Hullo dear. I've been wondering why not all of your fic posts seem to appear in the tag I'm following and then I noticed something. You seem to have 2 separate tags wowbright-writes-fic and wowbrightwrites. I'm thinking it's not on purpose since some parts of Fidelity are tagged with one and others with the other one. Any chance you could just have one :) ? And here I was sitting and hoping you'd write reaction fic and it was hiding in the other tag all along :)
Hi! I try to use both but apparently forget often and use only "wowbright writes fic," or I have so many tags that "wowbrightwrites" ends up after #5 (tumblr ignores all tags after the fifth one in its tag search, although you can still search within a blog up to #10, or so I've heard).
"Wowbright writes fic" was the first one I made and I was planning to transition to wowbrightwrites because I thought a one-word tag might be easier to track, but alas I have failed to do that. So tracking "wowbright writes fic" is probably your safer bet.
Sorry about the confusion. I haven't been very good about that because I was like "No one actually tracks my tags do they?" THen I found out that they do and I just got confused. :/
The good news is that I track "wowbright writes fic" and it rarely fails to give me a notification, even though it's multi-word. Question to people who track that: Have you have any issues with it?
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: Kurt turns 19. ~3,650 words.
Rating: PG-13
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
---
Chapter 27: Simple Gifts
It wouldn't be waking up alone in his depressingly clean bed (and if you had told him on his last birthday that he would grow to find a clean bed depressing, he would have flared his nostrils at you condescendingly).
He wouldn't feel this aching emptiness in his palms where Blaine's and Dave's hands should be.
He'd be able to look forward to seeing both of them later at dinner, tossing stupid jokes over hazelnut ice cream while Finn tried to keep up and his dad rolled his eyes fondly.
In reality, of course, the look in his dad's eyes would be anything but fond if he knew what was going on with the three of them. He's softened more on the idea of Dave recently, which Kurt gathers has something to do with a visit Dave made to Hummel Tires & Lube last month. But if Burt Hummel knew that Kurt’s current life goal (other than getting into NYADA) is to fuck both of the boys’ brains out at once – well, he has a hard time imagining his dad being cool with that, even if the fucking is sweet and loving and full of “you matter”s.
Kurt wishes the security camera in the garage had audio, because neither Dave nor his dad has been forthcoming with details of what happened that day in April. All Kurt knows is that when Burt mentioned it that evening, he pushed back his baseball cap to scratch his scalp and said, "You're right. He's a different kid than the one I slammed up against a wall a year and a half ago. I guess if you guys want to do your study thing over here sometime, it's okay."
Kurt just nodded, stunned.
So it's safer to mention Dave now, and sometimes Burt asks if Kurt knows how "things are going for Dave at school," which Kurt takes as "is Dave getting beaten up on a regular basis?" It's not exactly fondness, but at least it's concern.
Still, Kurt tries to make sure Dave doesn't come up too often. He may pride himself on being a performer, but he can't perform for very long around his dad. He's as transparent as air when it comes to his emotions. He sneaks texts to Dave in the living room and whispers phone calls to him in his bedroom, and if Kurt forgets himself sometimes and lets his voice carry, everyone in the house just assumes he's talking to Blaine.
Kurt does not have Dave and Blaine in his bed with him. But he does have their text messages.
Dave: Happy Birthday! You're officially older than me for the next five months.
Blaine: Happy Birthday! I get to spank you 19 times, right?
Kurt smiles in spite of himself and texts back.
To Dave: I'll always be older than you. Older and wiser. Keep that under advisement.
To Blaine: Only 19 times?
Kurt turns in his bed to look at the two wrapped presents from Blaine and Dave on the shelf next to his phone. They're both small: Dave's wrapped in plain blue paper; and Blaine's decked in a sheet of purple-and-white origami paper with gold ribbons and a red origami rose.
Dave gave Kurt his in the Anderson's front hallway the afternoon before. Kurt moved to open it right then before Dave interrupted, blushing. "I was hoping – Could you wait to open it tomorrow?"
Kurt blushed, too. "Sorry. I just assumed you wanted me to open it in front of you."
"Um … " Dave looked down at his hands. "This present, I wanted you to open tomorrow. Since I won't be there. So that you know I –" He swallowed. "I wish I could be. With you."
Kurt stared at Dave, which made Dave duck his head further, shoving his hands into his pocket and shuffling his feet. "Sorry, that's cheesy, isn’t it? You can go ahead and open it now, or throw it away, or whatever –" but Kurt interrupted him by tackling him to the wall and covering his face with a dozen kisses.
"No, no, it's not," Kurt murmured when he came up for breath. "It's – It's wonderful. Thank you." Another kiss, long and drawn out, because speech alone couldn't tell the whole story. Kurt wasn't even sure what that story was, but he'd try to write it out on Dave's lips as long as he was allowed.
Blaine, ever the fair-minded, gave Kurt his own present a few hours later, as they walked out to the Navigator to say goodbye.
"But I'm going to see you tomorrow night," Kurt said, confused. "You can give it to me then."
"I have another present for in front of your family. This one's just between us."
Kurt lifted an eyebrow. "A vibrating cock ring? I was wondering when you'd come around."
"No." Blaine ducked his head and smiled. "Just – you'll see why. And I know I could just give it to you tomorrow in your room, but I want you to have the chance to open it alone."
"Why?"
"Because," Blaine bit his lip, "it doesn't seem fair that I would get to watch you open my present on your birthday, but Dave doesn't. I mean it’s up to you, but if you want you can open them at the same time, or –"
"Blaine," Kurt said.
"Yeah?"
"I love you. You make it so hard to go –" Kurt was about to say home, but suddenly the word didn't sound right. It was the place where his father was, and wherever his father was had always been home, except maybe that wasn't enough anymore. Maybe Kurt was split between two homes: the place he'd grown up in, and the place he was growing toward.
So Kurt didn't finish the sentence, just repeated it with no dangling question at the end. "You make it so hard to go."
*
"It's your birthday," Carole says, tears streaming down her face from the onions she's chopping. "It's not your job to make the dinner."
Kurt waves a whisk at her and peers into the mixing bowl. "It's difficult to keep all traces of egg yolk out of the whites. I just thought you might need an expert on hand."
"Hey." Burt removes the whisk from Kurt's hand. "I learned how to make soufflé from an expert. Trust me to do it right."
Kurt is considering whether to surrender when his pocket starts playing Rondo Alla Turca. "Fine," he says, backing out of the kitchen. "But don't think this means you've won."
When Kurt picks up he's halfway up the stairs, his "hey" breathy from the speed with which he's bounding toward his room.
"Hey," Dave answers back, equally breathy. "Happy birthday."
"Thanks." Kurt sighs. "It could be happier."
"Did something happen?"
Kurt shakes his head, even though Dave’s not there to see it. "No. I just – I guess I'm coming down from yesterday. It was really nice, being with you." Kurt closes his door behind him. "I mean, spending time with you, not being with you. " He bites his bottom lip. "Well, being with you was nice, too."
"Okay," Dave says, but Kurt can't really read what Dave means by that over hundreds of miles and crackly reception.
"More than nice," Kurt stammers, settling on the bed. "A lot more than nice. You're – I like kissing you. A lot."
He hears Dave laugh. "I like kissing you, too. A lot. And –"
"And –?" Kurt says, only then realizing that he's half-hoping that this conversation will quickly unravel into phone sex. He bites the inside of his cheek.
"And touching you, and looking at you, and going to IHOP with you, and learning bird songs with you, and waking Blaine up with you, and – I just really like being near you, Kurt."
"I do, too," Kurt says. "I mean, being near you. Not being near me. I'm always near myself. It gets kind of annoying sometimes, actually." He bites the inside of his cheek again, this time to shut himself up. He is not being cool or wise or in control or any of the things that Dave seems to admire. "Where are you, anyway?"
"In my uncle's living room. All the adults are out back arguing about the best way to grill an eggplant."
"An eggplant?"
"Yeah, an eggplant."
"But that's so easy. You just soak it in a little salt water and then brush it with olive oil and –"
"I knew you'd know. If you were here, you could just show them."
An unbidden image comes to Kurt of himself at Dave's house – it's Dave's, because he has no idea what the uncle's house looks like – carrying out a pan of brined eggplant to the backyard and setting it next to a grill that Dave's tending. Paul Karofsky and some other adults who look vaguely like him are sitting at a large fold-out table on the back deck, watching with approval as Kurt stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Dave, brushing the olive oil over each slice, laying it on the grate, and telling Dave when it's time to flip them over. Small children dart around, and Blaine keeps them away from the grill by swooping them up in his arms and swinging them in dizzy circles until they shriek out high peals of laughter.
Kurt's heart swoops so fast that he starts to feel lightheaded, despite the fact that he's sitting down.
"Kurt? Are you still there? The reception here kind of sucks."
"Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking. About grilling eggplant."
"Okay."
"I just … I'm kind of jealous of the eggplant. For being so close to you."
Dave guffaws and Kurt can see his face so clearly, the way his smile shows the perfect straight line of his front teeth and the jaunty points of his cuspids. He lets Dave's laughter wind into his belly until he's laughing, too – laughing so hard that his eyes tear and his breath becomes as ragged as it does from sex.
"That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me," Dave says he gains control of his breath.
"I'm nothing if not suave. Watching all those rom coms has clearly paid off."
They're silent for a moment. Kurt turns his head and looks at the shelf next to his bed, curls his free hand around the small blue box because he can't curl it around Dave's fingers right now. "Dave?"
"Yeah?"
"I haven't opened your present yet."
Dave pauses. "That's okay. No hurry."
"I wanted to wait until we were on the phone, so I could open it in front of you."
Silence.
"Is that okay?" Kurt says.
Silence again. Then, from Dave: "I'm kind of nervous."
"Don't be. It's from you." Kurt pauses. "Can I open it now, or do you need to go back outside?"
"Sure," Dave says. "I don't think anyone's noticed I'm gone yet."
Kurt starts with the soft separation of tape and paper. He’s a compulsively neat opener of gifts. "I really like the wrapping, by the way."
"It's a piece of blue paper."
"It's you."
Dave doesn't say anything to that, so neither does Kurt. He just takes a deep breath before removing the lid.
And gasping. "Dave – Oh, Dave. It's –" Kurt starts, and then stops. It's a cerulean warbler brooch, with blue cloisonné feathers almost as vibrant as the real thing.
"It's – is it okay? I have the receipt if you want to return it. I just thought, you and warblers, and the cerulean warbler always make me think of you, because it’s the same color that your eyes get sometimes. Except your eyes are better. ... And you can never seem to get enough of brooches, so –"
"I can never get enough of you."
"Kurt –"
"It's perfect. Thank you."
*
Dinner is flawless as far as the food goes, and almost flawless as far as the company. There's easily room for seven of them around the dining table, but only six of them are there. Kurt has to keep reminding himself not to focus on Dave’s absence. It may be his last birthday in Lima, so he focuses instead on trying to memorize his father's voice and his gestures and the excited way he slaps the table when Kurt approves of the soufflé.
He drapes the thin silk scarf from Blaine around his neck as soon as he opens it, and squeals with delight as he switches out his consignment store cufflinks for Alexander McQueen skull cufflinks from his dad. Carole squeezes Burt's hand and gets misty-eyed. "Don't expect anything that fancy for graduation, kid," Burt says with an air of gruffness, but all Kurt can hear is the underlying affection.
"I wasn't expecting anything this fancy ever. You didn't have to."
Burt just shakes his head. "Actually, I kind of did." His voice is a little choked, and Kurt rolls his eyes to try to deflect the grip it has on his heart. It doesn't work at all.
"Dad," he says, and reaches across the table to squeeze his hand.
Blaine helps carry the rest of Kurt's presents up afterward. It’s a symbolic act of genlemanlieness; they're all small and easily could fit in Kurt's arms: a box of Utrecht drawing pencils from Finn (Finn bounced up and down in his chair as Kurt slowly unpeeled the wrapping paper, and beamed when Kurt saw what it was), a French copy of Les Miserables sent by Aunt Mildred, a Judy Garland – Duets DVD from the whole family, and a Marc Jacobs dopp kit from Carole. There’s also a cartoon drawing that Sam did of Kurt as Han Solo.
(“Why Han Solo and not Queen Amadala?” Kurt had asked. Sam just shook his head like it was obvious: “You have way more in common with Han Solo. He’s a dude, and you both wear vests.” Kurt hugged him harder than he ever had in his life.)
Blaine spreads them out in a display on top of Kurt's vanity. "Your family knows you well." The pride in Blaine's voice is tinged with sadness.
Kurt sidles up behind Blaine and wraps his arms around his waist. "I'm lucky," he says, leaning his chin on Blaine's shoulder and looking at their reflection in the mirror. "I'm glad you're a part of it."
Blaine looks back at him through the glass. "I want to be."
"You are." Kurt almost leans in to kiss Blaine's cheek, but it's more important to hold his eyes right now, to make Blaine see that he will never back away from this one truth.
A smile that looks like acceptance spreads slowly across Blaine’s face. "Did you open my present yet?" he says, nudging the scarf around Kurt's neck with a finger. "I mean, the other one?"
"Of course not. I wanted to wait for you."
Blaine looks down at the table, then back up, catching Kurt's eyes in the mirror. "But Dave didn't get to see you open his present. I want to be … fair."
"It's okay." Kurt pulls Blaine toward the bed. "I opened Dave's present when we were on the phone this afternoon. It was almost like he was here."
"Except for the making out?" Blaine grins as he sits on the mattress next to Kurt.
"Except for the making out."
Blaine rubs Kurt’s knee."So what did he get you? I mean, if you want to share."
"Of course I do." Kurt leans over to his bedside shelf, taking the brooch and handing it to Blaine.
"I love him. He's perfect," Blaine says.
"The bird or Dave?"
"Both."
Kurt smirks. "Sometimes I wonder who has a bigger crush on Dave."
Blaine's face twists into a laugh. "Mine's strictly bromantic. Anything beyond that is just contagion from the way he makes you feel."
"Contagion, huh?"
"Yup. Love is like a virus."
"Except that it doesn't stuff up your nose or make it hard to breathe or make you feel like throwing up all the time," Kurt says. "Oh, wait. It does do those last two things, doesn't it?"
Blaine puts the brooch back on the shelf, taking his own gift from it and handing it to Kurt. "Well, you might as well open it now."
"I'd be honored," Kurt says, removing the origami rose from the wrapping and tucking it behind his ear. Blaine beams.
Kurt pulls back the paper to reveal a wallet-sized photo of the mostly male New Directions after sectionals, Kurt and Tina at the center, everyone wearing the perfectly centered bow ties that Kurt and Blaine taught them to tie.
It’s the cover of a flip book. Kurt turns it open to the first page, the words So you always remember how much we love you on a grey-white textured background that looks like winter ice.
"That’s from when Dave and I walked out on the lake and you stayed on shore,” Blaine says. “The ice was so pretty. I took a lot of pictures with my phone."
Kurt flips the pages. At first, it's mostly Kurt and various people from the New Directions at their best moments – the ones when they're actually listening to each other, the ones when they drop the masks they use in front of the rest of the world – and a couple of Kurt’s family at Friday dinners.
But after a few pages, Kurt starts to see why Blaine didn't want Kurt to open this in front of his family. There's Blaine and Kurt in the corner of Puck's living room at the final cast party for West Side Story in what would have been a compromising position if they'd had fewer clothes on and their hands had slipped any further below their waists. Kurt blushes. The photo is delightful. "Who took that?"
"Puck, of course. He said if we'd been lesbians, he would have spent days getting off to it, but since we're not, it was only good for the one drunken ogle."
Next is the two of them in their Swiss chalet after the dress rehearsals for the Christmas special, Blaine wrapped in Kurt's arms on the couch, basking in the glow of the fake fireplace.
And then there's himself, Blaine and Dave at the kitchen bar, laughing over splayed textbooks.
Kurt looks up at Blaine questioningly. "Wait, when did you –?"
"I put my laptop camera on a timer one afternoon. There's hundreds of them. That one's the best."
Kurt's mouth curls into a smile. "Blaine Anderson, covert operations."
"You think that's sneaky? I get sneakier."
"You haven't been doing this in the bedroom, have you?"
"No." Blaine's eyelashes blink lushly, a sweet velvet seduction. "But I could if you wanted me to."
Kurt smiles but doesn't answer. He turns back to the book – to pictures from Scandals, some of which Kurt vaguely remembers being taken, but others that come as a complete surprise: Blaine wrapped around Kurt at the pool table to guide the cue as Dave leans in, whispering strategy. The three of them laughing over beer and Diet Pepsi at their table. Chandler, Kurt and Dave in the glasses shop, trying on different frames. Blaine and Dave swing dancing, Kurt flipping over Dave's back – all a blur of energy and lights and smiles so wide they're contagious, even through paper.
Blaine and Dave side by side at the piano bench, their hands on the keys, Blaine's left arm crossed over Dave's right, their faces screwed up in concentration.
Next come the gray outlines of Kurt and Dave against the picture window, Kurt with his hand latched to Dave's wrist, not wanting to let go but afraid to do more.
The final photo is of Kurt leaning on Dave's shoulder in the gazebo, their eyes closed and faces dreamy, eyelashes fanning out like dark smiles against their skin. The sun glints off their hair, liquid sparks of fire and amber. But their bodies look so solid together, permanent and sure.
This is how they look through Blaine's eyes.
They’re beautiful.
Tears spill down Kurt’s cheeks before he can stop them.
Blaine lifts his hand to Kurt's face and starts catching the tears with his thumb. "That's good, right?"
Kurt nods, but can't speak. He wraps his hand around Blaine's and squeezes it firmly.
"I know it's hard, being in love in a way that people don’t understand." Blaine nods toward the book. "So I just wanted to create this one place for you where it wasn't hidden. Where your love for him isn’t separate from your love for anyone else."
Kurt untangles their hands and wraps his arms around Blaine's waist, pressing his face into his shoulder, letting Blaine's shirt soak up his tears. "I don't have to keep it separate from you. I'm so grateful for that."
"Me, too," Blaine whispers into his hair. "You'll never know how much."
“I might have a vague idea." Kurt smiles, touching his fingertips to the book in his lap. "I needed this. I didn't even know I needed it. You know what I need better than I do."
"No," Blaine says, kissing Kurt's forehead. "I just take wild guesses and sometimes I turn out to be right." He sinks back onto the pillows, Kurt following into his arms.
"Thank you," Kurt says. He lets himself be held like the child he no longer is but sometimes he wishes he could still be. "For the present. For loving me so well."
"You make it easy. That's why you have two people in love with you.” Blaine sighs into Kurt's scalp. “God, I bet there'd be at least a dozen if you let them."
Kurt chuckles. "Thanks for your vote of confidence, but I think two is enough for right now."
*
---
Chapter notes: I wish I had a graphic of the actual book herein, but this will give you an idea.
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: One of the greatest gifts of friendship is discovering something new together. ~7,200 words.
Chapter notes: Here are pictures of cerulean warblers and more pictures of cerulean warblers. Kurt’s birding outfit looks kind of like this, except the boots are actual boots in Kurt’s get-up.
Rating: NC-17
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
---
Chapter 26: Lovebirds
“We should probably talk about sex,” Blaine says.
Dave almost chokes, but with a quick closed-mouth cough, he manages to make his Mountain Dew go down the right tube. “You could’ve warned me you were about to say that,” he says when he’s regained his breath and the inside of his nose no longer feels like a jellyfish has taken residence there.
Blaine smiles sheepishly, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the open pages of his geometry book. “Sorry. In my mind, it didn’t need an introduction. I’ve been thinking about it since you got here.”
Dave coughs again.
Blaine covers his mouth as his cheeks turn bright red. “Oh my god, I didn’t mean it that way. I just – I just meant I’ve been thinking that we should talk about it.”
Dave snickers, and Blaine laughs, and soon it turns into a round of cackles and snorting that neither of them can stop until they’re collapsed forward on the kitchen counter, their stomachs sore and their ribcages heaving with each breath.
“I guess I’m a little nervous,” Blaine says between sharp inhalations. He pushes against the counter until he’s sitting up straight.
“Well, we could just not talk about it.” Dave stays where he is, arms folded on the counter, ear pressed against his bicep.
Blaine gives Dave a skeptical look. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“Probably not.”
“OK.” Blaine smiles and nods, closing his geometry book and pushing it toward the end of the counter. “So do you want to have sex with Kurt?”
“Blaine –” Dave’s face is on fire. He buries it in his arms, and it gets even hotter.
“Sorry. I just –” Blaine puts his hand on Dave’s shoulder. “I’m not sure how to make this conversation not awkward.”
Dave turns his head until one eye peeks out above his arm. “Alcohol would probably help.”
Blaine tilts his head in thought, like he’s considering it as a reasonable option.
“I’m not actually serious,” Dave grumbles, straightening up in his chair.
Blaine’s smile is relieved. “Oh, good.”
“But I don’t know, maybe we could go for a walk or something? I might feel less nervous and freaked out if I was moving around.”
*
They end up walking to the public playground a couple blocks away from Blaine’s house. Hardly anyone is ever there, because most of the kids in the neighborhood have grown out of it, and the ones that are young enough have their own newer, shinier playsets in their backyards.
They find it completely barren of children or any other human inhabitants. There’s a squirrel sitting at the top of the slide like it owns the damn thing, eyeing Dave and Blaine suspiciously, clutching at the apple core in its paws and going statue-still as they step nearer. When they hook a left and settle down in two neighboring swings, the squirrel relaxes its tail and resumes nibbling at the apple core.
Dave sets both feet against the ground and begins swinging his hips so that he’s twisting side to side, facing Blaine and then away from Blaine. He doesn’t understand why he’s so embarrassed, or why this is so difficult; they’ve talked about sex before, but of course then it was all in vague generalities, and most of it was Blaine trying to make sure that Dave knew never, never, ever engage in butt sex without a latex condom and water- or silicone-based lubricant unless he was in a long-term, committed relationship where all partners tested negative for STDs and didn’t have risky activities outside of the relationship.
All partners. Not both partners. All of them. That’s actually what Blaine said, isn’t it? Back in – when was it? February? March?
Dave looks up. “How long have you had that book?”
Blaine looks at him. They’ve been silent almost the whole way to the playground; Dave can tell Blaine has no idea what he’s talking about. “What book?”
Dave shifts his feet so that he can keep twisting without looking away from Blaine. “The slut book. How long have you had it?”
“Since March, maybe?” Blaine shrugs. “Yeah, I think March.”
“Why did you get it?”
Blaine hunches over, his hands in his lap. His swing is barely moving. “Kurt got it, actually.”
Dave’s surprised; he’d assumed that Blaine had bought it to understand Kurt better, to decide if he could do this thing. He’d imagined Blaine buying it in a bookstore in Columbus and going home to read it under his covers with a flashlight when his parents thought he was asleep and then, after starring and underlining the parts that comforted and worried him the most, handing it to Kurt and saying, “I can do this.”
Kurt buying the book – well, for one thing, it’s hard to imagine. How on earth did Kurt get through reading all of those reclamations of the word “slut” without rolling his eyes? Wasn’t he tempted to rip out the section on cruising and use it for papier maché?
But maybe more importantly, it puts a whole different spin on things. It means that Kurt’s the one who pushed, who started to propel things forward. And Dave knows how hard it is to refuse Kurt when he wants something. Usually that turns out to be for the good, but still –
Dave looks at Blaine, and waits until he’s sure Blaine is looking him in the eye. “So are you doing this for him? Because it’s what Kurt wants?”
Blaine chews his bottom lip and squinches one side of his face. “Yes and no?”
“Which part’s the ‘yes,’ and which part’s the ‘no’?”
“Well, if Kurt didn’t want it, it would all be –” Blaine raises one hand in the air and waves it around to indicate something dissipating, evaporating. “Kind of a moot point? But it’s what I want, too.”
“What do you get out of it?”
Blaine smiles and ducks his head. “Well, I get to see my boyfriend happy, and my best friend. That’s a lot of it.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
Whatever Dave’s expecting, it’s not for Blaine’s face to turn as pink as a peach. Seriously, Dave had no idea that Blaine could blush like that. “Um –” Blaine says.
Dave can’t help but smile; Blaine’s adorable when he gets embarrassed. It’s probably not helpful, though, so Dave tries to force his face into something more somber. He clears his throat. “It’s okay. You already know plenty of embarrassing things about me. That’s what true friendships are built on.”
Blaine clutches at the chains of his swing. “I –” he starts, then stops. He takes a deep breath, looks at Dave, then squints one eye closed. “I think it’s hot. When other guys are attracted to Kurt. It – I like it. I’ve always liked it. I like it in general, but I especially like it when it’s you.”
“Huh,” Dave says. He’s not sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that.
“Before I knew he had a crush on you, even, I –” Blaine closes his one open eye and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t open his eyes when he resumes talking. “I thought about him with other guys.” Blaine sits there for a long moment, breathing slowly; Dave never knew that a person could look so earnest and vulnerable with their lids closed. He thought those emotions were expressed through the eyes alone.
Clearly he was wrong.
Blaine inches one eye open. “Are you going to say something?”
“Can I ask a clarifying question?”
Blaine opens both eyes now. “Of course.”
“Okay.” It’s Dave’s turn to blush. “Are you saying that you, um … that you get off on the idea of seeing your boyfriend with another guy?”
Blaine sucks in his lips and nods.
“Literally?” Dave says.
Blaine screws up his eyebrows like he doesn’t quite understand, so Dave makes the standard jacking off hand motion. For some reason, that’s easier than saying the words. Blaine makes this weird laugh that’s a cross between discomfort and relief. “Um, yes, literally,” he says.
“Okay,” Dave says.
Blaine looks at him. “That’s all you’re gonna say?”
Dave looks down at the ground, toes his shoe deeper into the mulch beneath the swing set. “Have you – Have you thought about … me and Kurt … together?”
There’s no answer at first, so Dave looks up. The tips of Blaine’s ears are as red as a cardinal’s wings. “Yeah.”
Dave smirks. “How many times?”
“Dave!”
Dave laughs. He laughs until Blaine is laughing, too, pretty and pink-faced, and keeps laughing until tears start pushing out of the corners of his eyes. He wipes the back of his wrist against his face. “Well, I guess it’s only fair.”
“What do you mean?” Blaine smiles as he catches his breath.
Dave shrugs, going for nonchalant. “I’ve gotten off thinking about you guys together, too.”
Blaine’s jaw drops. “Really?”
“Well, it usually felt weird thinking about me with Kurt, so –”
Blaine smiles. “But now that you know he likes you, you can let your imagination wander?”
Dave shrugs again. “You’re still there sometimes, anyway.”
“I don’t believe you,” Blaine says, but his tone says he believes Dave 100 percent and just wants to hear it again.
“It’s … nice. You guys are – you know you guys are hot together, right?”
Blaine bats his eyelashes. “Well I certainly thought so, but I figured my opinion might be a little biased.”
“I like –” Dave can’t believe he’s about to say this, but Blaine did say he wanted to talk about sex, so they might as well start getting into the details. “Sometimes I think about you showing me what he likes.”
Blaine tips forward in his swing. “Wow. That’s … hot.”
“‘Hot’ like ‘fantasy hot’ or ‘we-should-do-it-in-real-life hot?’”
“All of the above.”
Dave smiles, pleased with himself. “And what do you think about? I mean, as far as ... you know.”
Blaine bites his bottom lip. “Everything. I’ve thought about you guys doing pretty much everything that Kurt likes to do.”
“Which is –?”
“Well, that’s a conversation you should be having with Kurt now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” This polyamory thing sure involves a lot of talking with people. Dave wonders how and if they’ll ever get to the actual sex part. “But what are you doing? Do you just watch, or –?”
Blaine kicks his foot against the ground and starts swinging gently side to side. “Sometimes I watch; sometimes I help out if you guys want me to. Sometimes I’m not even there, but I know you guys are … well, you know. And that’s nice, too.”
“And do you – Do you get off? I mean, in your fantasies? Or is part of it not getting off?”
“Sometimes I get off, sometimes I don’t. It’s not really the point, but it’s not like it’s something I’m trying to avoid, either.” Blaine plants his foot on the ground and comes to an abrupt stop, looking Dave squarely in the eye. “But I could avoid it, I mean, in real life. If we’re all together and that would make you more comfortable.”
Dave looks down at his hands, back at Blaine. “No. You wouldn’t have to. Avoid it, I mean. It’s ... The more the merrier, you know?”
Blaine smiles and laughs and starts swinging again, just a few inches back and forth at first, and then farther up from the ground with each push. Dave follows his lead. Pretty soon they’re high in the air, up and back, their feet soaring above the level of the uppity squirrel on top of the slide. It’s finished with its apple core by now, spending most of its energy giving them dirty looks when they fly overhead. Eventually it abandons its post, scrambling down the side of the slide and darting toward the public trashcan in search of new treasures.
It’s been years since Dave’s been on a swing like this. His body has changed a lot; he gets this weird swooping sensation deep in his ears with every rise and fall that he doesn’t remember feeling at a younger age. It’s weird and uncomfortable, but he also likes it. It reminds him that he’s a different person than he ever was before.
* * *
On the last Saturday in May – the day before his birthday – Kurt wakes up at four o'clock in the morning to his iPhone sounding its alarm on Blaine’s nightstand. Blaine continues snoring.
"Blaine," Kurt whispers, poking Blaine's calf with his big toe. Blaine stops snoring, but doesn't quite wake up until Kurt pokes him three more times and deposits a loud, lip-smacking kiss just below his ear.
Blaine opens his eyes and mumbles something incoherent that's probably meant to be, "What?"
"It's your last chance to join the fun!" Kurt gives the bed a little jounce.
Blaine rubs his eye with the heel of his palm. "Fun?"
Kurt bounces again. "Lake Erie! Magee Marsh! Birding!"
"No, no. That's what you and Dave think is fun."
"If you're sure." Kurt kisses him on the forehead and Blaine suddenly becomes a lot more lucid.
"Of course I'm sure. That's why you have two boyfriends. So this one can go back to sleep and recover from being so excellently laid last night, and that one can get up at the buttcrack of dawn and look for birds with you."
And with that, Blaine gives Kurt a quick peck on the lips and buries his head back in the pillow.
Two boyfriends. It's weird and perfect, and the casual way that Blaine said it makes Kurt's heart do pirouettes as he sets about making his latte, not worrying about the noise of the espresso machine since Blaine’s parents are gone for the weekend at a golf resort near Canton.
It's still dark when Kurt arrives at Dave's. He smoothes his hands over his beige shorts and matching button-down as he waits for Dave to come out the door, nervous that his effort at birder chic might come across more as safari chic. But he's pretty sure he looks good in it, judging by Blaine's reaction when he modeled the outfit last night and Blaine offered to unlace his knee-high brown boots with his teeth.
"Sexy and practical," Blaine said. "You can keep your bird list in there," he lowered his finger into the shirt's left pocket, rubbing Kurt's nipple through the cloth, "and your binoculars in there," he ran his other hand under the leather belt bag on Kurt's hip, pressing his fingers against the bone, "and Dave's hands in there." He lowered both hands into the patch pockets and pushed them toward each other until he was brushing Kurt's cock through the fabric.
"You're going to wrinkle my shorts," Kurt said with a rough sigh.
"Then take them off," Blaine said.
Kurt did.
He's probably overdressed for the occasion, but that's never stopped him before. Anyway, he wants to be sure that he's the best-looking guy on the boardwalk, just in case there happen to be any other svelte 18-year-old gay birdwatchers who have a thing for jockish, math-obsessed classical musicians – although it'll probably be mostly old people wearing high-waisted pants and hideous comfort shoes.
Or worse – sandals with socks. Kurt shudders.
Dave steps out of the front door in blue jeans and an unzipped hoodie, the t-shirt beneath it hugging his chest. Dave has moved toward more fitted tops in the past couple weeks, and Kurt is not unhappy at all about the way they hint more strongly at the muscles moving beneath them.
"Happy day-before-your-birthday," Dave says when he climbs into the passenger seat. Kurt fondles his own seatbelt, fighting the urge to undo it and climb onto Dave and kiss him until he makes that weak-kneed noise that Kurt loves. Dave's dad is watching them from the front window of the house, so instead Kurt squeezes Dave's knee and says, "Thank you," before pulling back onto the road.
At the first stop light, Dave pulls out his first birthday present for Kurt. It's a set of maps he made from sightings that birders have posted in the local online forums. Kurt tries to take a close look at them, but it's still too dark outside for him to make out the details. He sees the outline of Allen County and the silhouettes of birds scattered here and there on the first page; the second page is of Magee Marsh; and the third, a satellite image of the woods next to Blaine's house, with images of each of the birds they've spotted this spring.
"Perfect, perfect, perfect," Kurt murmurs until the light turns green.
Then there's Dave's second present. Dave plugs his mp3 player into the dash and says, "This is for you." Kurt waits for the first chords to erupt out of the speakers – he's certain it will be something classical, hopefully piano, hopefully Dave – but they never come.
Instead, the world is silent but for the hum of the wind against the Navigator's cabin and the call of a bird.
It takes a moment for Kurt to realize that the call is coming from the speakers. "Oh, my god. That's a – is that a Wilson's warbler?"
"A Tennessee warbler, actually," Dave says, "but it took me a while to figure out the difference. I thought, if you wanted to, we could listen to it on our way up and then maybe we'd recognize some when –"
"You're the best!" Kurt reaches across the console and squeezes Dave's thigh.
They listen to the recording most of the way there, pausing after each bird to imitate the song. Dave is much better at it than Kurt.
"Oh, my god, we're really nerdy, aren't we?" Kurt says after they've finally parsed the difference between the song of the black-throated blue warbler and that of the black-throated green warbler. "We'd fit in perfectly in a retirement community. I could design the songbird garden and you could be in charge of the feeders and the birdhouses and Blaine could sit on the veranda all day charming the ninety-year-old ladies. I think a lot of them would confuse him for someone they dated in 1938 or 1952."
"As long as there's a piano there and they keep it tuned."
"Well, of course. We wouldn't even consider retiring to a place without 24-hour access to a Steinway."
"Oh, I'd be happy with a Yamaha if everything else is as good as you make it sound."
Kurt reaches across the console and rubs his thumb over the back of Dave's hand.
*
The boardwalks are packed with old people as Kurt expected, so Kurt and Dave don't hold hands and they definitely don't plant kisses against each other's foreheads as they stroll around, eyes on the trees. Dave wants to find a cerulean warbler, but by eight-thirty the birdsongs have faded and they’ve had no luck finding that particular shade of blue. Still, they've checked a few off their list and learned from some of the older birders about red-eyed vireos and yellow-bellied flycatchers. And the colors of some of the birds – Kurt contemplates the possibilities for a spring wardrobe based on those dusky purples and enigmatic oranges.
They are heading back toward the car when Dave hears it. He cocks up his head and hold up a finger and Kurt turns his ear the same way. He can hear it – it's a familiar song, something from the mp3s they were listening to this morning – but he can't remember which it is.
Dave looks through his binoculars and Kurt follows his gaze. There, in the tangle of half-bare branches, is a bright spot of blue. It's like nothing Kurt's ever seen in nature, and more vivid than any blue he's seen outside of it. The cerulean warbler flits from branch to branch, singing its way through the treetops, and Kurt feels Dave's elbow brush against his. Kurt presses into the warmth until they’re elbow to shoulder. Kurt is hyperaware of the touch; something about being here – outside, and part of the natural world again – makes it feel more real than any of their touches that have come before.
*
They hold hands most of the way back to Lima, unlinking long enough to stop at an IHOP off the highway for a spinach, mushroom and tomato omelet (Kurt), a T-bone steak and eggs with buttermilk pancakes (Dave), and two pots of coffee (both). They link ankles under the table and almost get a takeout order of blueberry pancakes for Blaine before remembering that they'll be cold by the time they get to Lima. Instead, they swing by Pat's Donuts & Kreme on the way into town for kettle tarts and coffee.
Blaine is still asleep when they get to his room. They find him spread-eagled on his stomach in his tank and boxers, and sink down next to him in the empty space on Kurt's side of the bed. Blaine's face is half-buried in the pillow, half-exposed, his mouth open and his hair a mess of contradictory curls. Kurt kisses him on the forehead. "Good morning, sleepyhead."
Blaine mumbles something incomprehensible and rolls over as he opens his eyes. His sleep-addled smile grows bigger when he sees that Dave's there, too, then practically swallows his face when Dave says, "We brought you coffee."
"And kettle tarts," Kurt adds. "I argued briefly for whole-grain bagels, but Dave won."
Blaine bolts up in bed. "God, I love you, Dave."
Blaine has devoured his first kettle tart and half the cup of coffee before the full weight of the situation seems to dawn on him. He looks at Dave, running nervous fingers through his curls. "Crap, I must look like a wreck. Kurt's used to it but you shouldn't have to put up with it."
Dave ruffles Blaine's hair. "You look cute."
Blaine gives Dave a sideways kick to the ass, but he can't get very good contact considering the way they're sitting on the bed. Dave just chuckles.
"Am I a bad host if I abandon you two here while I go take a shower?" Blaine says.
Kurt blushes. "No."
Blaine scrambles over them to make his way out of the bed, even though there's a perfectly clear path on the other side of the bed. "Back in twenty." At the door, he turns around and winks. "Enjoy yourselves." And with that, he's gone.
They do. It's pretty innocent – long, lazy kisses on the mouth even when they end up lowering themselves into a long stretch across the bed.
"You're so beautiful," Kurt whispers into Dave's mouth.
Dave startles back. His eyes, which had been blissfully half-closed, are wide open. "What?"
"You heard me," Kurt says, kissing the corner of Dave's mouth. But he repeats himself, anyway. "You're beautiful."
Dave keeps staring, his mouth half-open as if he's about to say something, but nothing comes out.
Kurt props himself up on his elbow, traces Dave's bottom lip with the fingers of his other hand. "You don't believe me. Do you?"
Dave closes his lips, swallows, rolls onto his back to get a better view of Kurt's face. "You never lie."
"I try not to," Kurt says. "But sometimes I hold off on telling the truth for longer than I should. So let’s see –" He kisses Dave's forehead. “When you play the piano it feels like there's a whole vine of moonflowers blooming in my chest." He kisses Dave’s nose. “And when your cheeks turn pink, it makes my knees melt." Dave lets out a little moan as Kurt kisses his jaw, still smooth from this morning's shave, still smelling like Dave's mystery aftershave. "I love that we can share our age-inappropriate interest in birding." He kisses Dave's throat. "And," Kurt hovers his lips back above Dave's, "that you're an amazing kisser."
"I don't understand," Dave says before Kurt has a chance to bring their lips together.
"What don’t you understand?"
"Just – I don't want this to sound the wrong way, but when I watch you and Blaine, the kissing looks pretty amazing, too."
"It is."
"And I don't mean that in a jealous way – I really don't, it's always been one of the weird things about being with you guys. I mean, since fall, at least. Nothing makes me jealous."
"What do you mean, since fall?"
"Oh." Dave flushes pink. "I had a crush on you before that, even. It's – yeah, that's pretty fucked up. Okay, I should probably go now." He starts rolling away from Kurt, but Kurt grabs his forearm and won't let go.
"How long?"
"I don't know." Dave's jaw tightens and he looks like he's trying to keep from crying, which tears Kurt's heart into bits. "I – I've been attracted to you for a long time. I mean, that was part of why I got so angry with you."
If Kurt’s supposed to feel shock, he doesn’t. He has a sense of puzzle pieces clicking into place. "I wondered about that, last spring after we had our meeting with Figgins.”
“Really?”
Kurt nods. “Yeah. It occurred to me as a possibility, but I decided it wasn’t really any of my business as long as you kept your end of the bargain.”
Dave quirks his eyebrows. “Why?”
Kurt shrugs. “I had a crush on Finn for a really long time, and he made me feel like it was something to be ashamed about. I mean, things got better later, but … I didn’t want to make anyone else feel as bad as he’d made me feel just for having feelings they couldn’t control. I decided the thing that counted was what you were going to do with your feelings now.”
“I never thought about it that way.”
“Oh, Dave," Kurt sighs.
“I guess that’s something to add to the list of things to talk with my therapist about.”
Kurt smirks and twitches Dave's nose. "That's probably a good idea."
By the time Blaine gets back, they're lying side by side again, holding hands. Dave is singing the song of the cerulean warbler and trying to teach Kurt to sing it, too, but Kurt just keeps giggling because the shapes feel impossible in his mouth. It would all look perfectly innocent if it weren't for the fact that Kurt walked into the room with only the top button of his shirt undone, and there are three open now.
Blaine settles down next to them and tries the song. After a few minutes of tutoring, he eventually does about as well as Kurt – which means they both sound like humans whistling.
Dave, on the other hand, sounds like something that belongs in the sky.
* * *
They decide to watch a movie. Blaine and Dave snuggle up against the headboard on either side of Kurt while Blaine uses the computer’s remote control to flick through the options on Netflix. But everything is no, no, seen it already, no, ugh god no, and when Blaine feels Kurt's fingers trailing up the inside of his thigh, pushing up the hem of his shorts, and he looks down and sees that Kurt's other hand is doing the same thing to Dave, it becomes obvious that watching a movie is the stupidest idea on Earth.
Blaine throws the remote on the floor and dives into Kurt's neck.
Maybe he should think about that first – ask Kurt if that’s okay in front of Dave, make sure that Dave’s actually ready for a group grope – but Kurt lets out this lovely soft moan and then Dave moves in, muffling Kurt’s moans with his kisses and making his own happy sighs into Kurt’s mouth. Dave drapes his arm around Kurt’s waist, the back of his fingers brushing against Blaine’s belly, and Blaine is so hard already, growing harder by the second from the strange haunting intimacy of this moment and from their scents mixed together.
Blaine slides his palm up the inside of Kurt’s thigh, pushing up the hem of his shorts and teasing his fingers along the leg opening of Kurt’s briefs. Kurt whimpers into Dave’s mouth, wraps his arms tight around Dave and pulls him flush with his chest, sways his hips in tiny waves off the bed, nudging his balls toward Blaine’s fingers.
And then Dave’s hand is on the back of Blaine’s, nudging it upward until Blaine’s palm is stroking the hard length of Kurt’s cock through the fabric of his shorts. Dave lets his own hand fall to the inside of Kurt’s thigh, caressing it in smooth, soft strokes.
Kurt lets out a surprised choking sound, his mouth dropping open, his head falling toward the pillow. Dave falls with him, kissing Kurt’s chin and his neck, his face so close to where Blaine’s is pressed against Kurt’s shoulder.
“Are you sure?” Kurt lets out between gasps. Blaine slides his hand to rest on Kurt’s hip.
Dave looks up from the spot he’s sucking on Kurt’s collarbone. His eyes are open, his expression so soft and achingly tender as he looks into Kurt’s eyes. “Yes,” he says. “I want – I want this. Please.”
Kurt bites his lower lip. Blaine can feel Kurt’s muscles tensing underneath his hand as he tries not to thrust forward. “Promise to say if it’s too much?”
Dave nods solemnly. “I promise.”
“Okay.” Kurt smiles cautiously, turning to Blaine. “Okay?”
Blaine answers by reaching his hand up the leg of Kurt’s briefs and stroking the smooth, warm skin of his cock. The position is awkward, but it’s hot how desperate Kurt already is when his shorts aren’t even off yet. Blaine keeps stroking him with one hand as he undoes Kurt’s shorts with the other.
Dave watches and his eyes go wide when Blaine pulls Kurt’s cock out of his shorts, hard and smooth and purpling with desire. Kurt’s eyes flutter between Blaine’s and Dave’s and he moans when Blaine strokes him, and he moans when Dave touches his balls with tentative sweetness, and he moans again when Blaine ducks down and licks a long stripe all the way from the root to the head.
Blaine takes Dave’s hand and guides it up Kurt’s shaft. Dave pets it hesitantly at first, watching Kurt’s face for cues. Kurt nods, his eyes and mouth open, his hips pumping up toward Dave’s hand.
“Oh, Dave,” Kurt moans. He’s so turned on – Blaine can tell by the sounds he’s making, by the way Kurt’s hand is gripping Blaine’s thigh, the way the precome beads at the tip of his cock. Dave smooths it down over the Kurt’s glans until it’s glistening, then further down the shaft to mix with Blaine’s saliva.
“God that’s hot,” Blaine mutters. He unbuttons Kurt’s shirt and pulls it open to suck at Kurt’s nipples. His head nudges up against Dave’s chest, and Dave lets out a soft gasp, and Blaine closes his eyes to feel everything more – the warmth of their bodies so close to his; the smell of sweat and sex; the sound of Dave’s palm stroking Kurt’s skin and of hard, wanton kisses and sweet, desperate moaning.
* * *
There's so many hands, so many lips and they all know what to do, all know how to make Kurt's skin sing. His hands, his mouth – he wishes he had more, wishes he had enough to give this to them both, but he does his best, holding tight to Dave's hair with one hand and squeezing Blaine's shoulder with the other as sucks groan after groan out of Dave’s mouth. Kurt kisses and rocks and everything feels so good: Blaine’s tongue on his nipples, Blaine’s hand on his ass, Dave’s lips and curling fingers and desperation.
Kurt rocks and rocks and he can’t stop, he can feel Dave’s cock swelling against his hip and Blaine’s against his outer thigh and everything is so good and so close, he’s so close, oh god –
"I want – I want –" Kurt moans, fucking up into Dave's hand, against both of his boyfriends’ hardness. “I want – ”
"Please," says Dave, his voice breaking.
“Anything,” says Blaine. “Anything.”
Kurt fucks his tongue into Dave's mouth to draw out his loveliest groan yet, fucks until Dave jerks the hard outline of his cock up and down against Kurt’s hip, over and over. Kurt's brain short circuits with all the things he wants to do to Dave's cock, all the ways in which he wants to make Dave beg and feel, and he grabs his ass and pulls him in tighter, and Blaine makes a sweet, crescendoing moan against Kurt’s chest.
Blaine's hand clenches the curve of Kurt's ass as Kurt fucks arhythmically into Dave's fingers and Dave fucks against Kurt’s hip. "God I love you, Kurt," Blaine whispers, nosing against Kurt’s peaked nipple. "I want you to come and I want you to make Dave come."
Kurt thrusts his hips again, sliding forward into ineffable heat.
* * *
Dave oh god Blaine oh god yes oh god yes yes Dave I'm going to make you –
Dave comes with a force and suddenness that he didn't know was possible. He feels like his body is being ripped in half and healing back into something better a million times a second – except that he doesn't even know what a second, or a minute, or an hour are anymore. He's outside of time; everything is just the intense pleasure of his body and the feeling of Kurt moving against him and in his hands.
Kurt's eyes go wide and startled, his body shuddering, his voice calling out yes like it's the only word worth speaking. He kisses Dave greedily, his hands grabbing at Dave's hair, spreading fire from his scalp down to his spent hips. And Kurt’s cock – large and stiff and fever-hot and growing larger as Kurt pumps himself in and out of the circle of Dave’s fingers, and then pulsing, a quivering dry spasm and then with a choked groan he pours onto Dave’s hand, slick and wet and warm.
Kurt loosens, tightens, loosens his grip on Dave's hair as Dave works him through the aftershocks. His face is gorgeous and flushed, his soft pink mouth open and eyes fluttering at Dave like birds. Blaine licks wantonly at Kurt’s neck as he reaches into his own pants and Dave finds himself moaning again as Blaine comes; and Kurt moans, too, exhaling music with one last shudder before going lax in Dave’s arms.
*
“Oh god, that was –” Blaine’s voice, soft and awed. Blaine’s face, resting against Kurt’s chest. Blaine’s hand, stroking Dave’s arm reverently.
“Are – are you okay?” Dave says. He’s not sure who he’s asking: Blaine or Kurt or both.
“Amazing,” says Blaine.
“Ditto,” says Kurt, breaking into soft giggles as he zips up his shorts and kisses Dave on the nose. “You?”
Dave nods. “Yeah.” He looks into Kurt’s eyes, more beautiful and rare than the cerulean warbler they spotted this morning. “Overwhelmed. But in a good way.”
Kurt cradles his head into Dave’s shoulder, wraps Blaine into his arms. They’re three spoons nestled into each other, Dave thinks.
"I love you guys," Blaine sighs, turning around in Kurt’s arms. "Each," he says, kissing Kurt on the lips. "And together." He leans across Kurt to kiss Dave on the cheek. "I love you so much together."
*
Dave wakes up to the feeling of the mattress dipping next to him. “Wh – what?” he mutter, opening his eyes to see Blaine sitting next to him on the bed. Kurt is still nestled up on Dave’s other side, eyes half-open in a lazy sort of wakefulness.
“Oh, sorry,” Blaine says sheepishly. “I didn’t realize you’d actually fallen asleep. I just –” He gestures to the washcloth in his hand. “Thought you could use a little clean-up? For your hand, I mean. Not your–” Blaine gestures bashfully toward Dave’s crotch. “I mean, not that I’d have a problem with that, I just didn’t think you’d want me to, um, you know.”
“You’re cute,” Dave says because he apparently has no filter right upon waking up. Is it okay to say something like that to your boyfriend’s boyfriend in front of said boyfriend?
Apparently it must be, because Kurt giggles, squeezing Dave in a tight hug. “Isn’t he, though?”
Blaine reaches for Dave’s hand. It’s only a little sticky; he already wiped most of Kurt’s come on his jeans before he fell asleep. Jeans that he will never, ever wash now. Well, probably never. They also have his own come on them, which isn’t quite as special.
The washcloth is steamy warm like one of those hot towels they give out at the Japanese restaurant Dave sometimes goes to with his dad, but it’s green instead of white. Blaine rubs it gently over Dave’s palm and between each of his fingers. It feels nice, being taken care of like this. Dave wonders if that’s what it used to feel like when he was little and his parents shampooed his hair for him. He can’t remember. But he does remember his great aunt wiping down his forehead with a cold washcloth when he used to get sick with a fever. It was the only part of being sick that he enjoyed.
When Blaine is done, he looks at Kurt. “Do you want it, or –?” He blushes.
“No, I’ll take a shower,” Kurt says, nuzzling into Dave’s shoulder. “In a little bit.”
Blaine bends over Dave to kiss Kurt on the forehead. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone and get a start on making lunch.”
“You sure?” Dave says.
Blaine squeezes Dave’s hand and smiles in that way that Dave knows means he’s telling the truth. “Positive.”
* * *
Dave is gorgeous. Kurt knew that before, but here in Blaine’s bed with his hair mussed up against the pillow and his cheeks pink from sex and his face so close that Kurt can count his eyelashes and see the spot on his chin where he must have nicked himself with a razor this morning, he’s stunning. There’s something so intimate and privileged and unbearably wonderful about seeing a person this way. It breaks Kurt’s heart and rebuilds it at the same time.
“What?” Dave says, blinking his lovely light eyelashes over deep acorn eyes.
Kurt touches a fingertip to Dave’s mouth and traces the bow of his top lip. “You’re so … enchanting.”
Dave smiles. It’s what Kurt wanted to see.
“No one’s ever called me that before,” Dave says.
“That’s because they’re all stupid.”
Dave laughs, his pretty white teeth showing and his eyes crinkling and his whole face joy. Kurt’s heart flutters in his chest.
“What else can I be the first to call you?” Kurt rolls over on top of Dave, knees straddling either side of his hips.
“Well, not ‘asshole’ and ‘douchebag.’ I get those all the time.”
Kurt tickles him under the arm. “How about gorgeous? You’re fucking gorgeous, you know that?”
“‘Fucking’? Well, technically –”
Kurt bends forward and licks his tongue into Dave’s mouth. Dave answers with his own tongue and a sublime little growl.
“There,” Kurt gasps as he pulled away. “You’ve been tongue-fucked. So technically, you’re fucking gorgeous.”
Dave bats his eyes. “Kurt, I –” He looks at Kurt, bites his lower lip.
Kurt takes his hand and holds it in both of his. “What, David?”
“I –” Dave shrugs. “I’m really happy right now.”
“Good,” Kurt says, bending forward to kiss Dave on the cheek. “Me, too.”
*
Kurt and Blaine sit in the moonless dark of the second-story balcony after Dave goes home that evening. He has to pack. He's leaving early in the morning with his father for their annual family gathering outside of Pittsburgh.
It'll only be a couple days. Kurt's gone without seeing Dave for a couple days before even when he hasn't wanted to, and it's never killed him yet. But Kurt has already had several pangs of longing for him, overwhelming moments when it feels like there's a litter of kittens roughhousing in his stomach.
Their lounge chairs are close enough that they're almost one piece of furniture. Kurt is resting his head against Blaine's shoulder, at peace in the moment and the familiar scent of his boyfriend in the shadowy dark.
"I miss Dave a lot right now," Kurt says.
"I know," Blaine says. "I do, too."
"And I wish I didn't have to hide it from everyone but you."
"I know."
"He deserves someone who can show him off."
Blaine shakes his head. "No, Kurt. He deserves someone who loves him."
"Blaine –" It’s thank you and you understand me and I love you and how do you know to say the perfect, right thing? all in one word.
Blaine kisses Kurt slowly. "God, when you came this afternoon, he looked like – I can't explain it. He was so beautiful looking at you, and it was because of you. That's what matters to him."
"Blaine." Kurt presses his nose and lips into the curve of Blaine's neck. He feels so safe there. "You take my breath away."
"You do the same thing to me, Kurt." Blaine starts brushing Kurt's hair with his hand in long, comforting strokes. "And to Dave. Literally. I can hear the breath rush out of him sometimes when you walk into the room."
Kurt considers. There are so many things he wouldn't know about Dave if it weren't for Blaine, distracted as he gets by his own nervousness and desire. The two relationships have become indelibly intertwined. “I don't think I would know how to –" Kurt swallows. "I don't think I could love him the way I do if I wasn't so in love with you."
Blaine's silent for a moment, his fingers still lazily caressing Kurt's scalp. "This afternoon – you were beautiful together. Watching you – maybe it's weird, but I felt really loved."
"No, it's not weird. It’s wonderful."
Blaine kisses Kurt lazy and slow. They have no destination but each other, kiss until their mouths are sore and then kiss some more as their bodies wind into each other, become a tangle of tongues and limbs and hearts. Hidden here in the blissful dark, they give themselves over to each other and the clear night sky.
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: That old truism about finding beauty in unexpected places is, in fact, true. ~5,500 words
Rating for this chapter: PG-13
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
---
Dave: I was thinking about bringing Kurt flowers.
Blaine: Just when I think you can't be any more perfect, you go and say something like that.
Dave: I wanted to make sure it would be okay with you.
Blaine: Of course it's okay with me. Kurt will love it.
Blaine: No lilies, though. They remind him of his mom's funeral.
Dave: No. I was thinking of something else.
Blaine: OK, just don't tell me what kind. He should be the first to know.
Blaine: Although, as a general rule, I like the idea of secretly plotting Kurt's happiness with you.
Dave: You're kind of amazing.
Blaine: I was about to say the same about you. He's pretty smitten with you, you know.
Blaine: If I didn't already know you were awesome, just that fact would make me realize it.
Dave: Um OK.
Blaine: Be that way. So I was thinking. You and I have spent a lot of time together without Kurt, but you and Kurt haven't spent much time together without me.
Blaine: That doesn't seem right.
Dave: He's your boyfriend.
Blaine: He's yours, too.
Blaine: Hello?
Dave: Processing.
Blaine: It's nice being in love, isn't it?
Blaine: Fine, I won't make you answer that. Anyway, you can think about it.
Dave: Okay.
Blaine: I’m so excited about the flowers!
Dave: Me too.
Blaine: :D :D !!!
* * *
"Remember how I said maybe you and Dave should go on a date?" Blaine and Kurt are eating lunch outside on McKinley's lawn, sitting on the blanket that Kurt keeps in his car. It still has grass stains and traces of clay on its underside from the Saturday night they spent at the river with Dave.
"Yeah." Kurt pops a jicama stick into his mouth, chewing with his mouth half-open. As much as Blaine loves Kurt's cultivated elegance, he also loves the moments when he forgets himself and reverts to being as unselfconsciously ill-mannered as the rest of the kids at McKinley.
"Well, it's more that I think you guys should have the opportunity to spend some time together, without me around."
Kurt tips back his head so he can look down his nose at Blaine. "I am suspicious of your motives."
Blaine blushes and looks down at the picnic blanket, tracing the edges of its quilted squares with his finger. "Not like that. I just – we get to spend a lot of time together on our own, and Dave and I have spent a lot of time together on our own. But you guys haven't. And I thought you guys might have things you want to talk about or, you know, to get to know each other better."
Kurt still hasn't removed the haughty look from his face, but a sparkle begins to light the edge of his eyes. "Get to know each other better?"
"Not like that." Blaine smiles bashfully. "I mean, unless you're both ready."
Kurt takes another bite of jicama before responding. "I kind of doubt that. I mean, there are probably things we should talk about first."
Blaine nods. "So, Sam and Rory asked me if I want to watch a geeky comic nerd movie that would totally bore you after school today. And I thought, if you guys want, I could do that and you guys could have a couple hours together. If you want privacy, you could have my house. I mean, I know it isn't a hot place for a date or anything –"
"Speak for yourself. I've had some seriously hot dates there."
Blaine blushes again, but doesn't look away from Kurt. "Well, if my house is too hot for you, you could always go somewhere else."
Kurt reaches for Blaine's hand. "No. It's kind of become home for me. If it's okay with Dave, then sure. I think – I'd like that, Blaine."
Kurt continues munching on jicama while Blaine unwraps his sandwich and starts eating it in small, delicate bites. They eat in silence, alternating between beaming at each other and watching a group of sophomores about 20 yards away play a game of ultimate frisbee.
"You know," Kurt says, "before I met you, I had this picture in my mind of what the perfect boyfriend would be like."
Blaine swallows his bite of sandwich. "Yeah? Tell me about him."
"It's kind of irrelevant," Kurt answers, his eyes darting to Blaine's lips, then back to his eyes. There's an earnestness in Kurt's face that makes Blaine's heart skip. "You're so much better than anything I dreamed about."
* * *
Blaine: Have you had enough time to think about a date? Because Sam and Rory invited me to watch the Comic-Con movie with them this afternoon.
Dave: The what?
Blaine: Um, it’s a movie? About comic geeks?
Dave: You’d really rather do that than hang out with me? ;)
Blaine: Just this once.
Dave: Well, if spending time with me is such a hardship …
Blaine: Don’t be ridiculous. :D
Dave: So what’s the idea? I'll hang out at your house with Kurt?
Blaine: That's an excellent plan!
Dave: I won't try anything.
Blaine: That's sure to disappoint Kurt, but fine.
Blaine: Seriously, though, whatever you two do or don't do is okay with me a long you're both okay with it.
Blaine: And I guess this is a weird conversation to be having over text.
Dave: Every conversation I have with you is a little weird. I'm getting used to it.
Dave: If they start being normal, I might worry.
* * *
They exhale their greetings with breathy shyness. Kurt closes the door behind Dave; the house is empty of life except here in the vestibule, where their hearts beat.
Dave has a plastic soda cup from the Circle K. He passes it nervously back and forth between his hands. His backpack, slung loose over his right shoulder, begins slipping down his arm from the motion. "Hi," he says again.
"Hello." Kurt reaches for Dave's backpack strap, and Dave moves the cup into his left hand. "Kitchen?"
"Sure. Okay.”
Kurt slides Dave’s backpack off his shoulder and onto the floor, takes the cup from Dave's hand and places it on the entry table. "Or –"
The look in Kurt’s eyes is something like the way he looked at Dave in the car that night after the river. He's blinking a little, and pulling his bottom lip into his mouth with his teeth, and his terrifyingly everything eyes are steady on Dave's – steady except for one not-very-surreptitious glance at Dave's lips.
Kurt puts his hands on Dave's chest, slides them up to his shoulders. "I missed you," he says. He's not looking at Dave's eyes at all now, just staring at his mouth.
"Me, too." Dave's knees give and he leans back against the wall. "All the time. So much."
Dave's not sure when the kiss begins. All he knows is that Kurt is there, and here, and everywhere, the feel and the taste and the scent of him, the pale of his skin and the flashing silver-green of his eyes, like cottonwood leaves and tornado skies.
Dave tries to pay attention to all of it, but there's too much for his brain to process, everything so new and strange. Kurt sucks on Dave’s bottom lip and Dave hears himself whimper, weak and needy, the kind of sound that could get you mocked for months if you made it on the field. But here, there's no shame in anything.
Kurt pulls back, the smile crinkling the corner of his eyes. He traces the fingers of one hand over Dave's eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, the bow of his lips. "I can't decide," he says, "whether to kiss you all afternoon, or stare at you all afternoon."
"Anything," Dave says, because it's all he can muster for an answer.
"Not yet," Kurt says, taking Dave’s hand. "Soon, I hope." It's not until Kurt's face flushes bright red that Dave registers what Kurt means by that. He feels every string of muscle in his body tremble, piano strings struck and humming.
Kurt picks Dave's backpack from the floor and tugs on Dave's hand. "C'mon, beautiful."
Dave picks his drink cup off of the entry table and follows.
In the kitchen, Kurt grabs a can of Mountain Dew and a can of raspberry Klarbrunn from the fridge and sets them on the counter. "Oh, duh.” He glances at the soda cup still in Dave's hand and blushes. “You already have a drink. I guess I’m a little distracted.”
Dave blushes. "Actually, it's not a drink." He stands next to the counter where he usually does his homework and fiddles with the lid of the cup, trying to gather the will to pry it off. It was a stupid idea.
Kurt raises an eyebrow. "It's not confetti in there, is it?"
"No."
"A glitter bomb?"
Dave chuckles. "No."
"Good, because as much as I love a good glitter bomb, that stuff gets all over the place and Blaine's parents would not be excited about finding sparkles in the grout." Kurt tilts his head contemplatively at Dave. "You'd look nice, though, with a bit of glitter right –" Kurt steps closer, brushes his index finger across Dave's cheekbone. "– there." His breath is warmth and strawberries.
"It's –" Dave starts. He keeps fiddling with the lid.
Kurt waits, eyelashes fanning with every blink.He’s the most beautiful thing Dave has ever seen. And he was yesterday, and the day before. How does he keep doing that, just getting more and more radiant with every breath?
"You're being rather mysterious," Kurt says.
"Sorry," Dave says. "I'm not trying to be. I'm just … nervous. Because it's – it's for you." Kurt's lips turn up into a small smile, but Dave has to look away before he starts thinking about what Kurt's face will look like when he sees his very weird gift. Dave pries the lid off the cup and reaches in, carefully lifting it from the crumpled paper that holds it in place.
It's a small cylinder of a vase – a bit narrower and taller than a shot glass – with a tiny fern leaf and small cluster of exotic short-stemmed flowers that, four weeks ago, Dave wouldn't have been able to name if his life had depended on it. The flowers are tiny, their bases shaped like wine glasses but small enough to fit into a thimble. The triangular petals are the dusky pink of well-loved lips.
Dave doesn’t look up at Kurt’s face at first. If Blaine were here, he’d look at him for clues. Blaine's eyes would tell him if Kurt was happy.
Kurt's fingers wrap around the glass. "What are they?" His voice is light and reverent, like a Chopin nocturne.
Dave looks up. Kurt is beaming.
"Wild ginger," Dave says. "From our garden. They're not the prettiest, but –"
"No." Kurt shakes his head. "They're beautiful. I've never seen anything like them."
"Well, I hadn't either until last week. Even though we've had wild ginger in our yard as long as I can remember."
"I thought ginger grew in the tropics,” Kurt says with a raised eyebrow. (Does he have any idea how hot that is? It takes a significant amount of willpower for Dave not to derail the conversation with kisses.)
"It does. This is a different plant. It grows in some of the woods around here. You might have seen it before and just not noticed, because it looks kind of like violets – I mean, not the flower, obviously, but the leaves. Heart-shaped."
Kurt bites his lip. "Heart-shaped? You'll have to bring me one of the leaves, too."
Dave's face heats up. He glances at Kurt's lips, at the flowers in his hands. "I will," he says. It's barely above a whisper, but still it has Kurt bouncing on his toes and leaning forward to kiss Dave's cheek.
"Can I –?" Dave starts, gesturing toward the vase in Kurt's hand. "Can I hold your hands? I want to tell you something."
Kurt nods, swallowing slowly, the line of his Adam's apple bobbing against his neck. Dave wants to kiss it. He wants to kiss every spot on Kurt, really – his eyelids and the boney ridges behind his ears and the insides of his wrists. He wants to slip past the open button at the top of Kurt's orange oxford and map out his collarbone – it must be so perfect, prominent and ethereal, like the curve of a warbler's wing.
Dave closes his eyes and inhales. He wants to kiss everything, but he has to tell Kurt this thing first.
Kurt puts the glass on the counter, running a finger lightly over the opening of one of the flowers before turning back and giving his hands to Dave. "Okay." Kurt breathes. "Tell me."
Dave sees, in Kurt's pupils, his own face reflected back at him. It gives him the courage to speak. "So we've had this wild ginger in our garden for years. Do you remember the birch trees back by the garage?"
Kurt nods.
"Well, it's all over the place there. Anyway, I was back there last week digging up a buckthorn, and I kneeled down to push the ginger aside and I saw these flowers hidden under the leaves. So I started, um –" Dave exhales a laugh. "Basically, I ended up crawling through the whole patch and turning over every leaf to see if there was a flower under it. The neighbors must have thought it was pretty amusing."
Kurt opens his mouth like he's about to say something, but he doesn't – just smiles so wide his eyes crinkle. The beauty of it makes it both easier and harder for Dave to keep talking.
"I don't even know how long I was out there, but they were all over the place – like, a flower under every single plant. And I just kept thinking how you can think you know something and then you find out you didn't know it at all, that you just saw what was most obvious or easy to see, and –"
Dave stops then, glances down to where their hands are wrapped together, feels the warmth of Kurt's skin against his. Sometimes, when he's near Kurt, he feels like the whole world is about to drop out from under him. A couple years ago, when it first started happening, he thought it meant that the world would disappear. Now, he knows what it really means: He's learning to fly above it.
"But you don't do that. You see everything. At least with me. You see things I don't even know about myself until you show them to me. You show me that I'm a nerd and that it's good to be a nerd, and that I love tiny birds with names I can’t even pronounce, and that I don’t have to give up on my dreams when people try to break me, and that I can be brave, and that I am so, so, so incredibly gay."
Kurt's eyes are welling up with tears. He squeezes Dave's hands and laughs. "I think you knew you were gay before I did."
Dave shakes his head. "No. Not really. I mean, I knew I was attracted to guys and I wasn't into girls, but I just thought that meant I was fucked up, not that I was gay. Like I was created to be straight, but my body didn’t get the memo, you know?"
Kurt sniffles and nods. "Yeah, I do."
"And even though you had no reason in the world to be nice to me, you sat with me in those PFLAG meetings and just waited for my eyes to open. Even though they never really did."
"I had a reason, Dave." Kurt cups Dave's jaw in his hand. "I wanted you to be happy."
"Why?"
Kurt lowers his eyes, blushing. "Well, at first – so you'd stop acting like such a jerk."
Dave turns his head slightly and kisses Kurt's palm. "I was a jerk," he whispers.
"And then because you weren't a jerk anymore."
"You made me believe I could change."
Kurt wraps his arms around Dave's shoulders, pulls him down against his chest, Dave's forehead resting in the curve of Kurt's neck, his cheek against the wing of Kurt’s collarbone. "And then because you were pretty awesome, and the idea of you being happy made me happy in a way I couldn't explain to anyone, not even myself."
Dave kisses at Kurt’s tears, follows the trail up Kurt's neck and jaw to his cheeks. "I didn't mean to make you cry."
"I always cry when things are too wonderful to fathom."
*
They end up on the couch again, almost lying down, Kurt pressing Dave into the pillows but keeping his hips maddeningly tilted away from Dave’s own.
“I could kiss you forever.” Kurt’s lips are still touching Dave’s when he says it.
“Liar,” Dave whispers, then flicks his tongue into Kurt’s mouth as a sweet tease before adding, “You need to eat. And you’d miss kissing Blaine.”
Kurt tilts his hips a little closer to Dave’s, but not close enough. “I wish I could kiss you both at the same time.”
The sound that erupts from Dave’s chest is one he didn’t even know he could make. He’s heard it on porn videos, usually by a guy whose ass is being perfectly, sweetly fucked. His cock swells, pressing uncomfortably against his zipper; without thinking about it, he reaches down to adjust himself through the front of his jeans. When his fingers make contact, another indecent sound rumbles from his chest.
Kurt stops him with a hand on his wrist. “Let me.”
“Oh god yes,” Dave groans before his brain catches up. “Or – no, I mean, wait, I mean –” Dave startles upright, sliding Kurt off his body.
Kurt straightens his alluringly disheveled oxford shirt. “Sorry, I, um – maybe we should stay off of this couch for a while? I think it’s drenched in pheremones.”
“I think we’re drenched in pheremones.”
Kurt smiles sheepishly. “You may have a point there.”
“Maybe this sounds weird, but ... I’d feel better if Blaine was here.”
Kurt raises one eyebrow. “You mean –?”
“Yeah. I mean, to do that.” Dave’s stares down at his own twiddling thumbs. He clears his throat. “With you.”
Kurt puts a hand on Dave’s, putting an abrupt end to the thumb-twiddling. “Okay.”
Dave looks up. Kurt’s face is pink and glowing and should be memorialized on the ceiling of every Italian cathedral.
“Okay?” Dave says.
Kurt lets out a long breath. “Better than okay.”
"You think it would be okay with Blaine?"
Kurt's face turns even pinker. It's starting to clash with his orange shirt. "Way better than okay."
“Okay.” They might sound a bit like a skipping CD.
“Maybe we should take a little break from kissing right now. You kind of … do things to me. When we kiss.”
Dave opens his mouth, but it’s a minute before any words come out. “We could look for warblers.”
Kurt pecks Dave’s cheek. “Excellent idea.”
*
They wander in the wooded area next to Blaine’s house, faces tilted up toward the treetops.
“I’m not sure I would see a warbler right now if it perched on my nose.” Kurt hands Dave the binoculars.
“No?”
“No. I’m still thinking about what a wonderful kisser you are.” Kurt winks. “Seriously, where did you learn?"
"I really don't have that much experience. But if you insist on knowing –"
"I do." Kurt smiles smugly, giving an encouraging squeeze to Dave’s arm.
Dave starts with the ones that Kurt already knows about: Jerry (which was barely a kiss at all) and Gavin-Patrick. "Good," Kurt says of Gavin-Patrick. "I'm glad he at least kissed you before putting his hands in your pants."
“Fortunately we got interrupted before his hands were in my pants for long.”
Kurt hides his face against Dave’s shoulder. “Don’t remind me. I was such an ass that night.”
“You were? I thought that prize went to me.”
“Are you serious?” Kurt looks up with an expression of genuine surprise.
Dave shrugs. “Well, I was the one who was fooling around with a stranger in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like that’s unheard of in a gay bar. Or that it’s illegal, or unethical, and as long as everyone’s safe –”
Dave comes to a halt. “Really? I thought you thought –” I was a slut, he’s about to say, but then he thinks about the title of the book Blaine lent him and how that word has so many meanings he’s not even sure how to use it anymore.
“Making out with randoms isn’t for me, but as long as you’re not hurting anyone … I don’t know. I think Chandler probably does it, and he’s okay. And Brittany used to, and she taught me how to kiss, so it would be kind of hypocritical of me to judge her for her experience.”
“But –” Dave stops himself before he says something stupid.
“What? Sebastian? I hate Sebastian because he’s evil, not because he gets around.”
“Yeah, Sebastian, but also –” Ugh. Why does he keep opening his mouth? “Forget about it.”
Kurt lets go of Dave’s arm and moves so that they’re standing face-to-face. “I know that look and it’s not one you get when something’s easy to forget. Tell me.”
Dave’s tempted to look away, but he doesn’t. “That night. With Gavin or Patrick or whatever his name was. You were mad at me.”
Kurt’s mouth drops open. No sound comes out.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Kurt shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. I just – I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“I wasn’t mad. I was upset. Because I, I was –” Kurt looks down at his hands, then back up at Dave. “I was jealous. Of him.”
The muscles in the back of Dave’s knees go wobbly like Jell-o. He leans against the nearest tree trunk. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Kurt shrugs. “I’d kind of known before that I was attracted to you, but seeing you in there with him – I couldn’t really ignore it.”
Dave replays that night in his head – how pale Kurt was, and quiet, and how he kept looking away every time Dave looked in his direction. He understands, for the first time, why Kurt kept looking away from Blaine too.
“I’m so sorry,” Dave says.
Kurt smiles and reaches for Dave’s hand. “Oh, silly,” he says, and out of his mouth the word sounds as precious as sweetheart or dear. “That’s nothing to be sorry for.”
*
When they reach the creek, Dave moves on to the next easiest one to tell: the one that Kurt also kissed in his misspent youth.
"Brittany?" Kurt dissolves into giggles. "I should have known that. She told me she'd made out with every guy in the school but I didn't –" Kurt leans his cheek against Dave’s shoulder. "One degree of separation."
Kurt seems so charmed that Dave decides to wait until later to tell him the other thing that happened with Brittany. Instead he says, "I kissed Sebastian, too.”
"I know," Kurt sighs. "He told me.”
"When?" Dave supposes he shouldn't be surprised. Sebastian isn't exactly a no-kissing-and-telling kind of guy.
"In January," Kurt says. “But I didn't want to believe it."
"But why would you care?"
Kurt rolls his eyes. It sends a tingle right all the way to Dave’s toes. "You know why. Because you deserve better than what he was giving you." Kurt looks down at the bubbling creek. "And because –” The color on his cheeks is high and bright when he turns to look Dave in the eye. “I’m not as good as you and Blaine at not being jealous when people touch things I like."
* * *
It's not until later, shortly before Blaine’s due home, that Dave tells Kurt that a lot more than kissing happened with Brittany.
"Oh." Kurt feels the dam behind his eyes start to leak, and why? Why is he being so selfish about this?
"Kurt?" They're sitting next to each other on the loveseat in the gazebo. Dave reaches for Kurt's hand, and Kurt has to resist the urge to pull it away, pull himself away, to run back into the house and grab his keys and drive home because he's being so selfish, so selfish to react this way.
Dave and Blaine don't get possessive like this. Why does he?
"I'm sorry." Kurt wipes his cheek with the back of his hand. "I wasn't expecting that. I don't know why I'm –" He feels more tears threatening so he leans back against the cushions, closes his eyes and inhales deeply. He holds his breath for a count of three, exhales, does it again.
He looks at Dave. "No, that's not right. I do know why I'm reacting this way."
"Do you want to tell me?"
"Well, I'm sad that your first time was with a girl –"
"It's okay. She pretty much helped me figure out I was gay. Actually, I think she told me I was. She seemed to think that it was ... hot."
"Brittany's much smarter than people give her credit for."
"So as first times go with someone of the wrong gender," Dave says, "it was actually perfect."
Kurt smiles. "That's not the only reason I'm upset."
"No?"
Kurt swallows. This should be easy to talk about – he's had so much practice with Blaine – but it's not. "I'd assumed – I'd hoped –” He didn’t think his face could possibly go any hotter than the tears have already made it, but it does. “I wanted your first time to be with me."
Dave’s eyes are calm and brown like the acorns that are strewn across McKinley’s lawn each fall. He squeezes Kurt’s hand. "It can be."
*
After Blaine comes home, after he and Dave practice their duet and Kurt bounces on his toes from watching the way their hands work so effortlessly together, after Dave leaves with long lingering kisses from Kurt and hugs from both of them, Kurt goes up with Blaine to his room – even though no one else is home and no one else will be, not for hours.
They lie down on the bed, one of Blaine’s arms wrapped around the back of Kurt’s shoulders, the other draped across his chest. Here in Blaine’s compact little room, in the snug fold of Blaine’s arms, Kurt’s safe.
“You’re beautiful,” Blaine whispers.
Kurt rolls his eyes.
Blaine nudges his nose against Kurt’s cheek. “You are. I could stare at you for hours. It’s good we don’t share any classes. I’d never get any work done.”
“You have no problem studying around me. Geometry homework, to wit.”
“Only because you won’t respect me anymore if I fail all my classes.”
Kurt frowns. “Don’t joke about that. I love you. It’s not contingent on you being perfect.”
“I know.” Blaine kisses Kurt’s temple. “I hope I didn’t sour your mood.”
“No,” Kurt sighs. “I guess I’m just feeling a little … contemplative.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Kurt turns in Blaine’s arms so that they’re facing each other, each with a cheek pressed against the pillow. “Dave and I talked today.”
“About …?”
“Sex.”
“Oh.” Blaine’s cheeks go a little pink, and the corners of his lips twitch upward, but he stops them before they turn into a smile. “Is it – Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, I almost got carried away, but he stopped me, and –”
“W-wait,” Blaine beams. “What do you mean by ‘almost’? I want details.”
Kurt laughs. “In a minute. I need to tell you what we talked about first.”
Blaine blinks sheepishly. “Okay. Sorry.”
Kurt holds onto Blaine’s hand. “You never need to apologize for your interest in my sex life.”
Blaine laughs, little crows feet forming at the corners of his eyes. (He’s going to be so beautiful when we’re old,Kurt thinks.)
“Anyway we both, when it happens –” Kurt bites his lower lip to keep from smiling too big. “Dave said he wants you to be there.”
Blaine’s eyes go wider than Kurt has seen in – well, actually, he saw them go that wide just the other day when Blaine was about to orgasm.
Blaine coughs. “Did you – Was he just agreeing with you, or –?”
“No, he’s the one who brought it up.”
“That’s –" Blaine thinks for a moment, as if searching for the perfect word. “That’s hot.”
“You’re well-spoken.”
“You can’t expect me to spout poetry when I’m thinking about you two. My brain short-circuits.”
Kurt sinks his head a little further into the pillow. “Well, there’s something else, too. Can you un-short-circuit your brain long enough to talk me through it?”
“As long as it doesn’t involve your penis and Dave’s penis doing things to each other.”
Kurt barks out a laugh. “Um, no. It doesn’t involve my penis.”
“But it involves Dave’s?”
Kurt’s not laughing anymore. “Um, yeah. I guess you could put it that way.”
Blaine looks at Kurt quizzically.
"Did you know –" Kurt starts, fishing for the words. "Did you know he's had sex with a girl?"
“Wait. You mean –?”
“Brittany. Two years ago. She gave him a blowjob.”
Blaine’s eyes are wide again. "Really?"
"Yeah."
"Huh." Blaine rubs his palm comfortingly along Kurt’s bicep. “Well, Brittany once told me that I was the only upperclassman at McKinley she hadn't made out with. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.”
“I know, right? But I’m just – I'm torn up, Blaine."
"Oh, Kurt." There's such tenderness in Blaine's voice that Kurt wants to be happy for his boyfriend's sake. It's the same tone Kurt's mom used with him when she had no easy grown-up answers for the problems he was facing, like the afternoon in preschool when Max Breckenridge made him cry by announcing that he was no longer going to marry Kurt, but was instead going to marry show-offy Mandy Feldman when he grew up.
“It's just – I feel awfully selfish right now.”
“Because –?”
"When he told me, I got – I got jealous. Not angry-how-dare-you kind of jealous. Just – more like devastated."
"Oh, honey." Blaine wraps his arm around Kurt's shoulder.
"I know I’m being ridiculous, but I wanted to be his first. I wanted us to be the ones to – to show him what sex can be." Kurt sighs. “I want him to know that he matters.”
Blaine brushes Kurt’s hair back from his ear. “You can still show him that, Kurt.”
“But I wanted – I feel like Brittany's stolen something from me, and that’s so stupid. Dave doesn’t belong to me.”
“He kind of does,” Blaine says, but Kurt ignores him.
“And you guys – you’re not like that. You guys don’t get jealous of each other over me, and I should – I feel like I should be like that, too. I want to be as good as you.”
Blaine sighs. “It’s different, Kurt.”
"It's different, alright. I'm a self-absorbed bastard and you aren't."
There's a flash of anger in Blaine's eyes. At least it looks like anger to Kurt. Anger or deep-seated disappointment. He's seen the fire before – last fall when Blaine would talk to or about Finn, this spring whenever someone mentioned Sebastian. But Kurt's always seen it from the periphery. Now, it’s looking straight at him.
"You're not, Kurt." Blaine is barely controlling the register of his voice. It's raspy and near-breaking. "Please tell me you don't really believe that."
"I – I don't know what to believe, Blaine." Kurt pulls Blaine's arm tighter around him. The tension in Blaine’s body starts to disperse.
"You're not selfish or self-absorbed, Kurt. You just want to protect people. You don't want him to get hurt."
"But the book says I should share, and I don't want to share you with anyone, except maybe Dave when we're all in the same room, and I don't want to share Dave with anyone, except maybe you when we're all in the same room –"
“Look, I know I've been really into the book, but I'm starting to think it's not the last word on everything. What we have is fine. We're each getting what we want."
Kurt is about to protest, but something stops him. "That's the same thing Dave said the other day."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Basically."
"Well, if we both said it, it must be true." Blaine grins. "You're outvoted. You're going to have to stop feeling guilty."
"Are you guys always going to gang up on me this way?"
"Only when it's for your own good." Blaine kisses Kurt firmly on the lips. "I promise."
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: Blaine is really enjoying this whole thing. ~4,360 words
Rating for this chapter: NC-17
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
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Kurt holds Dave's hand almost constantly when they're all at Blaine's house, plays with his hair, gives him lingering hugs for hello and goodbye.
He wears Dave's kerchief blatantly – in his right and his left pockets, cuffed around his wrist, billowing out from the front pocket of his blazer.
But he doesn’t kiss Dave. Kurt’s body wants and his heart wants, but his mind keeps telling him he’s asking too much. What comes next is Dave's decision now.
In the meantime, Kurt has to be patient.
Kurt is anything but patient.
Kurt bows out of his Monday shift at the tire shop with the excuse of finals arriving and instead spends the time at Blaine's. The three of them study together on Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday, too – Dave's intramural baseball season is over and glee rehearsals are scarce now that Nationals have been won.
Kurt wants to kiss Dave when he smiles and when he laughs and when he snorts Mountain Dew from his nose. He wants to kiss him when he’s reading his textbooks and his brows get that characteristic furrow of concentration. He wants to kiss him when he’s at the piano working out the knots in a new piece of music – he wants to kiss Dave’s lips and his face and his hands and each callused fingertip. He wants to coax a melody from Dave’s body.
By the time Dave leaves, it takes no wheedling on Blaine's part to get Kurt up to his bedroom and naked in a flash. Their sex life has never been better than now.
For the first time, they try it with Kurt on all fours, Blaine behind him on the bed, their hips both rocking as Kurt slides back and forth on Blaine's shaft. They can see their faces in Blaine's mirror, watch the twists of pleasure that possess them, look into each other's eyes in the reflection. Blaine can't stop running a hand through Kurt's hair, pulling soft moans from Kurt with every gentle tug at the roots.
"You know what I would love?" Blaine says.
Kurt is, at this point, unable to string a sentence together. "Fuck," is all he says.
"Yes," Blaine says. "I love fucking you. I love feeling how warm you are inside. I love how you hold onto me."
Kurt says nothing, just turns his head and bites the hand that's been running through his hair, pulls the fingers into his mouth and sucks.
"But I'd also love if – if Dave was here, under you, and you kissed him and rubbed your cock against his while I fucked you. God, I would love that."
Kurt's ass clamps down on Blaine's cock, fucking it rhythmically as he spills onto the sheets.
Another afternoon, they sixty-nine on Blaine's bed, Kurt sucking hungrily, trying to take all of Blaine in, while Blaine intersperses lazy licks with whispers against Kurt's cock: "I want you to be alone one afternoon when Dave comes over. I – I'd go to the library and you would, you would answer the door and he'd ask where I was and you – fuck, Kurt, that feels good – you'd grab him and press him against the door and kiss him and you wouldn't be able to stop and – oh, Kurt – you'd take him up to my room and you, you'd do everything, you'd both come all over my sheets and you'd start all over again and I’d come home and hear you guys going at it in my room, I would hear the sounds you make him make, Kurt, I would hear you, I would –"
Blaine comes warm and bitter into Kurt's throat and Kurt comes all over Blaine's face and hair.
Blaine looks remarkably pleased with himself.
*
On Sunday evening, Kurt is over at Blaine's empty house, polishing Blaine's toenails deep red to match his polo shirt. Blaine reads Vogue while his nails dry and Kurt picks up his phone to call Dave, like he does every night now.
They don't say anything monumental. But every word feels weighted and significant, even when Dave's just telling him about the stuff he's reviewing for his AP Physics exam tomorrow. He mentions Heisenberg's uncertainty principle – you can't measure where a particle is and how fast it's moving at the same time – and Kurt wonders if maybe this is a metaphor for his own life, or for himself and Blaine and Dave, but he can't put his finger on how.
Except that Kurt wants to be moving faster.
It's getting ridiculous. His heart flutters when Dave talks about science and math; he gets hard when he sees Dave's fingers on the piano. Dave starts talking about a piece he's working on and that's all Kurt can picture – those broad hands moving over the keys, seducing a tune out of previously lifeless wood and ivory – and he is absolutely, completely gone.
When he and Dave hang up, Blaine looks up at Kurt from his magazine, his eyes falling on the hard outline of Kurt's cock against his pants. He rubs a thumb across his toenails to check that they're dry before moving to the bed.
They quickly discover that they both want to be fucked tonight. So Blaine opens his bedside drawer and takes out the dildo that Cooper sent as an embarrassingly inappropriate, but frequently useful, seventeenth birthday present. They finger each other open and he slides it gradually into Kurt's ass, waiting for Kurt to beg before moving it forward each time.
When it's all the way in, Blaine climbs on top of Kurt and sinks down onto his dick. Kurt's eyes go wider than Blaine has ever seen them before.
"You like this?" Blaine says.
Kurt nods a wordless yes.
"It'll be even better when we're like this but it's Dave's cock inside you." Blaine shifts his hips and leans forward to suck on Kurt's collarbone, his jaw, his lips.
Kurt fucks the dildo in and out of himself while Blaine slides up and down his cock. He can't hold the toy as steadily as he'd like or keep the rhythm right, but it's so, so good and he can almost feel the warmth of Dave's hands against his ass, spreading him open as he fucks lovingly into him, as Blaine squeezes his cock with the same sweet attention.
Kurt cries out his orgasm before he knows it's there.
* * *
Dave's pretty sure he's going to die if Kurt doesn't kiss him soon.
But it doesn't matter. He'll wait as long as it takes. He doesn’t deserve anything from Kurt. He's only willing to take what Kurt wants to freely give. The book that Blaine gave Dave talks a lot about sex, but Kurt hasn't mentioned sex and Blaine hasn't mentioned sex and, even though Kurt did mention kissing that one time on the phone, Dave feels most of the time like he must have hallucinated that part of the conversation.
It’s okay, though. The friendship and the hugs and the hand-holding and the lingering glances are more happiness than Dave ever planned for in his lifetime.
Kurt holds his hand so much now that Dave has begun to notice the subtle changes in Kurt's skin from day to day. On a breezy afternoon when Kurt and Dave tread through the woods next to Blaine's house looking for warblers, Kurt's hands are dry and a little rough, their usual softness sucked out by the wind.
On a humid afternoon as they sit in the kitchen studying together, Kurt's hands glow with a fine mist of perspiration, heady and warm. (It’s good that Dave’s calculus homework is mostly mindless calculations, because all he can think about is kissing the sweat off the palm of Kurt's hand.)
When Kurt hugs him goodbye, Dave resists the urge to hold Kurt flush against his body. He leans into it, shoulders first, so Kurt won't feel his hard-on. Kurt can keep poking fun at his baggy clothes; Dave is thankful to have attire that hides the more embarrassing truths about his body.
Dave's not really sure about the etiquette of masturbating while thinking about a boyfriend you haven't even kissed. He's not even sure if Kurt's his boyfriend. No matter. He can't stop. After getting home from Blaine's, he goes to his room or the shower because his eyes see nothing but Kurt's face and his hands feel nothing but Kurt's skin and his ears hear only Kurt's voice. He imagines, sometimes, being fucked by Kurt – as the getter or the giver, he doesn't really care, just as long as Kurt takes everything he can.
It's jerking off, of course, but it doesn't feel like it. He feels Kurt's voice humming through his skin and his affection thrumming through his veins and his eyes breaking his heart open.
Doing this has never made Dave feel so plainly happy before.
It's enough.
* * *
And still, Kurt waits.
Or mostly waits. On Monday afternoon, when Dave says he thinks he did well on the physics exam, Kurt hugs him and kisses his shoulder – so brief and light that he's not even sure Dave notices. If Dave does, he doesn't say anything, doesn’t take the gesture as a signal to kiss Kurt senseless now.
On Tuesday afternoon, Dave leaves without trying anything again. Kurt wants to punch him, but instead he leans forward to plant a kiss on Dave's cheek as he's about to head out the door. He doesn't hit the apple of Dave's cheek like he was hoping. Instead, he hits the part of Dave's cheek right above his lower jaw, where the shadow flushes out every afternoon around 4 p.m. The stubble feels different from Blaine's, though Kurt can't quite explain how. It makes him think of the bristly hairs on poppy leaves.
Dave lets out a little breath of surprise when Kurt pulls away, the apples of his cheeks so red that Kurt can barely resist trying for them again. "What – what was that for?"
Kurt lifts their joined hands to his lips and kisses Dave's knuckles, never breaking eye contact. "For you."
Kurt watches Dave step out to his car, watches him back out of the driveway, watches his rear bumper disappear behind the hedge on the corner. All the while, Kurt’s clenching and unclenching his hand in a tiny wave because, even though it's totally dorky, he can't seem to stop himself.
He feels Blaine approaching before he realizes that he hears him – feels the way the air stirs behind his back as Blaine steps closer, and the familiar warmth of Blaine's body before they're even touching. Blaine wraps his arms around Kurt's waist and kisses his neck in a way that Kurt thinks is supposed to be chaste, but sends a wave of lust right down his spine and into his hips.
Kurt turns around in Blaine's arms and kicks the door closed behind him. "He's never going to kiss me. Ever. He doesn't want this." He leans his head against Blaine's shoulder, half because he's exhausted and half to hide his pout.
Blaine kisses the top of his head. "Maybe he's waiting for you."
"I don't want him to wait for me. I'm afraid I'm going to do everything wrong."
"Why?"
Kurt vents his lungs loudly. It's not quite a groan or a moan – just frustration, pure and unfiltered. "I didn't have to read a book before we became us, Blaine. I knew how to do it without reading a book first. The fact that I had to read a book makes me feel like I'll never know what I'm doing."
"Kurt." Blaine puts a finger to Kurt's chin to tip his head up until their eyes meet. "Um, I definitely didn't know what I was doing when I fell in love with you. I mean, it took me months to even realize that I was. I just thought I knew stuff because I'd watched Love Story too many times. And because couples are everywhere around us – and a lot of them show us good ways to love each other, like your dad and Carole, and a lot of them show us bad ways to do it –"
"Like everyone in New Directions."
"But we don't have role models for this. So we read a book and try to do things right."
Kurt bites his lip – not in his come-hither way, but in his too-conflicted-to-do-anything else way.
"Are you afraid of hurting me?" Blaine says. "Because that's really not something you should be worried about. I love you both."
"I know. Or I think I know. But I'm –" Kurt leans the back of his head against the door and sighs. "I also keep thinking how Dave has never had a boyfriend he can call his own. And I can't give him that."
"Oh, Kurt." They're already close, but Blaine pulls Kurt in closer, presses their chests together until their breath rises and falls in the same rhythm. "You already have."
A tension that Kurt didn't even realize was in his forehead begins to release. "And I don't want him to feel like I'm ashamed of him just because I don't know how to explain this to my family. To anyone."
"I could help. I mean, not by blurting it out at an inopportune moment like I do everything else." He pauses as Kurt chuckles quietly. "But if you want to tell them. We don't have to explain ourselves to anybody, though, if we don't want to."
Kurt kisses Blaine softly.
"Can I tell you what I think is going on, with both of you?" Blaine says.
"Please."
"I think," Blaine says, "because of your past with Dave, you're stuck with this idea that he wants his life to be normal – that that's more important to him that anything else. And I think you're wrong about that. I think you're more important to him than anything else. And I also think that, because of his past with you, Dave is afraid to make the first move. Because he still remembers the last time he kissed you."
Kurt looks at Blaine, pleading, his fingers gripping Blaine shoulders. "But he knows that wasn't – It doesn't hurt me anymore. He's a different person. He's – him."
"Kurt." Blaine strokes softly at knob of Kurt's hip. "He's not that person anymore. But he still remembers who he was and what he did, and he carries that around with him everywhere, even if you don't want him to. Even if you've forgiven him. Even if he's forgiven himself."
Kurt reminds himself to breathe. "Has he?"
"I don't know, Kurt." Blaine's voice is soothing and hushed and too much. Kurt starts kissing him without volition, parting Blaine's lips with his tongue because he needs inside, and he needs Blaine inside him.
Blaine pulls away with a moan and a smile. "Is that how you want to kiss Dave?"
"Maybe," Kurt says, his chest heaving. "But right now I want to kiss you."
Blaine kisses Kurt back, pressing him into the door, and his tongue and lips do the work on Kurt's heart that a million locksmiths never could.
"Please," Kurt whispers when Blaine lowers his mouth to the nook just under Kurt's jaw. "Take care of me. I need you to take care of me."
The request unleashes something akin to a growl from deep inside Blaine. It's not a request that Kurt often makes. He likes to be in control – well, likes may not be the right word. He just tends to forget that there's any other way to be.
Before Kurt knows what's happening, he's in the air, one of Blaine's arms under his back and the other under his knees. He squeals in surprise, throwing his arms around Blaine's neck and letting himself be carried up the stairs. It doesn't matter that he's always pictured carrying Blaine this way on their wedding night, because this is perfect. It's just what he needs.
Blaine lays Kurt down on the bed and begins undressing him slowly, kissing the exposed skin as he undoes a button or pulls back a hem. Kurt feels like a drunken, blissed-out rag doll.
When every last bit of clothing has been stripped from Kurt, Blaine stands up and removes his own clothes unhurriedly. Kurt can't take his eyes off of Blaine: the light trail of hair dusting down his spine, the perfect curve of his ass (so much better than anything Michelangelo ever carved from a block of marble), the striated muscles of his thighs.
Blaine leans over the bed and kisses Kurt. "What do you want?"
"I want you to take care of me."
"I will. I promise. But how?"
Kurt turns his face toward the pillow. The down is soft and cool against his cheek. "I don't know." He faces Blaine again. "Trust yourself. I don't know what I need right now. But you do. You'll listen, and you'll know. I trust you."
Blaine's hand is trembling. He rests it against Kurt's hip, sending minute vibrations through Kurt's skin and into his muscles and bone. Blaine's lips are on his again, delicious and in control.
Kurt feels himself falling apart with just the kiss. He doesn't know how he's going to last through this, but he doesn't have to know.
He lets Blaine love him. Blaine kisses him and kisses him, with as much patience and longing as he did that first time in the Dalton common room, kisses him like that's all he needs and all they're going to do and Kurt gets lost in it, forgets he's ever wanted more, forgets the ache in his balls and just lets himself kiss and be kissed.
He doesn't register when the kisses shift from his mouth to his chin to his neck – the light keeps pulsing through his body all the same. It's Blaine's lips, everywhere; Blaine's skin and hair dancing against Kurt's body; Blaine's tongue relishing places that Kurt never understood could be beautiful.
Blaine kisses Kurt's armpits, murmurs endearments to the hair there, chides Kurt for trimming it again. Kurt would laugh if the feeling of Blaine's nose on the tender skin there wasn't so utterly, bewilderingly hot.
Kurt tries to keep track of everywhere that Blaine's mouth goes, but he loses count somewhere between the inside of his elbow and the jut of his ankle. Kurt's body, apparently, has an infinite number of locations to be kissed. Each one Blaine kisses becomes Kurt's favorite, until Blaine kisses the next one, and the next, finally reaching the one that Kurt needs touched the most but doesn't even realize he does until Blaine's tongue is there, in that dark, intimate place that Kurt had never given much thought to before Blaine showed him that he should.
Blaine's nose nudges sweetly against Kurt's balls as he licks and sucks, his moans competing with Kurt's for loudness. The hum vibrates down into the ring of muscle, loosening it and making Kurt moan even more, launching a cycle of hums and loosening and moans and more moans until Kurt feels Blaine's tongue enter the ring.
If pleasure could kill, Kurt would die on the spot.
Kurt takes everything Blaine gives him, doesn't press into Blaine's mouth no matter how much he wants, because Blaine is giving it to him now and will keep giving it to him without his prompting.
Kurt doesn't whine or whimper when Blaine pulls his mouth away, gradually licks back up to Kurt's lips via balls and shaft and navel, sternum and nipple and collarbone. He relishes in Blaine covering his body, in the sharp suction of Blaine's mouth on his neck. He's so lost in it that when he feels Blaine's wet finger slip inside of him, he's not even sure how it got that way.
"How'd you do that?" he gasps, clenching around Blaine's finger.
Blaine stops sucking on Kurt's neck, but keeps his lips there. "I might" kiss "have started moving the lube" kiss "to under the pillows" kiss "on days that you come over."
"Mmm." Kurt closes his eyes and turns his head further into the pillow to give Blaine's mouth even better access to his neck. "I – mmm – love you."
That earns Kurt a second finger in his ass and oh it takes everything in him not to ride them. Blaine is giving it to him slow and sweet and that's how he wants it, despite the ingrained habits of his body.
Blaine slides his fingers in and out, twisting and stretching, and it keeps feeling incredible, like Kurt's world is going to fall apart and then rush back together, the pieces of it rejoining into something more beautiful than what came before.
Kurt feels another slide and press and it must be a third finger now, but he doesn't ask because he doesn't need to know. Blaine's kissed back down to Kurt's belly by now to give his hand better leverage, and he's licking little circles around and into Kurt's navel and that drives Kurt crazy, too, for no good reason at all. Blaine's chin brushes against the head of Kurt's cock and his neck against theshaft and Kurt feels himself spinning, spinning, as fast as the world.
And now their faces are close, Blaine's hovering over Kurt's, sweat breaking out over Blaine's brow, eyes soft and cradling. He slides into Kurt slowly. It doesn't feel like caution, or even patience. It feels the way that love does, starting right at the bottom of your heart and then growing, pushing gently at its boundaries and filling it, then pushing further so it stretches and accommodates even more, and every time you think your heart has reached its limit, suddenly there's even more love and your heart grows bigger to hold that, too.
They haven't done it like this much lately. Except for their one successful experiment with Blaine fucking him from behind, Kurt usually rides Blaine because it turns Blaine on and it keeps Kurt in control. But something clicks in Kurt's brain as he looks up at Blaine. He understands why this is the way that Blaine loves to be fucked. To have someone look at you that way, with wonder and concern, to have someone know that your pleasure is under their control and that you have entrusted them with it – it's heady and humbling and breathtaking.
Maybe there are some things that Kurt's better off not controlling. Back in the twilight of his discontent with Blaine, when the boy was embarrassing himself in front of Gap employees and making out with Rachel in front of the entire glee club, Kurt thought it would be easier if he could somehow make Blaine see the light, if he could force him into loving Kurt now and truly and exactly the way Kurt wanted.
He's so glad he failed to make Blaine love him the way he wanted. The way that Blaine loves him, from his own heart, is so much better than anything Kurt could have come up with.
Kurt can't control the way that Dave sees himself, can't make him forget a past that never should have existed in the first place. But maybe that's okay. Maybe there's something in Dave that needs to remember. Maybe that memory is what spurned him to become the person he is now, generous and kind and heart-achingly beautiful and impossible to get out of Kurt's head.
Someone who's helped make Kurt more fearless than he’s ever been.
Kurt wants to kiss Blaine and apparently Blaine can see that because he piles pillows under Kurt's neck until their faces are flush. Their mouths are joined and they are joined and Blaine is moving so sweetly in him, hitting him at the perfect-yes-just-right angle. “Oh,” Kurt cries into Blaine's mouth. “You’re so good.”
Blaine keeps moving in the way that destroys and rebuilds worlds, strokes Kurt’s cock softly and then firmly as it swells and stiffens and starts to pulse. "I love doing this for you. Dave wants to do this for you," Blaine says, and Kurt bites down on his shoulder and comes with a million pinpricks of light.
*
"Maybe you guys should go on a date." Blaine is draped across Kurt's stomach, having licked it clean as soon as he pulled out of Kurt.
"What?"
"Maybe you guys should go on a date."
"No, I heard you the first time. I just –" Kurt tilts his head. "Given my only other boyfriend experience, I kind of expect the kissing to start before the dating." He pulls Blaine to him so that they can revisit their first kiss and all the ones that have happened since.
"I guess," says Blaine when he comes up for air, "I was just thinking that you guys probably need to talk about your expectations. Because you're waiting for him to kiss you, and he's waiting for you to kiss him –"
"You don't think I'm being a gentleman by waiting for him to kiss me first? Because if I kiss him first," a smirk inches across Kurt's face, "well, he'll never be able to resist me, even if he's not sure it's what he really wants."
Blaine smiles. "I'm pretty sure it's what he wants."
"You're biased."
"He looks at your lips constantly."
"Not constantly." Kurt chews on his lower lip.
"He just – he clearly wants you, Kurt, like you want him, and you guys are both waiting for the other to take the first step. I think you should talk about what's holding you back. So whether that's a date, or whether I shut you two together in my bedroom tomorrow when he comes over –"
"Oh, you'd like that."
"Yes, I would, but I wouldn't be doing it for my own sake."
"Maybe. But you'd still listen in at the door and hope for some good stuff."
Blaine starts licking Kurt's nipple mercilessly. "Mmmm. That really wasn't my motive, but I wouldn't mind."
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: Math, metaphors and hand-holding. ~900 words
Chapter notes: If you want a refresher course: square roots; negative numbers; imaginary numbers
Rating for this chapter: PG
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
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Chapter 22: Imaginary Numbers
Maybe this whole situation is like learning about imaginary numbers.
"Let's figure out the square root of negative twenty-five." Mrs. Buchanan wrote the figure on the whiteboard, but Dave didn’t copy it down. It was obviously a trick to see if anyone in the class was paying attention. Everything he had learned so far had proven that a negative number can't have a square root. Because whether you multiply a positive number by itself or a negative number by itself, the answer will always come out positive.
Except she kept going, parsing out the figure until she came to an answer: 5i.
Which was clearly something she’d just made up.
“This,” she said, pointing to the i, “is the square root of negative one, and even though it's called the imaginary unit, it's real. It's as real as a positive number or a negative number.”
Dave highly doubted that, but he listened anyway. It’s not like he could text Azimio about this bullshit; Azimio didn’t know that Dave had ever made it past Algebra 1.
"Now, a lot of you probably thought that negative numbers weren't real when you first learned about them, since we can't count them on our fingers or with matchsticks. But now you use them all the time without questioning it. Math doesn’t make sense without them. Well, that’s how it is with imaginary numbers." Mrs. Buchanan drew a horizontal line on the board, jotting down zero in the middle and writing "1, 2, 3, 4 …" to the right of it and "-1, -2, -3, -4 …" to its left.
"I think about it this way," she said. "I picture positive and negative numbers on a one-dimensional line. But we all know that space has more than one dimension, right?" She drew a vertical line through the zero mark. "I think of imaginary numbers as being on this vertical line. They take our one-dimensional view of numbers and make it two-dimensional."
Dave shook his head in disbelief, but when she assigned their homework, he did the problems as instructed instead of writing, "This makes no fucking sense," all over his assignment, even though he was tempted to.
Over the weeks, though, as he worked with the numbers, they did start to make sense. Mrs. Buchanan would show them little tricks for using i to do trigonometry problems more quickly and still come to the same solutions. The imaginary unit was elegant and practical and – it seems strange to use the word truthful to describe a number, but that's what it was. It led to the right answers.
He was hooked.
*
On Thursday, when Dave arrives at Blaine's, it's Kurt who answers the door. He reaches for Dave's hand as soon as he crosses the threshold. Dave just stands there, staring at their interlaced hands, a weird amalgam of panic and joy flowing through him.
"Sorry," Kurt mumbles, pulling his hand away.
"No, I didn't mean –" Dave reaches to take Kurt's hand back, stopping just before he makes contact. The air between his fingertips and Kurt's skin is electric.
Dave's never initiated a touch with Kurt before – not this way, not in friendliness. He's always been so aware that he has no right. "Just," Dave says, but he doesn't know how to explain. His eyes flicker between Kurt's face and where their fingertips are almost touching. "Please."
Kurt closes the gap between them, wrapping his palm with Dave's and staring at where their fingers touch. “Thank you,” Kurt says with a satisfied grin.
Dave takes a deep breath as Kurt leads him to the kitchen. Blaine looks up at them from his homework, eyes stopping on their interlinked hands, and smiles with all the brightness of the afternoon sun.
*
Kurt holds Dave's hand again when they stand at the picture window looking for warblers, passing the binoculars back and forth. Dave's hand sweats a little less than it did the first two times Kurt took it this afternoon. He's able to focus more on the texture of Kurt's skin, the solid reality of Kurt's fingers.
Blaine gets up from the counter and plants a kiss to the back of Kurt's head. "Back in a minute.” Kurt keeps holding on to Dave's hand as Blaine turns out of the room, and the next time he passes the binoculars back to Dave he looks up at him like … well, it's something like the way Kurt looks at Blaine sometimes.
Dave forgets how to swallow. Forgets how to breathe. But his heart doesn't forget to beat. It's thumping harder than he remembers it ever doing on the football field.
Kurt squeezes Dave's hand and lets go, smiling shyly. "I guess we should study."
Or we could look at each other the rest of the afternoon. Dave doesn't say it, though. Everything's incredible enough as it is.
Dave is barely a sentence into his English homework when Blaine returns, ceremoniously slapping a book onto the counter in front of him. "Required reading," Blaine says.
Dave reads the title out loud. "The Ethical Slut?"
Kurt rolls his eyes. "Sweetheart, I wouldn't call it required reading. It's not like it’s Patti Lupone’s memoir."
“Well, that was phenomenal, but –” Blaine beams at Dave as if he's just transformed a pepper shaker into a real, live kitten. "This book is much more practical. It’s about, well some of it's about, um –" Blaine points at Dave and Kurt, then himself. "This?"
Kurt puts a hand on the cover and says coolly, "It's not only about being a slut," but his bright blush belies his tone.
Dave blushes, too. The world is not at all what he's believed.
Fic summary: An unlikely friendship forms. Dave learns to love himself, Blaine learns to trust love, and Kurt learns that love is both simpler and a lot more complicated than he expected. AU from 3.05 with canon elements.
Chapter summary: Blaine sometimes does things without thinking them through first. ~8,100 words.
Notes: Title from Dream by John Cage. Poulenc's Sonata For Four Hands also appears in this chapter. Also, have a prothonotary warbler and a sign language "f."
Rating for this chapter: R
Note: Chapters on AO3 are numbered differently due to factors beyond my control.
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Chapter 21: Dream
Dave's been more distant the last few times Blaine’s talked to him. It's not really what he says or doesn't say; he'll still talk at length with Blaine about baseball, about players' stats, about why he likes (of all things) the Chicago Cubs. He'll complain about how much extra studying he needs to cram in before the AP American Government exam or laugh about something one of the math girls said at lunch.
Blaine thought maybe he was reading distance into their conversations just because they’ve spent more time talking on the phone than in person this past week, what with New Directions going to Nationals and Dave having to skip one of their study sessions for an exam. But even when they’ve been together in person, the hesitation has been there. On Thursday, when Kurt pulled Dave to the window to show him another type of warbler, a full minute must have passed before the first word came out of his mouth.
"So," Dave finally said. He and Kurt were silhouetted against the picture window, their backs to Blaine, and Kurt still hadn't let go of Dave's wrist. Blaine's heart fluttered.
Dave handed the binoculars back to Kurt. "What is it called again?"
"A prothonotary warbler," Kurt said, raising the binoculars to his eyes one-handed, still not letting go of Dave's wrist.
It looked a little awkward. It probably would have been more comfortable to hold hands. Blaine bit his tongue to keep from suggesting it.
"I like the sound of that." Dave wasn't looking out the window now. He was watching Kurt. "But I probably won't remember it. Can I just call it a mango warbler? Because that's what it looks like. A peeled mango with wings."
"It does," Kurt said, lowering the binoculars from his eyes and holding them out to Dave. "Do you want them again? It hasn't flown off yet."
"Sure." Dave didn't take his eyes off of Kurt's until the binoculars were firmly in his hand.
Kurt let go of Dave's wrist, but he made up for the loss of contact by leaning his shoulder against Dave's upper arm. He turned his head toward Dave and started to chew his lower lip the way he does when he wants to be kissed but doesn't want to make the first move.
But Dave didn't see. He was looking out through the window with his binoculars.
After Dave left that afternoon and they were up in Blaine's bedroom, naked and sweating, fucking and being fucked, Blaine watched Kurt's face and thought about what it would be like to be Dave, seeing Kurt this way for the first time.
Blaine came before he could stop himself.
*
As soon as Dave walks through the front door on Monday and takes off his jacket – after he's said Hello but before he's brought his backpack into the kitchen – Blaine blurts out, "Are you in love with Kurt?"
"Do you want me to leave?" Dave says, his face shutting down into that old mask that Blaine has only seen a few times.
They're standing in the vestibule next to the front room, the Steinway in clear view, and no, Blaine doesn't want Dave to leave. He wants to take back what he just said and start over. He wants Dave to put his backpack in the kitchen and then play on the Steinway for a while as Blaine spreads his homework out on the counter. He wants to hear one of Schubert's waltzes, the lightness of the music lifting the heavy feeling from his stomach.
"No." Blaine shakes his head. "That was a really stupid thing for me to say. I was just – curious. It doesn't matter one way or the other, really." Which may be the biggest lie that he’s ever told. He shifts his feet, torn between fleeing to the kitchen or out the front door. But this is his house, and Dave is his guest, and no matter how embarrassed Blaine is at himself, making this okay is more important. "I'm sorry. I sometimes talk without thinking."
Dave's shoulders relax slightly. "I've noticed," he says, huffing a little so that it's almost a laugh. "That's not always a bad thing."
"Do you want to just step outside and I'll close the door and then I'll reopen it and we can start over?"
"No," Dave says. "I want a Mountain Dew."
* * *
It is kind of like starting over, though. When they get to the kitchen, Dave settles down at the counter to crack his books open. He doesn't say a word about what Blaine just said, and neither does Blaine. Blaine tosses him a Mountain Dew from the fridge, which Dave both loves and hates – he hates it because it shakes up the can and means he has to wait that much longer to open it; but he loves it because no matter how many times he's told Blaine to Just hand it to me, dude, Blaine forgets as often as he remembers. And there’s something endearing about that.
It's weird when the things that annoy you about someone become another of their charms.
Blaine settles in next to him and they both start their work. Dave studies silently, hoping the memory of Blaine's question will disappear from both their minds just as easily as Dave's memory of whether he put on striped or white athletic socks this morning has slipped from his. (He peers down at his ankle and tugs up his jeans leg until he spots the red and black stripes at his sock cuff. Striped. Okay.)
Blaine does not study silently. He's quiet when he's reading, but when he switches to French grammar and vocab, he makes up a little song as he goes:
Il se spécialise en boire Mountain Dew.
Je voudrais travailler pour un petit chouchou.
Elle se spécialise en caresse le chat.
Je me spécialise en être le célibat.
Je me spécialise en français à contrecœur.
Sébastian se spécialise en être un branleur.
Kurt sometimes puts earplugs in when he's reading and Blaine gets like this, but Dave likes to listen. His family is so quiet. It's a nice change of pace to have someone yammering away in the background. And since Dave doesn't understand French, he doesn't get distracted by the words. It's pleasant noise, and it helps drown out the incessant Are you in love with Kurt? that’s repeating in his head.
They work for an hour or so, occasionally punctuating the session with outbursts like, "It's so weird that presidents didn't used to have bodyguards," and, "Do people think Faulkner's a good writer just because he's confusing?"
When he gets the urge to throw As I Lay Dying at the refrigerator, Dave decides it's time for a break. He looks at Blaine. "Do you want to try playing that Poulenc duet? I’ve been practicing."
"Duet!" Blaine jumps to his feet. "That is the best idea I've ever heard! I've gotten pretty good at my part, I think."
It's a little awkward, at first. They're pressed against each other on the bench and almost as soon as the song begins, Blaine has to reach his left hand over Dave's right, and his arm stays stretched out in front of Dave's chest for a full page. It catches Dave by surprise – not the action; he's read the score and knew this was coming – but the strange feeling of intimacy that comes over him. It reminds Dave of the campouts he used to have every summer at the farm when he was little, all the prepubescent boys and girls piled into one family tent and waking up warm against each other in the chill of the morning.
They flub a lot. At first, Dave gets confused by the sound of so many notes together; later, as they fall into it, he gets so distracted by how good it sounds that sometimes he stops following the sheet music and loses his place.
They play the Prelude three times, and it's pretty clean the last time through – not art, but decent – before resetting the metronome and moving on to the Rustique, which is so much easier that Dave almost laughs with relief. Unlike Dave, who plays with his back ramrod straight because his teacher scolded him for anything else, Blaine puts his body into it, swaying a little as the melody passes back and forth between their hands. But the Finale is the best part by far. By now, they have a sense of each other, and they play the the parallel harmonies in such perfect time that Dave feels like his heart is going to burst.
The final notes are still vibrating in the air when Blaine pulls Dave in for a hug. "Kurt is going to faint when we play this for him."
All the joy of the music disappears at the sound of Kurt's name, replaced by a lead weight on Dave's chest. "Well, maybe we should practice a little more first," he says as Blaine pulls away.
"I won't object to playing this as many times as you want," Blaine says. "But we don't have to wait until we're perfect. Kurt likes seeing people get better at things."
The weight becomes heavier, pressing the air out of Dave's lungs. Words squeeze out that Dave doesn't intend to say. "About Kurt." He looks at his lap. "I – I don't know."
Dave feels Blaine’s hand on his shoulder, but he doesn't look up.
"I'm not sure what love is. But if I was in love, I think … I would know what it is." Dave ghosts his fingers over the keyboard, pressing the ivories so slowly that no sound comes out. "So I don't think I'm in love with Kurt."
"It's fine if you are. I mean, I would definitely understand."
The weight lifts a little; Dave can get a tiny bit more air in with each breath. "At first, I thought it was because he was the only out gay kid I knew."
Blaine makes no signs of surprise that Dave’s crush goes so far back. He just nods sympathetically and waits for Dave to continue.
"I thought if I met other gay guys, it would go away. When I started going to Scandals … it seemed to help. It helped me hate myself less. But when I ran into you guys last fall, it –” In his mind’s eye, Dave can see it perfectly: Kurt and Blaine walking into Scandals together, the way Kurt’s hips were tilted confidently, everything about him so perfectly self-possessed in a way that Dave has never learned to be. “It all came back. But I – I wasn’t even going to say hi, because he was comfortable around you in a way I'd never seen before. And I just – I really respect you for that. I really respect what you guys have. I wouldn't –"
Blaine squeezes Dave's shoulder. "I know."
"I see you guys and it makes me think maybe one day I can have something like that. And I couldn't have that with Kurt, I don't want to have that with Kurt, because I want you guys to be together. I mean, I still think he's stunning, and I love him in a way, and I think about him – Okay, I'm going to stop."
"I didn't mean to put you on the spot earlier. I've been watching you guys pussyfoot around each other for a while now and it just seems kind of – " Blaine sighs. "Frustrating."
Dave picks at the hole in the knee of his jeans. "I really like you guys. I mean, I'd thought I had friends before, but – I don't want to mess this up, but I'm messing it up, because I can't stop feeling this way about him. I should probably – " His throat constricts. "I should stop coming around."
Blaine puts his hand on top of Dave's, and Dave stills. "No."
Dave looks up at Blaine and he's never seen him look so – no, not angry. Not stern, exactly. Authoritative. Yes, that's it. He's never seen Blaine look so authoritative. There's this blaze in his eyes and this tension in the muscles of his face, but at the same time he’s exuding a strange sort of calm.
He looks a lot like Kurt at this moment, actually.
"No," Blaine repeats. "You're really important to us, Dave. I'd be really sad to lose you."
"But Kurt," Dave protests. "After everything I've put him through, it's such a –" Dave frees his hand from Blaine's and pulls it roughly through his own hair. "Violation."
He covers his face with shaking hands. He's so close to losing it, so he really should just shut the hell up now, but he can't seem to stop the words. "I never should have done this. When I saw you guys at Scandals that time, I should have stayed away. I tricked myself into thinking I could make up for some of it, but I was just being selfish and stupid."
The tears start with a sob – a big, stupid, desperate sob that's so loud he wouldn't be surprised to find he'd just sucked all the oxygen out of the room and Blaine asphyxiated right there, and then Dave would have taken yet another thing away from Kurt, made his life even more barren of hope than it was a year-and-a-half ago.
"So stupid." He blubbers, because that's what he is – a big, blubbering idiot.
He feels Blaine's hand rubbing up and down on his back, soft soothing strokes like the ones his father used to give him when he'd get a particularly stinging knee scrape.
"No, no," Blaine says, in a voice that's like shush and it'll all be better soon. Dave feels Blaine's forehead press into his shoulder. "I'm so glad we saw you there that night. You're my best friend. I care about you so much."
"But what about Kurt? This is about Kurt."
"I – I didn't tell Kurt I was going to talk to you about this. But I think it's okay if I say that ... I’m sure he suspects you're attracted to him."
The world is closing in on Dave Karofsky. Oxygen is disappearing; the edges of his vision go black. But somehow he still manages to bolt toward the front door and grab his jean jacket off its hook. His keys are in the pocket. He can come back for his books later. Or never. Whatever. He just needs to leave.
"Dave, wait!"
Dave puts his arm through the wrong sleeve because he's a freaking idiot and he takes it off and fumbles around for the right way but then he puts his other arm through the other wrong sleeve and fuck he is so fucking stupid and he doesn't need this jacket anyway, all he needs are the keys so –
"Don’t break his heart. I'll be the one who has to pick up the pieces."
Dave stops. The jacket is bunched up in his two fists, but suddenly the muscles in his hands don't feel like clenching anymore.
The jacket drops to the floor.
"Please." Blaine sounds like he's the one crying now.
Dave turns around. "I don’t understand."
"He's head over heels, Dave. Don't you see the way he looks at you?"
And now Dave's head is spinning, swimming with Kurt Kurt Kurt and his clear, expectant eyes – but that can't be what Kurt's expecting. It can't.
Blaine steps toward Dave, reaching for Dave's elbow – and when Dave doesn't flinch, he takes it. "Look, can we go to the kitchen? Please?"
*
Dave is through half of his Mountain Dew before he says anything. It's cold and the bubbles are sharp against the back of his tongue, like tiny needles stabs.
He's never had that feeling in a dream, and he doesn't remember tasting things in dreams, either. Maybe, occasionally, he'll smell something – a waft of autumn air or chicken roasting in the oven – but taste, no. And right now, he can taste that too-sweet lemon tang, feel the sugar coating his teeth. He knows if he doesn't brush them soon, his gums will start itching.
So this is real. All of this is real.
Blaine is standing across the counter from him, sipping a Coke Zero and tapping out a complex pattern against the counter with his free hand. It takes a minute for Dave to realize that he's repeating his fingerings for the Poulenc piece.
Hmm. Maybe this is a dream. He shouldn't know Blaine's fingerings like that, not already, when they've only played through it a few times.
Dave sets his can on the counter and swallows his burp.
Huh. Dave doesn't need to burp in dreams. This is definitely real.
Dave sighs. (The sinking of his chest feels real, too.) "Can you just start from somewhere, and keep talking? I feel like I'm … missing something."
Blaine's hand stills. "Like what?"
"Like, I'm not sure I understand what you've been trying to tell me. It sounds like you're saying that – " No, Dave has no clue what Blaine is saying. He might think he does, but no. "I can't even begin to try to say what I think you're saying."
"I wasn't planning to have this conversation today." Blaine sets his Coke down. "But I kind of put you on the spot and I don't really know what I thought was going to come out of it, so – "
Dave wants to tell Blaine to get to the point. He doesn't.
"Look." Blaine grabs the edge of the counter in both hands and leans forward. "I need to be clear about this. I love Kurt more than I ever imagined it was possible to love anyone. And just when I think I can't love him any more than I already do – well, I do."
Blaine looks at Dave like he's expecting him to say something. An acknowledgement, maybe. So Dave says, "I know."
"Okay. And you’re my best friend, and I care about you a lot. So I care about you both, but sometimes?” The muscles in Blaine’s forearms tense as he grips the counter's edge. “You two drive me crazy. You're so obviously into each other – I mean, the eyes. The smiles. The – just, everything."
"I'm sorry, I –"
"No." Blaine holds up his hand. "Not like that. Let me finish. It drives me crazy because it must be driving you both crazy. Like, seriously, last week with the prontothicating – the mango warbler. Kurt was holding onto your wrist for – what, like five minutes? Geez, hold each other's hands. Or make out. Or something. It's not a crime."
All the blood in Dave's veins is preparing to boil out of his ears. If Blaine ever, ever thought Dave would do that, that Kurt would do that –
Dave forces himself to remain calm, or at least give as much the appearance of it as he can through clenched teeth. "I'm not trying to take Kurt from you. And even if I wanted to, I'd totally fail. He's in love with you and maybe I haven't made it clear that it's not only how things are, but how I want them to be."
"I'm not making myself clear at all," Blaine says, staring down at the counter, and suddenly his hands sink to his sides, his body contracts, and the breath wooshes out of him like he's a leaking balloon. "I really suck at this." He takes a deep breath and looks up at Dave. "I'm not talking about cheating. I'm not talking about Kurt leaving me for you. Look. You and I both adore Kurt. And we both want him to be happy. And anything that makes Kurt happy makes me happy. And I kind of suspect it's the same for you."
"That's what I've been trying to tell you. That's why – "
Blaine puts up his hand to stop Dave. "So, if you want something with Kurt, and he wants it – which, duh, you both do – and you're comfortable with me still being in the picture because, frankly, I want to spend the rest of my life with him and get married and the whole nine yards, then – seriously. You have my blessing. You have more than that."
"Oh." It's all Dave can say. He thinks. He tries to come up with something. There must be words that exist for these kinds of situations. He doesn't know what they are.
So he looks at Blaine, and Blaine looks at him. If Dave looks half as exhausted as Blaine looks right now, he must look like shit.
The sound of the front door opening jars them from their trance.
"Hello!" Mrs. Anderson's voice calls from the front door. There's the shuffle of feet and fabric.
Blaine takes a sip from his Coke and mutters "Of all nights for her to come home early" under his breath before composing his face and calling back, "Hi, Mom! I was just finishing up studying with Dave."
"Does he want to stay for dinner? I can order pizza." She's taking her own pretty time doing whatever she's doing in the foyer. Thank god.
Dave nods at Blaine and heads toward the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. He should at least wash his face before she sees him – although hopefully he can get out of the house without her seeing him at all. "No, I should head home soon," he says, closing the door behind him.
Blaine, apparently, is planning his own escape. "Mom, I'm going upstairs for a second. I'll be back in a minute."
Dave hears Blaine's footsteps go out the back kitchen entrance and up the stairs.
"So which is it? A minute or a second?" she teases.
Dave turns on the tap and splashes cold water on his face. Parents think they're so fucking amusing. If they had any idea how complicated life is – But he's kind of glad they don't.
*
Dave leaves without saying goodbye to Blaine. He hears Mrs. Anderson walk down the basement stairs while he's still in the bathroom and he figures that's his chance to get out without her seeing that he's been crying.
As soon as he gets in the car, he sends Blaine a text.
Dave: I didn't storm out. I just didn't want your mom to see me like this.
At the traffic light, he hears his phone beep. He knows he shouldn't look, especially after what happened to Quinn, but he does.
Blaine: I'm sorry I'm so bad at this. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. Or potentially ruin our friendship.
Dave turns off his phone so he's not tempted to text back, but he turns it back on as soon as he's parked in front of his house.
Dave:You didn't ruin our friendship.
Blaine: We can pretend this never happened. We can go back to how things were.
Blaine: I can live with you and Kurt never acting on your unresolved romantic tension if that's what it takes for us to be friends. :)
Dave: I'm not at tragedy + time = comedy yet.
Dave: Maybe by tomorrow.
Blaine:So we can talk tomorrow?
Dave: Yes, tomorrow.
Blaine: I love you.
Dave: I love you too.
* * *
Blaine begs for forgiveness for two whole minutes before Kurt even has a clue what he's talking about.
"You're done with dinner, right? Good, you should be alone for this, because I really, really messed up. No, really. I'm so sorry Kurt, I wasn't thinking – I mean, I thought I was thinking but I wasn't thinking at all, and this is not how the book said to do things, and I should have talked to you first. I mean, I know we've been talking but I mean it's only been talking and we hadn't really talked about if we were actually going to do anything about it and we haven't talked about talking with him yet and I –"
"W-wait, Blaine." Before Blaine called, Kurt was absently filing his nails and watching Jersey Shore. Now he's pacing back and forth between his bed and his vanity. "Him. You said 'him.' You mean –"
"Dave." A guttural groan from Blaine's end of the line. "Just break up with me now. I'm the worst boyfriend ever."
"Yeah, no. I don't think so." He's about to try for humor – Best one I've ever had, at least – but decides that now is not the moment. He tries for calmly authoritative, instead. That usually works with Blaine.
"Blaine," Kurt says. "Can you take a deep breath and start over again? Just breathe and then tell me what happened. Okay?"
"I'll try."
"I'm right here. I want to hear you breathe –" (Kurt picks a random number out of the air) "– five times, and then I want you to start from the beginning."
Blaine doesn't say anything. He inhales loudly, then exhales loudly. He sounds like a woman in a childbirth class. (Okay, so Kurt's never been in a childbirth class, but he's seen them on sit-coms.)
"One," Kurt says. He tries to make his voice hushed, to pack as much lull into that brief syllable as he can.
Blaine inhales, exhales again.
"Two." Kurt feels kind of silly counting out loud, but numbers tend to have a calming effect on Blaine. When he can't sleep, he counts sheep – literal, actual sheep, like in Brokeback Mountain, he explained to Kurt the first time it came up – walking through a gate. It usually works before he gets to 73 ("Seventy-three?" Kurt had asked – it seemed like such a random number).
By the time Kurt counts "five," Blaine's exhalations are less explosive. Kurt takes that as a sign that he's calming down.
"Okay. Are you ready to start from the beginning, Blaine?"
"Let's make it seven. Then I will."
They go to seven. It must be having a relaxing effect on Kurt, too, because by now he's no longer pacing the room. He's stopped next to his vanity chair, his hand clenching its back. "Okay. I'm ready whenever you are."
Blaine doesn't say anything at first. That's okay, Kurt reminds himself. It's better than the word-vomit he was spewing at the beginning of their conversation. The only problem, if it is a problem, is that it gives Kurt a chance to replay some of that word-vomit in his head, try to ascribe meaning to it, wonder exactly how Blaine fucked up (or thought he fucked up), and if the book he was talking about was that book, the book that Kurt had ordered from Amazon and lent to Blaine and that they had read through three times together since and what Blaine said to Dave and –
Stop it. Stop. It.
Kurt turns the chair so it's not facing the mirror and sits down, facing the white shelves at the end of his room. "I'm ready, Blaine. Please."
"I asked Dave how he felt about you."
"Oh," Kurt says. His stomach twists the way it did when his dad walked into Mr. Schuester’s class that day in February and Kurt thought that Blaine’s eye surgery had gone drastically wrong.
"I thought I could just ask him as his friend – be supportive, you know? And it was okay, at first, kind of. But then he thought I was trying to accuse him of something, and I tried to explain that I wasn't, and then – " Kurt hears a ragged breath. "And I probably explained more than I should have without talking to you first. Without you there."
Kurt is not going to let his mind play that scenario out in all its thousand possible permutations. "That's okay, Blaine." Kurt says it out of habit, but once he hears the words, he hopes there's a chance that they're true. "What exactly did you explain?"
"I didn't tell him anything we've talked about."
"Okay," Kurt says.
"He thought I was angry at him for having feelings about you – "
"Wait. So he does?" Kurt bites his lip. He didn't realize how tightly his shoulders were wound until just now, when they've begun to unwind.
"Of course he does, Kurt," Blaine says. "I mean, maybe I shouldn't be telling you that he said so, maybe that's his job. Ugh, I should really pay more attention to what the book says, I've only read it, like, four times."
"It's okay. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go on."
"He thought I was angry at him for having feelings about you."
"Oh."
"And he started to leave and I stopped him. I said – " Blaine pauses. "I'm sorry, we haven't talked about this and I know you're not really sure how you feel, but I just said what I thought was true."
"Which was?"
"That you’re smitten with him."
"Oh." Kurt slumps back in his chair and his eyes fall on the silver ampersand sculpture on his shelf. He found it while shopping at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store with Mercedes back before he even came out. He's always liked the structure and shape of the ampersand, but something more struck him when he found it crowded among the dull green-glass vases and artificial flower arrangements at the back of the store.
He'd woken up that morning, like he did most mornings at that point in time, with the sure knowledge that his life was at a dead end. That he had nothing to look forward to, that he was just repeating the same old comforts to distract himself from how meaningless everything had become. The day before had been another glee club practice where he’d been forced to sit and listen to Rachel sing something that he could do much better. This day would be another thrift store shopping trip where he'd madly search for treasure and find nothing, because no one in Lima would ever donate a McQueen jacket to St. Vinny's, because none of them had enough taste to buy one in the first place.
But he'd been wrong. He found a treasure. Not a McQueen, but something lovely just the same. Mercedes teased him as they walked out of the store and he reached into his bag, not being able to wait until they were back at his house to turn the ampersand in his fingers, feel its curves and its hard edges and its promise.
Yes. That's what it was. A promise. He couldn't explain it to Mercedes – he didn't even have the words for it himself – but the ampersand was promising him something. It was telling him that "and" was a tangible reality; that there was more yet to come. His life would come, if he worked and waited for it.
And life came to him, and keeps coming to him, in so many beautiful and unexpected ways. He came out to his dad, and Rachel admitted he was as good as her and maybe even better, and he found Blaine. (Or did Blaine find him? He's never sure which it is.) He planned a wedding and he got a brother and his father got a wife. He loved and lost a canary, but Blaine filled the empty space in his heart.
And then there was Dave, his transformation, his becoming – and somehow Kurt's heart grew a new empty space to be filled.
"Kurt?" Blaine's voice reaches through Kurt's thoughts.
"It's okay," Kurt says. "What you said was … true."
Blaine sighs. "He knows that I'm fine with wherever things go. I mean, we didn't really talk about it much, but he knows."
"I – " Kurt pauses. "I think I'd like to call him tonight. Just to – to say my part, I guess. Do you think that's a bad idea?"
"I think that's a great idea, Kurt. I think he could really stand to hear your voice right now."
*
Dave shouts a cursory "I'm home" when he walks in the front door and immediately heads for the first-floor bathroom to splash his face again with the coldest water he can stand. It doesn't help. He’s still red-eyed and worn.
He can hear his mother walking around upstairs, and smell garlic and tomato – probably lasagna – wafting from the kitchen. Dinner is going to be awkward if he still looks like this in half an hour.
He needs to think of what Kurt would do. Kurt drops beauty tips into conversation like other guys drop sports metaphors, and Dave tends to remember them all – not because he plans to use them, but because it startles him every time, how Kurt can know so much about things that Dave has hardly thought about before: skin care and bird species and ululating and removing grape juice stains from a white shirt. Kurt used to tell him, last spring when they had just started the PFLAG group and Dave was at his most hopeless, that there was a whole world out there that Dave hadn't even imagined, that was so different from what he'd known all his life, and so much better. And when Kurt talks about these things that Dave's never heard of – last Thursday it was sergers and batiste and jacquard and a bunch of other words that Dave jotted down in the margins of his physics notebook to look up later, and most of which he spelled wrong – he feels like he's getting a glimpse of the world that's going to be his home one day.
Dave fishes out a couple of teabags from the kitchen pantry and drops them in a small glass of ice water before bringing them up to his room. He sets the glass on the floor and turns his mp3 player to John Cage's "Dream," wrings the teabags, sinks back against his pillow, and presses them over his closed eyes.
He massages his temple and jaw line the way he heard Kurt explain to Rachel once over the phone. It feels good, surprisingly so, almost as if they were someone else's fingers against his skin.
Dave hears the front door open and his father hollers that he's home. Two cycles of "Dream" later, his mother is calling for him to wash his hands. He takes the teabags off his eyes and crosses the room to look in the mirror. He doesn't look fresh as the morning dew, but he doesn't look much more worn than he usually does after a long day at school.
He almost texts Kurt to thank him for the beauty tip, but he stops himself. He should probably say something else, too, but he doesn’t know what.
At dinner, his dad comments that Dave seems a little distracted and asks if everything is okay at school. When Dave responds with an automatic "Yes, fine," his dad asks again and Dave goes into longer detail with, "No one cares anymore as long as they don't have to dress next to me in the locker room," and his mother gasps "David!" as if he said he's been giving one-dollar blowjobs to every member of the baseball team.
But Paul Karofsky is satisfied with the answer, and as far as Dave is concerned, that's all that counts anymore.
* * *
Over the past few weeks, Kurt has started a dozen random text messages to send to Dave. (Blaine helped me make a YouTube playlist of the piano songs you play at his house.—My dad came home in a blue baseball cap today. Did he steal it from you? I feel like my worlds are colliding.—So you know about WWII fighter planes, but do you know anything about early passenger planes? I have this brooch, and I'm not sure it's historically accurate.) But his thumb always hits "delete" instead of "send."
Last week, he accidentally hit “send” before he could delete what he'd written (Blaine and I have been singing "Fidelity" all afternoon but it's missing something, and I just realized it's your voice), and he was so freaked out that he almost took his seam ripper to the vest he’d been altering for non-prom. But somehow Blaine managed to channel Kurt’s energy into desperate making-out by the time that Dave buzzed back with Regina Spektor? I love that song. She makes me want to learn how to play pop on the piano. And then the desperate making-out turned sweet and hungrily tender, and Kurt came with barely a touch.
Kurt turns on his phone and selects Dave's name from the menu before hitting send. It's a good thing that Kurt only needs his thumb for this, because his hand is trembling so hard he can't even keep the phone still.
Dave answers on the second ring. "Kurt?"
"Dave." Kurt hadn't planned what to say because, if there's one thing he's good at, it's thinking on his feet.
Except that, right now, he has no idea what to say.
"Kurt? You there?"
Kurt opens his mouth, hoping that will coax something to come out. It works. A little. "Yeah. I –"
Another silence. Maybe Kurt can just pretend the phone reception went dead.
"I'm glad you called," Dave says. "I was ... thinking about you."
"Good thoughts?" Kurt means it to sound flirty and confident, but instead it sounds kind of weak and afraid-of-having-one's-dreams-shattered.
"Well, I – You've talked to Blaine?"
"Yeah. He didn't tell me much, though. Just that – I guess he let slip that I'm, um –” Kurt sucks in a breath. “Crazy about you?"
Dave's silent for a second. "Yeah, well, Blaine's kind of – he sees things that aren't there sometimes."
"No," Kurt says. "I mean, yes. Sometimes. But –" Kurt darts his tongue nervously across his lips. It's like sandpaper against his skin. "He's not seeing things this time. Everything he sees is real. It's there."
Another pause. "Kurt – this has been a crazy day. I don't think – maybe we should talk later."
"Nonono." The floodgates suddenly open, the words rushing out of Kurt's mouth. "I – I need you to know. Please. I need to talk about this. It's been building up and building and every time I look at you it's just – so much."
Silence on the other end. Maybe Dave's hung up. Kurt keeps going, anyway. "I didn't know things could be like this. I'm in love with Blaine and I can't stop thinking about you, but that doesn't mean I want to stop being with Blaine – I don't think I could ever stop being with Blaine – I love Blaine and it's not fair to you because I keep touching you because I can't not touch you but it's not fair, you don't need that, you deserve to have someone of your own, you've never even really had a boyfriend unless you count that boring Mennonite and –"
"Kurt." Dave is still there. He hasn't hung up. "I don't want someone of my own. I've tried, but none of them are you."
Oh fuck. Here they are. Tears. Kurt gets off the bed and flicks the lights off so he won't accidentally catch his reflection in the vanity mirror.
"But I don't deserve you, Kurt. I don't even deserve to be your friend. This whole time we've been hanging out, I've been waiting for you to see that."
Kurt interrupts. "We've talked about that, Dave. The past is past."
"No. We haven't. I mean, yes, the past. But not – even without the past, I'm still me. I'm still – I guess I'm good at some things, but I'm not whip-smart like you – like, I'm not funny and I would flunk out of most of my classes if spell-check didn't exist and it takes me years to figure out obvious things like I'm gay. And I'm overweight and –"
"Waitwaitwait. Stop. First off, I'm not funny, I'm sarcastic, and I couldn't stand to hang out with anyone who was as cutting as me because of the competition. Second, I don't care how well you spell, even though I honestly haven't noticed it being a problem. Third, of course it took you years to figure out you were gay because pretty much everyone in this society is raised to think that they're straight until proven otherwise. I mean, it took me a while to figure out even though I drew hearts all over Marcus Kramer's yearbook pictures in first grade. And lastly – you're beautiful, Dave."
"Kurt –"
"Look, I could go into all the objective things like you're supposed to be that big for football and most of your extra weight is muscle mass and that you shouldn't insult a body that does so well for you – but fuck it. Because that would just be hiding what I really think, which is that you're beautiful and I get overwhelmed when I look at you. I mean, you already know how I feel about your eyebrows, but your face, Dave, and when you smile I can barely breathe sometimes it makes me so happy, and from a purely objective standpoint your teeth, and the hair on your forearms is just – I can't even –"
"Kurt –"
"Dave. You're the bravest person I know, and I know you want to protest and say no, you hid in the closet and you used to throw me into lockers and torment the whole glee club. But to me, you're brave because you had the courage to stop doing those things, and to change even when you still hated yourself, even when you were terrified of what other people would think."
"When I look in the mirror, I just see someone who has no idea what he's doing."
"No one does. No one. But you try to do the right thing anyway. You're kind and you're gentle and your heart is huge and you're a goddamn math genius, and when you play piano it's like singing, and you're honest and brave and you're Blaine's closest friend. And that takes something, because as friendly as he is he usually doesn't let people in past a certain point. And he's let you in. He trusts you, and he's comfortable with you, and there are so few people in the world I can say that about. And I do, too. I trust you, Dave. As much as I trust Blaine."
"Kurt –"
"No, I need to keep going. I've been avoiding this for too long. Just let me keep going, okay?"
"Okay."
"I want you. I want you in my life and I don't even know how to ask for that because I'm already in love with someone else and I have no plans to leave him and you and I are both leaving for college in the fall and I've been carrying your Webelos scarf around with me since December – "
"Wait. My Webelos scarf?"
"You wrapped the cake topper in it when you gave it back to me last year."
"No, I remember. I just thought – I assumed you would just throw it away."
"No. I remembered when we met in Figgins' office and your dad mentioned how you'd been a Cub Scout and he looked so proud of you and you looked almost like you were going to cry from that pride. I couldn't have thrown it away."
Kurt thinks he hears Dave crying on the other end of the phone. He wants to wrap his arms around him and pull his face to his shoulder and let the tears soak into his dry-clean-only shirt. But he can't, so he just keeps talking.
"I don't know how it happened, but I want you and Blaine both in my life, and Blaine wants it to. And I know it's more than any reasonable person would ever ask and so I can't even ask it of you. I just needed to tell you. And I hope we can still be friends. Because I need that more than anything. And I'll start keeping my hands to myself. I haven't been practicing a lot of self-control in that area lately. I'm sorry."
"No. Don't – don't do that. I like it when – I like your hands."
Kurt looks down at his free hand and curls his fingers into his palm. He touches the tips of his index finger and thumb together into a circle, extending the rest of his fingers into a sign language "f." He opens his palm and studies the lines and divots there. He wonders which one is his love line, and how many people appear on it.
"Dave, I'm sorry if I've said too much. It's – you know me, once I get going I can't keep my mouth shut."
"I'm kind of ... overwhelmed."
"Yeah." Kurt sighs. "We don't – we don't have to do anything. You don't have to reciprocate."
Whatever Kurt's expecting, it's not the chortle he gets from the other end of the line. "Um, I was reciprocating even before you were, I'm pretty sure."
With anyone else, Kurt would correct the misuse of “reciprocating.”
Dave is not anyone else.
"God, I want to kiss you senseless." Did that really just come out of Kurt's mouth? Apparently, it did.
"Kurt, this isn't – no one ever told me things could be this way."
Kurt rests his palm against his jeans, smoothing the fabric against his thigh in small strokes. "Yeah. The natives have deceived us."
"Kurt – I think I need to think for a few days."
"Yeah, okay."
"We can still talk, I just –"
"I understand. It's okay."
"Kurt, I need to tell you something."
"Yeah," Kurt says. "I haven't really given you a word in edgewise. What is it?"
"That Saturday, when we were driving back from the river, I was so – I think it was the happiest I've been in a long time. And I couldn't figure it out. Because a lot of what was making me happy was watching you and Blaine together all evening. Because you’re my best friends and it feels good to see two people that I love in love with each other. It makes me feel safe."
Kurt starts to cry again. Damn his overproductive lacrimal glands. He'll never be able to leave his room again tonight unless he wants Finn asking a million questions. (Which he does not, duh.)
"And the other part that was making me happy was being with you," Dave says, and fuck, more tears. "It just felt right dancing with you, and being by the river, and sitting in the car next to you. It felt that way when Blaine was there and when Blaine wasn't. And I couldn't figure out how, on one hand, I could know that Blaine is perfect for you and enough for you, and on the other hand, I wanted to belong to you, too."
Kurt completely loses it at that. The tears run down his face faster than his fingers can catch them, curling over his jaw and down his neck into the collar of his shirt.
"Kurt, are you okay? I didn't mean – I'm sorry if that was too much."
Kurt sniffles, the tears thick and burning at the back of his throat. "No, Dave, it's not too much. It's perfect."
***
Dave hardly sleeps that night, and he walks around school in a daze on Tuesday. Nobody really seems to notice except for the girls at lunch, because nobody really notices Dave in general. That's how he likes it.
He drinks twice as much Mountain Dew as usual, which helps him stay awake through classes, but he skips intramural baseball after school and goes straight home to bed, where he sleeps for three hours.
When he awakes, he's surprised to find that Kurt isn't on the bed next to him. He was lying there in Dave's dreams all afternoon, his head against Dave's heart and his hair catching the sun in red sparks. Kurt's hair smelled of lemon and sage, and his breath was warm through the thin cotton of Dave's t-shirt. Dave had one arm wrapped around Kurt's back and Blaine had an arm draped across Kurt's waist, the backs of his fingers grazing Dave's stomach.
