Burt Hummel was getting re-partnered. Carol Hudson was a charming little woman, and her son was Kurt's age, they got on well enough. They had completed all the standard applications for partership and they'd been accepted as viable partners. Kurt adored Carol, he was very excited.

The two Hummel men had lived in one of the oldest and last remaining pre-conflict houses in town thus far, and so the government had decided that the mixed family unit would be moved to the brand new housing development across town and they would take up residence together there. The old house would be demolished.

It was because of this that Kurt found himself crammed into the crawl-space of an attic, sifting through dusty old boxes of his mother's less important belongings and other assorted junk belonging to Kurt's ancestors.
He coughed as he pushed aside an old trunk full of long out of fashion and moth eaten dresses and pulled a musky, water-stained box toward himself. He opened it and dug past the old yellow newspapers that had been used as packing, he smiled as he scanned the headlines, they acted as a little time capsule. He watched the history he'd had drilled into his mind through years of school flash by with the flick of his thumb, he took the greatest interest in the articles that focused on the conflict, when the mass book-burnings were still impassioned, when there were still government raids and people that everyone agreed were immoral had been rounded up and carted away, when the other side had still tried to fight it. Kurt found it fascinating.

Past the papers his fingers felt the solid block shape of old books stacked upon each other. Actual physical books were a rare thing. It was much easier and cheaper to just download the things and they took up so much space, it was considered unfashionable to let the old media clutter one's home.

Kurt selected a novel at random, opened it somewhere in the middle and began to scan the page, It was a story about a person who was in a sleeping bag, next to a girl named Lara. The person pulled their arm out of their own sleeping bag and put it in the Lara girl's bag. They laced their fingers together and squeezed.

And then they kissed.

Kurt stared at the book in shock. This was illegal. This was disgusting. This was wrong. Years of conditioning told Kurt that he needed to take the box to his local center to have it and its contents eradicated. So why did those few lines of text send such a thrill coursing through his veins? What was that tingling sensation? Why did his very soul feel as though it were afire? What was wrong with him?
"Kurt? Buddy? You okay up there? You want some help?"

At the sound of his father's gruff voice, Kurt jumped and flung the book across the small space, preparing himself to deny ever having read such blatant smut. His voice was high and nervous when he answered his dad.

"NO! It's fine- I'm fine!"

He crawled to retreive the book, moving in shifty, jerky, movements like he was being watched, he wrapped the illicit thing in a thick, cream colored sweater that had been his aunt's and he was planning to re-imagine into something fashionable for himself. Now he used it to smuggle his contraband past his concerned father.

He needed to read more, needed it like he needed his next breath. For some reason incomprehensible to himself, he felt his whole world and his entire future teetered on the jagged peak those few paragraphs had struck into his timeline. He knew, reading those few words " held hands" "cuddled" "sexy" "kissed" would be a moment he would look back on as the pivotal moment. It was like standing on the precipice of a cliff that he had sensed was ahead but had never really processed until he was actually standing there, and Kurt was about to jump.

It would never be the same.

............................................................................................................................................................

It was not difficult to hide the book from finn. He bundled the little parcel in layer upon layer of last season's clothing, stuffed it deep within his bottom drawer, and placed a pair of very expensive boots that Finn knew were not to be touched under penalty of Kurt telling the authorities that Finn had stood much too close to Rachel Berry from school, Kurt had even seen Finn let the girl's skirt brush against his leg and he'd said nothing. It was very good blackmail and a very good hiding spot indeed.

When the others were gone, out to some dinner or car show that Kurt claimed to have no interest in, he would close the blinds, retrieve the bundle from it's hiding place, bring it into the bathroom, lock the door, unwrap the book and he would read.

It was barbaric, that much was obvious. The boy in the story went about his life in such a way that would get a man put in solitary confinement for the rest of his life and as far as Kurt could tell, the author wanted the boy to seem like the most tame of all the people in the story. It was unfathomnable and it was so exciting.

Kurt learned about sex, and not the clinical thing that had been described to him in his health classes. In which each man and woman would make a trip to their physician once they reached the age of nineteen to have their seed harvested and how it would be combined with an optimal sample from the opposite sex to produce a fine new member of the next generation.

This was raw, this was how the cavemen must have produced their offspring. The young woman in the story had put her mouth on the boy's penis, Kurt wasn't sure but he thought that, according to the minimal education on the female reproductive system he'd recieved, the act was not conducive to child production, and stranger still the boy seemed to experience some remarkable sensation from her mouth, the pleasure he described nearly unimaginable to Kurt, the only thing he could liken to the description was the handful of shameful experiences he'd had in the shower, an act that he had been told was meant to be unpleasant but necessary in young men to relieve dangerous pent up agression. At the time he had thought there was something deeply perverted about him for enjoying the awful act so much. He had been so worried. And yet this piece of literature suggested that it was something completely normal, and furthermore something to be viggorously sought after.

Kurt read every chance he got, careful not to get caught but quick to retrieve the book whenever he was left alone. He poured over it obsessively, finishing it quickly and immediatly flipping back to the beginning to re-read it time and time again.

And then, when he had read the book enough times to have lost count and to be able to re-play the story in his head as he slept, he remembered the box he had found it in. He remembered that there had been a bounty of old reading materials crammed into the confines of that musky cardboard and he was willing to bet that there were many more depictions of this raw form of sex that Kurt was both terrified of and addicted to in that box.

He made it his mission, the next time his family left him alone he would climb up into that attic and he would bring down the whole box. He would hide it expertly. Since he'd hatched the plan he'd lain awake in bed for hours plotting the perfect hiding spot, and he was sure he knew the perfect place.

He got his chance one saturday night. His father and Carole had been invited to a mild little dinner party with everyone from their neighborhood. Himself and Finn had been invited but Kurt had faked sick without any problem and well, Finn was never one to turn down a meal. Kurt's stomach seemed to soar as his plan came to fruition.

He had watched their car disappear from view after so cleverly convincing his father and step mother that it would be a good idea to drive there instead of walking, claiming that Carole's new shoes were far too fabulous to get caked in mud left behind from the recent rain, and that finn never liked to walk anywhere after a good meal. It served his own purposes of course, he would be able to hear them returning that way and would have ample time to stash his books before anyone realized he was up to anything suspicious.

When he could no longer see his father's car he was up the attic latter in a flash, and back down again, the box barely balanced on his hip as he climbed down. he replaced the latter in the ceiling quickly before retreating to his bedroom and beginning to carefully hide his treasure.

He had found a nice new box, with stiff, crisp sides and no particular smell. It was another detail he hoped would keep his books from being found. He carefully moved each novel from the old box and stacked it neatly in the new box, he ran his long fingers over each volume and flipped through the pages before placing it.

He smiled at the scent of aged paper that filled his nostrils, it reminded him of his late grandmother who had lived through the conflict and had managed to keep a number of books from her childhood that had been approved by the decency council, she had read the old stories to kurt when he was young he remembered that she would even sometimes be so daring as to reach out and affectionatly ruffle his thick hair with her aging hand. Kurt wondered if maybe these were her books that she had managed to hide from the old raids.

When he reached the last book in the wilting old box, he placed it away from the others, he would read that one first and then keep it where he had kept the first, he stacked that first book reverently on top. The black cover with grey smoke looked up at him like an old friend as he closed the box's flaps over it.

Kurt was sure his hiding place was genius. His bed was pushed up against the northern wall in his room, and the large frame hid a big ugly air vent and, Kurt had found, the grate came off fairly easily but was on well enough to not suddenly fall off in the night and bring attention to itself.

He moved the bed frame with some effort and put his treasure trove away, then picked up the new book and read until he heard the rumble of his father's engine coming up the driveway, he quickly but carefully hid the new novel in it's designated place. That night, he could not sleep for excitement.

............................................................................................................................................................

Kurt burned through his first few books fairly quickly, he was thankful for Burt and Carole's budding new social lives, and for Finn's love of going to play racing simulator with his friends. Just as Kurt had predicted, each new novel contained many new depictions of touching and kissing and sex. Female characters would bend and spread and kneel for male characters in so many debauched combinations that even the naughtiest boys at Kurt's school would dare to even imagine.

And Kurt's head would reel at this new information just as his stomach churned. It was funny, for as excited by the books as Kurt was, something seemed off, he would always wince to read about a male character burying his fingers in the female's genitals.

He would read entire paragraphs explaining the perfection of a female's soft, round body and at best he would imagine clothes that would look good on her figure, most often he was bored and would skip ahead, and in the worst case, he would find himself somewhat horrified by a too-vivid description of that leaking crevice between a woman's legs. He found he much preferred to read scenes in which a male character would pleasure himself. Kurt hypothesised that this was because he at least had something to compare to these situations.
It was about half-way through a particularly confusing novel that Kurt had his big revelation.

The book was small and unassuming, it was paperback and had no cover art, just the title printed in a small, simple, half rubbed off font. He didn't quite understand it, the protagonist had described himself early in the story, it had mostly been matters of his appearance, and then he had announced that he was "gay" Kurt had found it funny, that an adjective mostly meant to describe flowers or chipmunks in nursurey rhymes was being used to describe a teenage boy, especially because, as he read, the boy didn't seem very gay at all, he seemed agitated and depressed if anything. The boy would complain that the other students disliked him because he was gay, which Kurt didn't understand. He could understand being irritated by a person that was too peppy, the way Rachel irritated him when she insisted on chirping at him early in the morning before he'd had his coffee, but even in a more violent culture he was sure there was no way to justify violence towards someone just for being happy, especially when, as he'd previously noted, this boy didn't even act very gaily at all.

It was very confusing, but Kurt powered through because, for all the confusion, there was a very large amount of those exciting scenes in which the boy would touch himself in the shower or under the covers at night and gladly, there weren't even any annoying thoughts of breasts or vaginas to interrupt!

Kurt woke up to find his father gone to work, Carole gone to a farmer's market two towns over, and Finn gone to sleep in Noah Puckerman's basement and rose from bed excited for a few good hours of reading to start his day.

He blushed as he watched himself in the mirror across from his bed. Remarking to himself that he had been waking up with a lot of that embarassing stiffness in his pants lately, the thing that boys in his books called 'erections' or 'hard-ons' or 'boners' Kurt always giggled at that last one, it felt silly in his head. He shuffled into the bathroom to shower, relieve himself of the issue, and to speed through his morning skin and hair rituals. When he was done he got his book from it's hiding place, made himself comfortable in the bed, and began to read.

The boy in the story had just made friends with another young man when Kurt had last been reading. Kurt figured they were probably best friends because the boy was always talking about how funny and smart and asthetically pleasing his new friend was. As he read the two boys went to dinner and a movie and then the boy's friend drove them to a park. This struck Kurt odd because he had thought that it was night time when they had left for dinner, but it didn't make sense that they went to the park at night. One goes to a park to enjoy the flowers and the sunlight and the nice weather and to exercise and if it was nighttime, obviously there wouldn't be sunlight, and the two boys didn't even get out of the car, so they wouldn't be able to enjoy the flowers or the night air, and obviously they wouldn't be exercising in a car.

Kurt's puzzled brain read on as the two boys declared how much they liked each other. He thought it was nice, it reminded him of he and his friend, Mercedes, when they would go to the mall and Mercedes would tell him how great she thought he was. But he still couldn't figure out why they had to park the car at a park at night to tell each other that.

And then they kissed.

Kurt couldn't understand it. He'd read plenty of kisses of course, in his little adventure in banned literature. But they'd all been between a boy and a girl. He had been certain that they were both boys. He re-read the last few sentences to be sure that yes, both characters had been referred to as 'he'. It didn't make sense.

The society Kurt lived in didn't teach an awful lot about sexuality and reproduction, that was definitely true, but he had learned enough in school to know that to reproduce both a male and a female contribution was required. And that was the reason the people in those books did what they did wasn't it? It was just a sloppier more enjoyable method of reproduction wasn't it? Two males couldn't hope to produce a child so why on earth would they need to kiss. It was stupid and illogical.

So why did Kurt's loins and his very soul ache to recreate the scene with a boy of his own? Why was he more excited by this than he had been by any previous very exciting material? Were was the lack of non-academic interest that he had found whenever two oposite sexed characters had done things far more risque in his other books? Why, upon re-reading the kiss did it register as obvious and natural and perfect?

Kurt's ears found the sound of an engine coming up the drive and he flinched but could not abandon his exciting new enigma. Instead he got up and locked the door, then wedged his desk chair under the door handle, to deny anyone enterence to his room.

He read further as the two boys continued to kiss, the narrator described the feel of his friend's masculine flesh beneath his fingers and Kurt felt himself heat, like the furnace was running on high during the hottest day of the summer.

Finn knocked loudly on Kurt's door, his large, clumsy fist startling Kurt slightly from his fever.

"Hey bro, I'm back, You wanna hang out or somethin'? "

Kurt flustered and yelled,

"GO AWAY FINN!"

He winced when he heard how anxious and suspicious his shouting had seemed and amended,

"I'm not feeling well and I would like to be left alone, please."

He heard his step-brother mumble something on the other side of the door and then the distinct sound of Finn's ridiculously large feet shuffling in the opposite direction.

Kurt listened for a moment, making sure Finn would not return to inquire further and then went back to his reading.

The friend had his hand on the narrator's erection now, and he stroked it while speaking encouragement to the other boy. The author described the scene so vividly, and Kurt found himself in the same condition as the two fictional boys for the second time in that short day.

He slipped his hand beneath the elastic of his pajama pants.

His heart beat a mile a minute, the taboo of it all rushing through his veins as his long hand wrapped around his own penis, his cock.

He continued to read as his hand pumped. And as the two boys got more excited so did he.

Just as the narrator was describing his own climax, Kurt felt immense pleasure as it seemed to burst forth from his loins. It was something much more intense than he had ever felt as he spilled his semen over his hand before.

And then it was obvious to Kurt, as he blissfully fell back into his pile of plush pillows, why the two boys did these things even though they have no hope of producing offspring. Because, it seemed, with two boys, the act of sex was so much better.