The Proper Way to Begin

Kurt and I never did anything in the conventional way. Every first we shared together happened in the most ass-backwards, abnormal way. I simply thought we were weird. Kurt, however, said we were the way we were meant to be…

I was lying on Kurt's bed looking up at the ceiling when he found me. He paused in the doorway for a second before finally stepping in the room with a confused frown.

"Hey," he said. "What happened to the game?"

I shrugged. "Finn got a call. Someone named Rachel, I think." I rolled onto to my side and laid my head on my arm. "Come here."

He lifted a brow. "Why?" he asked slowly, clearly suspicious.

"I wanna ravish you."

His eyes went wide as saucers.

"Oh my god, I'm kidding. I just want to"—'cuddle with you' sounded so stupid I refused to say it out loud—"talk. It would feel weird if you were all the way over there."

He didn't look like he believed me, but he walked slowly over to the bed anyway and sat down on the edge.

I frowned. "Jesus, Kurt, you're acting like I'm going to bite your damn head off."

He chose to ignore that. "So, what are we talking about?"

"We can't yet."

"Oka-a-ay. Why not?"

I was grinning again. I couldn't help it. Messing with him was too much fun. "I can't when you're all like that."

He sighed in exasperation. "Like what?"

I held in a laugh. "That," I insisted as I gestured in his general direction.

He looked down at himself and then back at me. "I'm sorry, was that supposed to make sense or…?"

I laughed and pushed myself up to peck him on the lips, partly because I could and mostly because he was too adorable not to. Grinning at his blush, I placed both hands on his shoulders and pushed lightly to signal I wanted him to lie back. He gave me one of his what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you stares, but let me maneuver him without a fight.

He eyed me curiously as I arranged his left arm so that his hand was resting on his chest. Then I pulled the other arm out so that it was perpendicular to his body and settled down in the empty space I had created, taking care to place my head on his chest in that spot just under his chin where we fit together perfectly. He let out a soft sigh when I finally stopped moving.

"You couldn't have just said what you wanted out loud?"

"Give it," I ordered in lieu of a proper reply.

"What?"

"Your hand," I told him, holding my own hand out over my shoulder and wiggling my fingers to indicate where he was to put it. I could practically feel him rolling his eyes but he did what I wanted and I wasted no time in taking his hand and placing it on top of my head.

He sighed in annoyance but laced his fingers into my curls anyway. "Words were created so you could use them," he pointed out. Words were created out of necessity for complex communication.

"Yeah, but my way is more fun."

"How is being vague as hell and confusing the crap out of me fun?" How is being vague and confusing fun?

I pressed more firmly against him and laced my fingers with the ones on the hand that wasn't tangled in my hair. "The answer is in the question."

He snorted.

I suddenly got an idea and grinned. "This is fun, too," I told him before angling my lips towards his neck to suck at his skin.

Kurt gasped. His entire body went tense but his fingers tightened around my hair and his palm pressed intently on the back of my skull, urging me closer.

I nipped his slicked up skin with my teeth before rolling my tongue against him for another taste. Fuck, he tasted good everywhere. "You like that?"

He moaned softly.

"Tell me to stop and I'll stop," I said, teasing and serious at the same time. Teasing because I knew he absolutely did not want me to keep my mouth to myself in that moment and serious because, well, Kurt was Kurt. If he said stop, I would have done it.

"Keep going," he urged, breathless and forceful at the same time. I smirked and trailed my lips up to his ear. I bit down gently on his earlobe and was rewarded with a real moan. "Jesus, that's hot," I breathed, licking my way around the shell of his ear.

"Gonna give you a hickey," I mumbled a warning to him before I pulled the collar of his shirt down and set to work. His skin was so pale that I barely had to try before the oval shaped bruise appeared. I was determined to leave a lasting mark, though, so I sucked relentlessly, rolling my tongue against his pectoral muscle. His hips bucked up.

"Oh god. Blaine. Kiss me."

As I kissed my way to his lips, I glanced down the length of his body at the very obvious bulge in his pants and groaned. I dipped my tongue in his mouth once before pulling away.

"I could take care of that for you, you know. If you wanted," I said, running my hand a little ways down his torso so he would get the message.

His blue eyes looked almost gray they were so dark, but his face was washed with embarrassed color. "Door."

I went back to lightly kissing his neck. "You want me to close it?" I asked between kisses.

"…What happened to wanting to talk?"

I couldn't help but grin at his nervousness. He was so obvious it was kind of really endearing. I pulled back so he could see my amusement. "Subtle."

He blushed harder. "I…"

"Hey. It's fine. We don't have to do anything you don't want to do, but what kind of a person would I be if I didn't offer?" I tried to keep a straight face but couldn't. "I was only trying to be polite."

"Sure, you were," he said dryly, regaining some of his sass. We both know polite had nothing to do with it.

I kissed him twice. He smiled at me when I pulled away and I honestly tried to just smile back and keep my eyes up, but it was practically screaming at me. I looked back down.

Kurt followed my eyes down. "Oh, god," he moaned, sounding mortified. "Stop looking at it."

I grinned. "Can't. It's too pretty. I can only imagine how much better it would look up close and uncovered. If you thought my lips on your neck felt good, just wait till they're wrapped around your cock."

"Oh my god." He grabbed one of the smaller pillows on his bed and placed it over his crotch.

I frowned and looked back up at him. "Kill joy."

"Pervert."

"Maybe only a lot."

I settled back down against him and reclaimed his hand. We were both silent while I absently played with his fingers, lacing and unlacing them with mine.

"How come you always let me hold your hand?" I asked as I traced the lines on his palm.

He went back to twisting my curls around his fingers. "Are you saying you don't want me to let you?"

"No, I mean how come you never told me to let go? I mean, even when you were pissed at me for drunk kissing you, you still let me hold it."

He shrugged. "We've always held hands." Ever since we met holding hands has been our thing. "Was I supposed to stop just because you decided to maul my face?"

"I didn't maul your face," I grumbled. Even during that first disaster of a kiss I had been more gentle with him than anyone else.

He snorted in amusement. "Are you really trying to argue with me? Do you know how pointless that is?"

I grinned. "Pointless because there's no point in arguing with a pathological liar or pointless because you're stubborn?"

He glared at me. "Take your pick."

"Stubborn is it then. But back to this,"—I gave our hands a shake—"why was this always okay for you?"

He shot me a skeptical look. "This is seriously what you wanted to talk about?"

"It would appear so. What? I've always been kind of curious about why you never pulled away. Even the first time I did it, you kind of just looked at me weird and then said nothing."

"So?"

"So, you really aren't the type to let someone manhandle you."

His eyebrows rose. "And that's something you just freely admit to doing?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, why not? If the shoe fits and all that. So, why didn't you ever pull away?"

He frowned as if the reasoning behind his atypical behavior had never occurred to him before. "Well… why did you take my hand to begin with? Are you saying you're the hand-holding type?"

"Pfft! Hell no," I asserted, wrinkling my noise in disgust at the idea. Sort of an ass backwards reaction for someone who had become a slut for hand to hand contact in less than a month, I'm aware, but I was just a mental case like that.

I tried to come up with a proper answer when he shot me a look. "I dunno. It felt right. It's kind of like how I get so on edge when we're too far apart. I can't be in the same room with you and not want to touch you." I failed to fight the grin. "That sounds kind of wanky."

He rolled his eyes. "Alright, Santana." Alright, Blaine.

"The offer from before still stands by the way," I said, glancing down at the pillow.

"Blaine."

"Yeah, yeah. Shutting up. You gonna answer my question?"

"I don't know what to say." It just felt right. It always feels right.

Well if that wasn't sappy as fuck. Still. It was simple, and I could relate to it. "I know what you mean."

Kurt offered me a small smile, like a beautiful impulse.

"One more question."

"Okay." He sounded so relaxed. He even had his eyes closed.

"How do you feel about me?"

His eyes blinked open. Clearly he hadn't been expecting that. I hadn't really been expecting it either. Really, when I asked him to talk, I had only wanted to get him on the bed so he could hold me and we could make out for a while. But we had done all that and once the question popped in my head, it stuck.

"I…" He faltered and a nervous pit started to develop deep in my stomach. "What do you mean?"

"I kind of thought the meaning was pretty clear," I said, voice quiet.

"Blaine…"

"Do you feel more than friendship for me?"

"Isn't that obvious?" he asked, not looking at me.

"Do you?" I pressed.

"No." Yes.

"A lot more?" I couldn't help asking.

He shot me an exasperated look. "No." Yes.

Back in familiar teasing territory, the pit began to shrink and I grinned. "How much more?"

"Blaine."

"Sorry," I lied, still grinning. Then I blurted, "Enough to be my boyfriend?"

He froze. The pit came back in an instant, only it was bigger and heavier than before.

I panicked. "I… It's just—I feel something when I'm with you. I've never had a boyfriend before," I admitted, looking down. "I never wanted one. But I'd like to be yours."

When I was finished, I looked up at him and my heart collapsed in on itself. He was going to say no. I pulled away from him and sat up before he got the chance.

Sitting with my back to him, I couldn't see his face, but the pain in his voice was palpable. I shut my eyes and shrunk away from it. "Blaine… We don't… we hardly…"

"Know each other," I finished for him, feeling hollow. It always came back to that. Why did it always come back to that? What more did he want from me? I was willing to slap a label on myself for him. Didn't he understand what that meant? Hadn't I shared enough of myself with him? At least enough to earn myself the benefit of the doubt. I let him see me in a way I never dared to show to anyone—not even to myself.

I was constantly forgetting that I had only known him for a short amount of time. A few weeks were nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't matter. Being close to him just made sense to me. He was the absent part of me I was always meant to find, and finally he was right there. He was therein front of me, close enough to touch. But he didn't feel the same. He didn't get it.

He didn't get it.

Make him get it, something inside me prompted.

"I told you about my brother once," I said quietly. "Cooper. He practically raised me. He was my everything. Whatever I needed, he tried is best to give it to me. A proud father, a mother who gave the best hugs, a big brother, a best friend; it didn't matter. Whatever I needed at any given moment he would just… be it." I traced the patterns on Kurt's comforter with my hands. "No one has ever loved me like Cooper has," I whispered to the blanket like it was some dangerous secret.

"He was fucked up, though," I said. "Mind hearers always are. They hear thoughts constantly. Just all the time, nonstop, twenty-four seven. It literally drives them insane."

Kurt tried to stop me. He moved on the bed to kneel in front of me. "Blaine, you don't have—"

"Sometimes," I cut him off. "Sometimes he would be okay, you know? Like we would be looking up at the stars at night, or building a fort out of blankets, or trying to get through my homework, and he would be okay. He could smile and just be my brother. But then there were times when he just wasn't himself anymore and he would scream without stopping for hours. Not for what felt like hours, but literally for hours. When that happened I was supposed to crawl under the bed and stay there until he told me I could come out."

"Why?" Kurt breathed, like he didn't want to know but had to ask. When I looked up at his face for the first time since I started talking, I saw that he looked horrified.

Good, I couldn't help thinking. He was the one who wanted to know.

"Cooper has two D5 classifications. One for psychic ability and one for telekinetic ability." I decided I would show him. "Give me your hand."

Slowly, he lifted his arm and I took his shaking fingers in mine. Bringing his hand towards my face, I guided it into my hair, to the spot just a couple of inches above my left ear where a stripe of skin was raised up and ruined forever.

I stared hard into Kurt's eyes. This is what you wanted.

"I was three. He hit me with one of his soccer trophies when he lost control. It just sort of flew off his desk and cracked me in the skull. He was only twelve."

"Blaine. Please. You—"

I cut him off again. "I had to get staples. He wasn't allowed in the operating room, but he forced himself to wait in the waiting room. I can't even imagine how he did that. I can't stand more than an hour in the cafeteria without throwing up or getting a migraine, but somehow he managed to sit in a fucking hospital surround by incessant head chatter just so I wouldn't be alone. When we got home it was different. He refused to come near me and locked himself in his room for two days. I sat outside his door crying for him to come out. When he finally caught on that I wasn't leaving until he came out, he finally gave it up. That was when he made the rule: if I wanted to spend my time in his room I had to promise to crawl under the bed if he had a psychic fit.

"But none of that is relevant anymore. Cooper has been locked up in a D5 facility for years now."

Kurt looked at me with wide, pleading eyes. He silently begged me to stop talking, but his lips were pressed into a thin, hard line and he said nothing.

"My mother's name is Melissa Anderson. That's really all I know about her. I've talked to her maybe five times in my entire life. She lives in the house I grew up in, but she's… I don't even know. She's messed up, I guess. She never leaves her room. She used to come out once a year on my birthday. She would sit in a chair and smile at nothing with this unfocused look on her face. I didn't understand what it meant when I was a kid. Once in a while, though, she would look at me and call me darling boy…"

For a few seconds I was lost in a mental cocoon, wrapped up in cakes and balloons and raven haired mommies that looked like dollies. I had to forcibly pull myself out and remind myself that I hated her.

I blinked away the chilling memory and looked at Kurt. He looked completely horrified and he head tears in his eyes. Seeing him felt like being doused with reality.

"My father's grandfather was the founder of SIIPA," I admitted in a rush; my first gasp of air after crawling out of the nightmare I put myself in (almost anything was better than thinking about my mother). "My father practically runs it now. He's my handler. He's also a bastard and I hope you never have to meet him.

"I get to see Cooper once a month in exchange for my services as a human lie detector. I help SIIPA find and incriminate runaways and in return I get to spend a few hours with my brother.

"I've fucked around a lot. Almost every gay guy at Dalton has had my cock up his ass at some point or another, and even some of the straight guys when they were too drunk to care either way. I've never kissed someone on the mouth and felt anything real until I kissed you. I've never slept next to someone before last night and I've hurt a lot of people."

There was one more thing I needed him to know.

"I love you."

He gasped and recoiled at the news as if he was afraid that words might jump out and stick to him. I tried not to let him see how much it hurt.

"I can be a different me when I'm with you. I can be someone I like. No one has ever made me feel like that before."

"Blaine…" He choked on his words when the tears that had gathered in his eyes finally spilled over and rushed down. "There's nothing I can say." I'm happy that I make you feel good about yourself, and that's beautiful—amazing even—that I was able to do that for you… but that doesn't mean you love me. You love the way I make you feel about yourself, and that's not the same as you loving me for me, and I'm so sorry.

He looked sorry, too. He looked like he was being torn to pieces, but to be honest I just didn't care. He might have been torn up, but I was completely destroyed.

I had gotten myself naked in the worst, most exposing way, and he just stomped all over me, smashing me into tiny little bits that were smaller than small.

But what if he's right?

I didn't want him to be right.

I barely noticed when he got up from the bed, I was so caught up in my own head, but I did notice when he returned with a small but thick book with the leather cover and no title. It was the book. The one he always seemed to be reading, but never finished. The one I always wondered about.

"This is my mother's," he said softly. This was my mother's.

He placed it in my hands.

I looked up at him with wide eyes.

"Open it," he said.

"Kurt…"

He pointed to one of the many faded yellow tabs sticking out of the pages, marking the important spots. "That one."

With my heart hammering in my chest, I gently pushed my fingers into the indicated spot and lifted the pages. The first thing I noticed was the tab, though technically it was a small post-it note—old, yellow, faded, slightly frayed on the edges, and completely familiar. Familiar because I had one. Kurt had given it to me the day we met.

I ran a hand over the post-it on the page that was identical to mine.

I was hesitant to speak, but I had to know. "The one you gave me that first day in the hallway… was that from here?"

"No." Yes.

"But… why? Why would you give me something so important?"

"For lots of reasons." I honestly don't know.

I nodded in a daze.

Kurt pointed to the middle of the page. "Read this one."

For the first time, I looked at the words written on the pages and was surprised to see neat handwriting rather than print. For a second I thought it was Kurt's writing, it looked so similar, but at a closer look I decided it wasn't. The handwriting in the book was softer and less confident than Kurt's.

"She… your mother wrote these?"

Poems. They were all poems.

"No." She did.

I read the title of the one he had pointed to.

~My Darling Boy~

I nearly dropped the book. I felt Kurt's eyes on me. I gave myself a second to recover then continued to read.

He looks up at me and I look too.

His lips can't smile yet—

He's still too small.

I realize that it's okay;

His blue eyes smile for him.

I smile with my lips

I show him how it's done.

I show him another way to love.

-Elizabeth Anne Hummel, June 10th, 1993

I was going to fall apart. I was too full and I was just going to fall apart.

As if he could sense it, too, he eyed me carefully and spoke softly. "I don't want anything from you." I want you to love me for me. I want you to know who I am. This is a start.

Drowning in everything he made me feel, I threw myself at him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and crawled in his lap, straddling him. I couldn't crawl inside him, so I compensated as best I could by getting myself as close to him as I could go.

It took him a second but he wrapped both arms around me and held me tight. I hid my face in his neck.

"Can I see her? I want to see her."

He kissed my cheek. "Let go."

I shook my head. "Can't."

So he just wrapped an arm around my waist and scooted up the bed to where his nightstand was. I clung to him as he leaned forward to open the drawer and he held on to me like I was a vulnerable child who weighed next to nothing. I certainly felt like that little boy from so long ago.

From the bottom of the drawer, he pulled out an old picture for me to see.

I turned my head to look but didn't let go of him. I looked at the smiling woman and felt a million different things.

"You look like her." That part was absolutely true. Their faces were the same. The next part, though… "You have her eyes."

He frowned at the picture. "But…"

Her eyes were a warm brown. Nothing like Kurt's blue, gray color. "Not the color. She has everything eyes. You do, too."

"What does that mean?"

The answer was simple. "It means you're beautiful."