Day 031/032: Wednesday 17th/Thursday 18th October, 2012
Kiss/Consume (Florida)

"Kurt, no. I hate My Girl."

"What? No, you don't. You cry every single time she runs in and starts telling them to put on his glasses. Besides, you've had three vetoes already."

"...Three vetoes is a stupid rule."



"Ugh. Is there no such thing as 'behind closed doors' anymore?"

"What?"

"Come look at this."

From his vantage point in the R.V.'s open doorway, hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea, Kurt watched the couple making their way back from the beach. The girl's shoes hung from her fingertips as her long turquoise skirt billowed around her, the lower third of it either tie-dyed or soaked with seawater, Kurt couldn't tell. The guy with her—clearly her boyfriend, or perhaps a lover in a torrid affair, which Kurt would have found infinitely more interesting—kept stopping every few paces to bury his hands in her shoulder-length blonde locks and kiss her as if nobody were watching.

There probably wasn't anybody else watching, aside from Kurt. And Blaine, of course, when Kurt felt the gentle press of Blaine's chest against his shoulder blades; not close enough, but not far enough, either.

"You don't think they're kind of cute?" Blaine asked.

"I think I'm surprised that they're not bursting into flames, being out in broad daylight and all," Kurt said with a sniff, and took a sip of his tea.

"So you're telling me that if someone kissed you like that, you'd really give a shit where it happened," Blaine challenged him, moving to lean against the door frame and look at Kurt pointedly, arms crossed over his chest.

"I can safely say that if someone kissed me like they were trying to eat my face, I'd be thoroughly repulsed and make for the nearest exit," Kurt replied blithely, trying to make his tone as nonchalant as possible. The all-day sunshine and humidity had done little good for Blaine's wild curls since their arrival in St. Augustine the previous day, but they had done wonders for his temperament, and currently he was in the mood for teasing. Kurt could almost hear the rest of the conversation unfolding before they'd even had it.

"I think you're jealous," Blaine said, poking Kurt in the arm. "The heat's getting to you."

"It's not the heat at all. It's that we had to stop at yet another Walmart, this time one with homeless people living inside, and it's also that I'm a great kisser, and watching that makes me want to throw up," Kurt retorted, the words tumbling from between his lips before he could even consider them and oh, how did Blaine always manage to get under his skin like that?

"A great kisser, huh?" Blaine drawled, and Kurt could have kicked himself. The trap was set.

"Yup. I've had feedback," he quipped, taking another sip of his tea and glancing back out of the doorway.

"Show me."

"What?!" Kurt spluttered. He wiped a few stray drops of tea from his chin as he regarded Blaine with an incredulous look. "You can't be serious."

"Oh, I'm very serious," Blaine countered, standing up straight and dropping his arms to his sides. "Lay one on me."

"If I remember correctly, you've already had one 'laid on you' in the past few days," Kurt said hotly, turning on his heel and taking his tea to the sink. He lifted the cover and unceremoniously dumped it out, suddenly not even remotely thirsty. He rinsed his mug quickly, noting Blaine's silence but choosing not to comment further; it was already a low blow to bring that kiss up, since Blaine had neither instigated it nor professed to enjoy it, but it had been playing on Kurt's mind enough since Sunday.

Specifically, the way Blaine's eyes had fluttered closed after a second, the twitch in his hand like he'd wanted to reach up and pull the angel closer, and—what had stung the most, a razor-sharp and jagged cluster at the base of Kurt's throat—how the muscles in his jaw had clenched and tightened when, just for a moment or two, Blaine had kissed the angel back.

He'd been running hot and cold ever since, flirting shamelessly and then keeping his distance so subtly that Kurt couldn't have called him out even if he'd wanted to. It was damnably frustrating, and a great part of the reason for Kurt's sour mood.

"Kurt."

Deep breath, Kurt. "What?" he asked calmly, back still to Blaine.

"I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable," Blaine said.

"You didn't," Kurt said as breezily as he could, turning and bracing himself on the counter behind him. "I think I might go for a walk, though. Seems a shame to waste such a beautiful night."

"Even with the humidity?" Blaine asked with a nod to Kurt's upswept hair, which had begun to droop despite regular re-applications of hairspray.

"Ah, it's done for anyway," Kurt lamented, and gathered the soft blanket draped across the chair behind the cab. Blaine was still standing in the open doorway, hands behind his back, and Kurt smirked as he approached him. Wanting to mess with him, just a little, he crowded into Blaine's personal space, parting his lips just so and letting his gaze linger on Blaine's mouth the perfect fraction too long. "I won't be long. Movie when I get back?"

Blaine's lips pursed in a reluctant smile, and Kurt was already on the second step down when he heard Blaine murmur, "Okay."

As he made his way down the beach, his bare toes digging into the fine sand, he took a deep lungful of fresh ocean air. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and the spill of colors in the sky was fading into a deep cornflower blue, Venus rising in the west. Despite the humidity, it was the second beautiful night he'd had in a row, and he walked to a place where the R.V. was well out of sight, until on his little stretch of shore, he was alone.

After spreading out the blanket and sitting down, he pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it over and over in his hands. He needed to talk to someone, try and work his way through everything before it all overwhelmed him. But judging by the time, April was about to go on stage somewhere in Brooklyn, Finn was already at work for his night shift, and being a Wednesday, his dad and Carole would be at Carole's sister's house for dinner.

The only other person he could think of was Blaine, and therein laid the problem. His thumb swiped back and forth, back and forth across the screen, clearing it of app icons and then restoring them, until he caught sight of the icon for his blog app. He paused only for a moment before tapping on it and going straight to the video capture option.

Squinting into the harsh glare of the flashlight as he turned his phone around—god, this would look like some dreadful Blair Witch parody—he gave the camera a little wave.

"Sorry I haven't updated for a while," he said. "It's a little difficult to find alone time when you're on the road with your best friend almost twenty-four-seven. Looks like there's a few more of you than my last update, so hello and welcome.

"Um... Well, we're in St. Augustine, Florida, and heading down to Key West tomorrow. We had a four-hundred-mile drive in from Atlanta on Monday, which was exhausting. Today we checked out some of the local tourist stuff and stopped for lunch in this old hotel that has a caf� in what used to be the deep end of the pool, and then we ended up back here, where we've mostly been enjoying the beach and catching up on our workout routines and emails and calls home."

Kurt paused, recalling his conversations with Andrew and John and how easy it had been to open up to them as strangers; he reminded himself that his modest number of followers were all exactly that—and how many of them were likely to watch his silly piece-to-camera videos, anyway?

"Blaine's been acting... Strange. More than usual, I mean. Something happened at Pride in Atlanta. One of the, uh... One of the Free Hugs Angels kissed him, and for a second he looked like he was really into it, which—it hurt. And I wish it didn't.

"The thing is, like I keep telling you guys, we've been best friends for so long that... I don't want to risk everything we have, but right now I'm at the point where every time I look at him I want to kiss him, and it should be weird, right? It should be weird to think about him that way; it used to be!

"I don't know what to do," Kurt said miserably. Finding himself with no other words, he turned the phone back around and hit Upload, blinking as the impression of the flashlight seared behind his eyes eluded him and faded.

"I don't know what to do," he repeated, to no one but himself.



"Have you ever noticed how phallic Florida is?" Blaine asked the next day, glancing at the map of Florida Kurt had printed off and stuffed into the folder along with their campground booking.

"Is that all you ever think about?" Kurt asked irritably. They'd been on the road for the entire day contending with freeway traffic and passive-aggressive drivers, it was nearing sunset, and he'd almost reached the limit of his patience—not to mention the fact that the lyrics of the song Blaine had skipped to on Kurt's 'Sunny Skies' playlist—The Colourist's Wishing Wells—were dangerously close to the bone.

"Just follow what you feel, just follow what you feel," was a message Kurt wasn't particularly enamored of, given that he really had no idea how to begin deciphering the mess of what he was feeling.

"Look at it," Blaine said, waving the map in front of the steering wheel. "No wonder they call it America's Wang. Anyway, you're one to talk."

"As I was saying," Kurt intoned deliberately, reaching up to adjust his sunglasses, "everything happens for a reason."

"Come on, Kurt. You don't believe in any of that."

"No, you're misunderstanding me," Kurt said, frustrated. Why did they always seem to be on two separate pages these days? "You know I don't believe in any of the spiritual stuff, but I do believe that everything that happens does so for a reason. History, simple as that. Z wouldn't have happened without Y, which wouldn't have happened without X, back and back. Look at My Girl, for instance. Thomas Jay wouldn't have gone back for Vada's mood ring if she hadn't dropped it, she wouldn't have dropped it if they hadn't been kicking around that beehive, and so on."

"So what you're really saying is that there isn't actually any such thing as history," Blaine said thoughtfully, and Kurt nodded with a smile.

"Right. Because one way or another, history is always present."

"You know a little something of the world, don't you?"

"Not really. I just know a little something of mine."

They lapsed back into silence as Kurt concentrated on navigating them through the narrower streets and inside the campground, and after parking and checking in, they both jumped down from the cab with sighs of relief, stretching out their cramped joints and muscles.

When they turned off Duval Street and onto South, Blaine took Kurt's hand and linked their fingers together, and Kurt's pulse skittered.

He knew he'd been subdued since the previous night, lost inside his own indecision and wondering what to do next. He'd made peace with the fact that he wanted more—so much more—of Blaine than what he was getting, and what he'd taken in Philadelphia. What was really getting to him was the fact that although he had recollections of what Blaine felt like, the weight and measure of him, he knew nothing of the taste of Blaine's lips, or the pressure and temperature of his mouth.

He also knew that Blaine had taken note of his shifting mood—it was clear in that same languid tension Kurt had been noticing increasingly frequently since Rhode Island. Perhaps even longer ago, were he to trace it back. No Z without Y, no Y without X, no X without—

"Wow," Blaine said, interrupting Kurt's thoughts.

Standing before them was the tall concrete buoy declaring the ground beneath their feet as the southernmost point in the continental U.S., and Key West as 'Home of the Sunset.' Behind it, the sky was appropriately smeared with pink and orange and yellow, the sun lazily descending in a halo of palest blue.

"Take a picture!" Blaine exclaimed with all the excitement of a child, and he grinned off to the side of the buoy, bracing himself against it with one hand, his left foot crossed over his right. After Kurt had captured Blaine's brilliant grin and forwarded the picture to Blaine's mom, he noticed a new email in his notifications and tapped it open.

It was an anonymous comment on his video post, and the only text was a YouTube link, signed with the initial F. He tapped the link absentmindedly, eyes lingering on Blaine as he snapped pictures of the marker, the sunset, and the weathered plaque on the low wall that separated the ground from the ocean below.

When the song began, blaring from his phone at top volume, Kurt almost jumped out of his skin. He circled around behind the buoy and let it cast him in shadow to listen in private and regain his breath. He'd been meaning to disable anonymous comments entirely; he'd received a few on his blog before, but they'd been spam, links to diet pills and discount codes and cure-alls for erectile dysfunction. They hadn't been anything like this: a simple link to a song he knew and adored. Second only to film, music was his great love—and this song... This song was perfect.

Because anything really could happen, couldn't it? What if what had happened between them in Philadelphia wasn't a total mistake, simply the prelude to Kurt finally giving in to what his instincts had been telling him for weeks, now? What if, what if, what if...

"What are you doing? Come see this!" Blaine called, and Kurt took a deep breath.

He stepped out of the shadows and moved to Blaine's left so that Blaine was silhouetted against the fading sun, light casting the top layer of his curls auburn. He stretched his arms up over his head, letting out the sigh of a man satisfied and content. Kurt felt as if he were watching Blaine through a long overdue pair of brand new eyes; he knew there was rescue in those arms, and suddenly he wanted to smudge himself into them until he felt safe.

"Yeah, since we found out, since we found out that anything could happen..."

Blaine turned away from the vista of the sky and pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head to look down at Kurt, his smile beatific and his eyes sparkling with warmth and light. As he leaned forward and held out his hand, he looked... Beautiful.

Kurt took Blaine's hand and stepped up onto the wall, the repetitive build of the lyrics wrapping him up in recklessness and resolve, because this was it, wasn't it? This was the real movie moment where the rest of them paled in comparison. Providence had been a premature disappointment; the Brooklyn Bridge belonged to two people that didn't exist; Philadelphia had been a rushed and disastrous taste, nothing more.

The simple fact was that Kurt didn't want to leave any more missed opportunities in his wake. He wanted Blaine. Every single moment they'd come close, every near miss, every mistake Kurt had chosen not to make had been leading to this, hadn't it? No Z without Y.

"Anything could happen, anything could—"

The music exploded and so did Kurt, his stomach caught in his chest as he hooked three fingers into the collar of Blaine's t-shirt and crushed their lips together in a kiss that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

It only took a moment before Blaine was kissing back, inhaling sharply through his nose as he pressed forward, his hands flying up to frame Kurt's face. It was pressure and give in perfect balance, exactly what Kurt had been wanting but not letting himself have, because this was the first brick from the wall of their friendship, the others tumbling beneath it, and as Blaine's lips parted, they tumbled down on top of Kurt, and he pulled back.

"Fuck," he whispered, looking away as Blaine's eyes opened. "I'm s—"

"Don't you dare," Blaine ordered, carding his fingers into the hair at the back of Kurt's head and yanking him down into a messy, hungry kiss that burned him in its intensity, teeth catching his bottom lip. And at once Kurt felt it as if it were something physical: a click, a slot back into place, a page turning so that they were both back on the same one. One hand still holding onto his phone as the song continued to play, he scrambled for purchase with the other, looping his arm around Blaine's neck and pulling him flush.

When Blaine broke the kiss, he simply said, "R.V. Now," and took Kurt by the hand, pulling him down from the wall and back onto the street.

His heart pounded in his chest as they ran hand in hand back to the R.V., Kurt barely keeping pace as Blaine led him there. Two kisses and he suddenly felt like he was standing on the edge of the world, the ground beneath his feet tipping, tipping, tipping him over the edge into a giddy sense of oblivion, and with the drama of the moment broken as he finally remembered himself and shut off the song, he grinned up at the sky.

No sooner was the door to the R.V. closed behind them than Blaine's mouth was back on his, his tongue tracing the line of Kurt's lips before plunging inside. They stumbled sideways up the steps, the inside of the R.V. growing darker in the fading daylight. As they finally managed to make it to the bedroom, still locked at the mouth, Blaine pushed him up against the bathroom door, linking their fingers and pressing them into the wood either side of Kurt's head.

"So this is happening now," he said, his voice holding a note of desire that Kurt had never heard before. He shivered as he breathed heavily, Blaine's face mere inches from his own and his eyes obsidian. "No going back?"

"No going back," Kurt said, pushing his hips forward into Blaine's and whining in the back of his throat, repeating to himself over and over and over, it's just a sex thing.

"Fuck, okay," Blaine whispered, pressing himself even more tightly against Kurt for a second, both of them moaning at the contact and friction, before pulling him into the bedroom and flicking on the light. Kurt pushed Blaine back onto the bed and looked at him for a moment, took in the sun-blush left on his skin and the rumpled front of his shirt where he'd had it gripped in his fist.

The impatient fire died but the wanton heat remained, and with his eyes locked on Blaine's, he slowly followed, knees either side of Blaine's hips on top of the covers. He leant forward, tracing Blaine's bottom lip with his index finger and biting back a groan when Blaine sucked it into his mouth; exactly what Kurt had wanted him to do that overtired, hazy night in Vermont.

Have we always been waiting for this?

Kurt replaced his finger with his lips, cupping Blaine's jaw to feel the shift and clench he'd been picturing since Atlanta. It was slow, the sounds Blaine made in the back of his throat hitting Kurt like pinpricks as he kissed Blaine harder, savoring the taste while Blaine's hands gripped and squeezed at his sides, moving up and underneath his shirt. He gasped into Blaine's mouth at the touch, firm and strong.

"God, why haven't we always been doing this?" he whined, rolling his hips down onto Blaine's and pressing their foreheads together, their breath mingling between them. Blaine groaned low in response, tugging Kurt's shirt up over his head and tossing it before letting his fingers drift over Kurt's nipples and down over his ribcage.

Kurt shivered and surged forward to recapture Blaine's lips, and he'd never kissed anyone like this. Everyone he'd ever been with had been a rush, even his first, and he felt like he was learning all over again, sweet tremors chasing one another up and down his spine and tingling, all the way up into his lips as Blaine kissed a new life into him.

They undressed one another in increments, trading off until there was nothing left of them but skin and flesh and Kurt's hips working circles into Blaine's. Blaine fell backwards, taking Kurt with him. His fingers gripped the back of Kurt's neck like a lifeline, and every time his screwed-shut eyes opened, they stared straight into Kurt.

"Blaine—shit," Kurt managed, feeling the sensation begin to build in his fingers and toes.

"Come on, Kurt," Blaine said, his pace quickening and his cock dragging against Kurt's, palms kneading into the flesh of Kurt's ass as he bared his throat and his back arched off the covers.

"Are you—you close?"

"Fuck—yes, just don't... Jesus, don't stop, I've—I've wanted this..."

"Tell me," Kurt panted into the hollow of Blaine's neck, sweat beading at his temples, and he spread his knees wider, thrust down harder, chasing and chasing and chasing.

"Couldn't—ah—get Philadelphia off my mind, you... The way you looked, fuck, I—Kurt..."

Blaine's entire body tensed as he came, a soundless cry in his slack mouth, and Kurt bit down hard onto his collarbone as he wound up and up and up, coiling tightly and then unspooling like thread.

The comedown was calm like Kurt had never felt, Blaine's hands finding Kurt's face to pull him closer, their lazy lips fitting together and sliding apart. Kurt climbed off him carefully, collapsing onto his side and pushing his face into the pillow, blood rushing through his head in a buzz that dulled everything.

He looked at Blaine, and found him smiling.

"Tell me something," Blaine panted, his chest—gloriously, gloriously bare and oh, Kurt was going to take his time mapping out every last dip and contour—rapidly rising and falling as he tried to catch his breath. Kurt gazed at him through heavy eyes and turned fully onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow and looking at Blaine expectantly. "This was just about the sex, right? There isn't something more you want to tell me?"

Of course there's something more, you idiot, Kurt wanted to say, but the three seconds he hesitated let that old fear back in, and it was just enough to slot a couple of bricks back into place, the light higher and out of reach.

Heart hammering in his chest, he met Blaine's eyes squarely and forced out the words, "No. What happens on the road trip stays on the road trip."



Distance: 3,230 miles