears? Rats? I don’t know. Something. Collective animals. Anyway, I’m failing analogies today. My point is, we don’t even know any of those people anymore.”
“Most people don’t. You’re mourning a fantasy, more than a real thing. Typical college experiences aren’t necessarily easy – and often have a much weaker support system than what you and Kurt had and have.”
Blaine sighs. “Right. I still need him not to come home early. I need to know we can do this. And I need to know that the only person I have to blame for not having whatever it is I think being on my own for the first time experiences should be is myself. Also, ice cream is awesome dinner. Just, you know, as an aside.”
*
Kurt copes by making lists for himself of small talk to offer all the people he’s spent the last several months effectively ignoring thanks to Jay’s exhortations to be social. While he is certain he must seem fake and insincere, a compliment here, an inquiry there, an exchange of complaints about the coffee in the lobby, all seem to land well and without offense.
People are, he knows, however, in their own world. Jay hadn’t been lying about auditions and agents and a little bit of madness setting in, in LA.
*
“Would I like it?” Blaine asks a week in.
Kurt smiles. “I wish I could say no. In another world, you’re a runaway here, flirting your way on and off the pier.”
Blaine bites his lip.
“Say it,” Kurt says, “Because I can hear you thinking it.”
“That just sounds like an awesome sex fantasy set up.”
“Well,” Kurt notes, trying to be sanguine, “it’s a lot less depressing than the alternative.”
Blaine chuckles. “Hey, can we do serious business for a moment?”
“What? Did I get another collections notice on the library book you lost?”
“Yeah, actually, but…. No. I just… are you going to be able to stick this thing out?”
Kurt takes a deep breath. “I’m working on it. It’s getting a little better. Although Jay still hasn’t said two words to me since it happened, and I’m frankly terrified of what it’s going to look like when that changes. Why?”
“Because I need you not to come home early.”
Kurt is silent.
“And now I think I need you to say something,” Blaine adds.
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you don’t hate me for that.”
“I don’t… I don’t hate you for that. I could never hate you for anything.”
“And if you need to come home, I’d welcome you with open arms and I miss you so much, but I think I’m doing everything I didn’t do in Shanghai and –“
“Not Thomas, I hope,” Kurt says dryly.
Blaine starts laughing and can’t stop. “No, not Thomas. Not anyone. I’m just, eating badly and staying up all night and drinking too much with Kate and Henry and maybe finally getting it through my head that the fact that I’ve been an adult since I was like fourteen isn’t actually the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“The house is a mess, isn’t it,” Kurt says.
“Kind of?”
“And you’re scruffy.”
“Totally scruffy.”
“If you’ve worn sweatpants in public, don’t tell me.”
“I love you,” Blaine says.
“I love you too,” Kurt replies, serious, and hoping it translates beyond the call and response nature of the exchange. “I think we should start planning the wedding.”
*
Three people get off the tour before they leave Los Angeles. None of them are Jay, who he secretly, and probably unfairly, expects to opine nastily on their chances at failing in their new endeavors and winding up in porn before the end of the year.
They arrive in Phoenix Halloween week, and Kurt wishes they could somehow be somewhere cooler for it, but at least, he hopes, it will guarantee a sell-out crowd, even at matinees.
He needs something to make up for drawing the short straw on the backstage tours. Kurt is sure he’s the last person who should be telling anyone – much less fourteen-year-olds with perfect noses, second place trophies in regional dance team competitions, and the doe eyes of prey – that their perfectly ordinary dreams absolutely can come true.
I was always strange, he finds he wants to say to them. I was always dead. And my boyfriend has eyes like you; he’s decided to go into politics instead.
*
Jay is ferocious in Phoenix from the very first rehearsal, and Kurt has no idea why, but the performance is angry, powerful, and the space between his Simon and Kurt’s own is the smallest he’s seen.
It makes Kurt proud.
It makes Kurt jealous.
*
“And I thought LA did nothing for me,” Kurt intones to Blaine on the phone.
“How are the new people?” Blaine asks.
“Professionals.”
“Aren’t you all?”
“No,” Kurt says, then softens. “Not all in the same way, I guess. It’s weird here.”
“How?”
Kurt shrugs. “I think it’s me. I miss you.”
“Is that new and weird?” Blaine teases.
“Maybe. This girl hugged me today. After the tour, after we posed for photos with them.”
“She was grateful.”
“Yeah.”
“What was she like?” Blaine asks, clear that whatever story Kurt has to tell, he needs help forming it into words.
“Sad,” Kurt says. “Just sad. She thought I was beautiful.”
“You are.”
“It wasn’t desire,” Kurt says, and it takes Blaine a moment to work it out.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t call her she?” he asks, not certain of his guess.
“Maybe,” Kurt says, non-committal. “She asked if I’d always been a boy.”
“What did you say?”
“That sometimes I wasn’t sure.”
“You’re so good,” Blaine says.
“What would you have said?”
“Only by accident.”
*
The first words Kurt says to Jay in the wake of their sex party blow up is to hiss at him to get off his damn cell phone during the Entr’acte on the Tuesday after Halloween. Jay just holds up a hand and then turns away, pressing a finger tight into his free ear.
Kurt throws up his hands, which is, he knows, what he should have done regarding this whole mess from the very beginning. Even so, he breathes a sigh of relief as Jay disconnects the call and then crouches down to skid the phone out of the way and in to a corner.
“Thank you,” Kurt mouths at him.
Jay snorts. “You don’t even know,” he says, low and tight under his breath.
An ache wells up in Kurt then, because he’s missed this man, or, at least, the idea of his friendship. Before he can say anything – not that he knows what it would be – they each plunge onto the stage, as they do every day, every night, into the dark.
*
After their bows, Jay grabs Kurt’s arm and pulls him into the same dark corner he’d banished his phone to earlier.
Kurt rolls his eyes, even as his heart speeds up and the drama is, unfortunately, expected.
“Do we have to do this in costume?” he asks, defensive, tired, and well detached now from his earlier moment of longing. He’s sweaty, and the touch of anyone who isn’t Blaine is particularly unbearable for it; it feels too intimate.
“I have to be on a plane tomorrow, so yes.”
“What?!”
“Los Angeles,” Jay says, enunciating each syllable like Kurt is stupid.
“Oh my god, congratulations,” Kurt says, and surprising them both, launches himself at him, hugging him hard.
Jay kisses his hair, and whispers, “Don’t be scared.”
It’s absolutely, and powerfully, erotic. Kurt feels guilt. It tingles, novel, on the barest edge of his fingertips.
*
“There are moments,” Kurt says on the phone that night with Alex – it is 10am in Rome – “when I know I’ll only feel alone if I try to explain it to another person.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
“Because you may as well be on Mars.”
“Blaine’s alone too. You should call him.”
“Not yet,” he says, curling onto his side, his face barely in the frame of the Skype call. “Not today.”
“Are you pretending to hold me?” she asks, looking at the curve of his body and the stripe of skin between his battered black jeans wrinkled t-shirt.
Kurt makes a non-committal noise. “You were always so warm,” he says.
“So were you.”
*
“How have you been?” his therapist asks. It’s a working question, disguised as a social nicety. For an activity about learning how to be more clear on your own needs with yourself and others, Blaine remains fascinated by how much of the process is tacit and unnamed, a symptom at least of his own disease.
“Well, we’re back to the first problem,” Blaine says brightly.
“Which is?”
“Kurt’s on tour, and I feel desiccated without human contact.”
“So no risk of him coming home early?”
“I suppose there’s always a risk. But, no. Not now. The guy he was understudying for quit the tour. He got a sitcom in LA.”
“So the role is Kurt’s?”
“Full time,” Blaine says, cheerfully.
“You must be proud of him.”
“No. Not really. I never expected anything else.”
“When will you see him?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Soon.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it will really be us though. I don’t know if it really gets to be us until this thing is over.”
“Do parts linger with him, when he’s performing?”
Blaine pauses to think about it. Oddly, it’s not something he and Kurt have ever really discussed. “No. Not particularly. Although this one has. It’s pretty haunting, no pun intended. Ugh. But I guess, we’re both performing this absence, right? So that’s hard. I guess I just have to let this be a thing that we’re doing.”
“Are you worried about whether he comes back to you?” his therapist asks.
Blaine shakes his head. “No. Not at all. It’s way more like a horror movie. I worry about what he’ll bring back with him. You know,” he pauses to laugh, “other than another suitcase filled with new clothes.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 01:26 pm (UTC)