Day 033: Friday 19th October, 2012
Treading Water (Alabama)

"So we've got it narrowed down to Big Fish, a low-budget post-apocalyptic movie, and Borat?"

"Yup. Not gonna lie; I think your Tim Burton addiction is going to be getting a healthy injection in Alabama."

"Well, it's supposed to be really good. And your 'future husband' is in it, after all..."



Blaine's first time had been a mistake.

The guy's name was Tyler Pace—one of Blaine's roommates in London, an intern on the same program, and originally from Cork, Ireland. His uniform was t-shirts in muted colors underneath a boxy black blazer, and ratty jeans that would have appalled Kurt. He had small black gauges in his ears and wore his bright red hair shot through with blond, shaved at the sides and in a messy approximation of a James Dean-esque quiff on top. Obscuring his pale gray eyes were a pair of thick, oversized black glasses with red arms, and there was always a pair of Skullcandy headphones around his neck blaring U2 and Stiff Little Fingers.

Tyler appeared, at first, to be a patchwork of personalities all clamoring for dominion over one body, and that was one of the things that Blaine had been immediately drawn to. Tyler had been an enigma, keeping mostly to himself and only ever speaking when spoken to or when he had something particularly important to say. All of Blaine's questions had gone unasked, and he had contented himself with mostly being in the dark, even if Tyler's eyes had sometimes lingered on him as if waiting for him to say something.

Blaine had scoffed every time Lucy told him that Tyler had a crush on him.

The night they slept together, a few days before the beginning of their Christmas break, Tyler had knocked on Blaine's bedroom door mere moments after Blaine had just disconnected from a blazing fight with Kurt over Skype. The walls in the flat were old and thin, and everyone had probably heard Blaine's placatory tone escalating into angered yelling, louder and louder until he'd eventually told Kurt that if he was going to be like that, then he was glad he wasn't coming home for the holidays, before hanging up and dropping his head into his hands.

"Everything alright there?" Tyler had asked quietly, in his softly lilting Irish accent, when Blaine opened the door. Perhaps it was the concern in his voice; perhaps it was the way his eyes kept dropping seemingly involuntarily to Blaine's mouth, or perhaps it was the fact that he was Kurt's polar opposite—Blaine still didn't know what had possessed him—but whatever the reason, Blaine had stepped forward and kissed him.

One thing had led to another, and even though Tyler was sweet about it afterward, something irrevocably changed between them. Blaine suddenly noticed the absence of lingering looks that had never even seemed to registered before. Tyler started talking to him more, but never about anything real. For the first time, Blaine had realized that the mystery surrounding Tyler had been nothing but the unresolved sexual tension between them.

The second time it happened, Blaine had been drunk and in pieces over the news of his grandfather's death, and on Tyler's part it was probably no more than a pity fuck. That was what it had felt like: quick, messy, and a race to the finish.

With Kurt, it had lasted hours. They had traded a litany of deep kisses that spanned their movements under the covers until they were both spent, and Blaine had fallen asleep with Kurt's face buried in the hollow of his neck.

The next evening, when Kurt finally pulled up to the campground's dump station in Ozark, Alabama—a town Blaine had never heard of before—the sun had long since set. They had been on the road from Key West all day, driving in two shifts and stopping only for an hour in Gainesville. They were both exhausted, not only from the miles they had covered, but from their shared lack of sleep the night before.

Silence enveloped them as Kurt switched off the engine, stretching his arms up over his head and rolling his wrists, and Blaine had to remind himself that he actually had permission to look now. So he did, taking in the lean lines of Kurt's body and picturing the miles of lightly freckled pale skin that he knew lay beneath his shirt and jeans.

If it weren't for the exhaustion, Blaine might have done a victory dance or something equally as embarrassing.

"What are you looking at?" Kurt asked around a yawn that he stifled behind his hand. Everything about him screamed tiredness, and Blaine reached over to let the backs of his fingers drift over Kurt's cheek.

"You, sleepy-head," he said, smiling fondly when Kurt leaned into the touch. "Do you think you'll stay awake long enough for us to watch our movie?"

"I'll be fine once I've had coffee... And stretched. God, I ache," Kurt complained, turning sideways in his seat and dropping his cheek to the headrest.

"Go stretch," Blaine said, unclipping his seat belt and standing up. "My turn to empty the tanks. Don't be too jealous."

Kurt wrinkled his nose.

"Aren't you jealous at all?" Blaine asked. "The hoses, and watching the gauges, and the disposable gloves... I'd be jealous."

"If I had the energy, I would be side-eying you so hard right now," Kurt murmured, his eyes drifting heavily closed.

"Hey, come on. Up," Blaine said, taking Kurt's hands and pulling him to his feet. He swayed for a second before finding his equilibrium, and offered Blaine a weak but grateful smile. Quite unable to resist the impulse, Blaine rocked forward and caught Kurt's sleepy, slackening mouth in a fleeting kiss; both a request for and promise of more. He knew he was playing a dangerous game, particularly in light of what Kurt had said the night before, but he couldn't yet find it within himself to care. What lay between them had a time limit on it, now—an expiration, dated the day they would arrive back in Maine—and Blaine was going to take whatever he was given.

Leaving Kurt and his soft smile, Blaine grabbed his iPod from its dashboard dock and headed outside, donning a pair of disposable gloves as he went. Soundtracked by a loop of Coldplay's Clocks and its unforgettable piano riff—the one he had learned by heart in tenth grade and played so often that, one Sunday morning after a sleepover, Kurt had told him he'd been drumming it on top of the blankets in his sleep—he set about emptying the tanks. First the black water, then the gray, running water rinses in between and finishing the job by dumping a liberal amount of treatment into each.

"If there was even the slightest spill," Kurt said when Blaine was back inside and leaning against the frame of the open bedroom door, "you're sleeping on the couch."

Blaine grinned, docking the iPod by the bed with the song still softly playing. Kurt was stretched out on his stomach, still in his clothes and half of his face pushed into the pillow. He regarded Blaine through one bleary eye.

"Coffee?" Blaine offered.

"Mm... No. Too comfy."

"Massage?"

"Oh my god. Please."

Chuckling, Blaine climbed onto the bed and straddled Kurt's thighs, blinking and swallowing as he gently tugged Kurt's shirt from the waistband of his jeans. With a little maneuvering, he managed to relieve Kurt of every last stitch of clothing from the upper half of his body.

Skin, miles of it, and he was allowed to look and touch and savor every inch.

He rubbed his hands together to warm them up, and started with Kurt's shoulders. Kurt melted beneath his ministrations almost immediately, letting out a loud and positively obscene groan of pleasure.

"Oh my god, that feels amazing," Kurt sighed as Blaine gently began working out a knot at the top of his shoulder blade. "If I'd known you were so good with your hands, I might not have taken so long."

"Why did you take so long?" Blaine asked after a moment, careful to keep his tone light and conversational.

Kurt paused, then said simply, "It was totally weird. And then suddenly, it wasn't."

"Obviously I just became too hard to resist," Blaine said, taking Kurt's arms and gently pushing them up so that he could wrap them around his pillow.

"Hard was right," Kurt replied wryly, arching his hips off the bed in a quick snap that sent a jolt through Blaine. Shaking it off, he redoubled his concentration. He dragged the heel of his hand up the length of Kurt's spine, a light flush of red left in its wake as blood rushed to the surface of the skin, and then worked both thumbs in circles between Kurt's shoulder blades. "Anyway, you—oh, right there—you took your time as well."

"What do you mean?"

"Rhode Island? The Brooklyn Bridge?" Kurt reminded him. "Come on, B."

The nickname fell from between Kurt's lips so easily that it was as if it hadn't been years since he'd used it, and Blaine felt a rush of nostalgic fondness in his chest. He eased off on the pressure for a moment, letting his fingers drift back and forth across the breadth of Kurt's shoulders.

"And what about Delaware?" he asked carefully, knowing that he probably wasn't going to get any answers, not with such a wall already between them. It was translucent—almost invisible, really—but tangible, and daubed with the words, 'boundary line, please do not cross.'

"Can we just... Forget Delaware?"

"Sure," Blaine said, even though he knew it would take a long time to forget the fear in Kurt's eyes that day; a storm reflecting the rain pounding down around them. Changing tact, he leaned forward and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to Kurt's shoulder. Against his skin, he murmured, "Something else I'm curious about, though."

"Oh?"

"What number am I?"

A beat, a shift, and then, "Thirteen."

"Lucky thirteen," Blaine said with a chuckle. He sat back and pressed his thumbs into the base of Kurt's neck. "It was what, four before I left? Wow. I really was cramping your style."

"No, you—mmm, that's good... It wasn't ever like that, not really," Kurt said quietly. "You were enough."

Blaine breathed in slowly, leaning his weight onto his thumbs and working out the knots in Kurt's muscles. Kurt shuddered underneath him when the tension finally dissipated, and this time when Blaine leaned forward, Kurt twisted and hooked his arm around Blaine's neck, dragging him down to lie next to him.

"Better?" Blaine asked. Kurt nodded, turning fully onto his side and looking remarkably more awake than before. "Good."

"Was last night a one-time thing?" Kurt asked suddenly, and Blaine blinked dumbly at him for a moment.

Carefully, he asked, "Do you want it to be?"

"No," Kurt said. "Do you?"

"Not when you were the least terrifying you've ever looked this morning. No fire, pitchforks or death."

"Be serious."

"No, Kurt," Blaine said as reassuringly as he could, curving his palm into the dip of Kurt's waist. "I don't want it to be a one-time thing."

With a flash of a wicked smirk, Kurt pulled himself on top of Blaine, hands either side of his head on the pillow. Looking at him with a glint of mischief in his eyes, he leaned down to murmur against Blaine's lips, "So what do you propose we do about that?"

Blaine surged upward to drag Kurt into a deep kiss, shivering as Kurt cupped his jaw and let out a breathy little hum. Without pulling away, he blindly reached out to switch off the song he still had playing on a loop—he didn't want to hear about confusion or ticking clocks or missed opportunities.

He just wanted Kurt.



Distance: 3,996 miles