The lunch café catercorner to Kurt’s coffee house offers the perfect vantage point for Blaine to watch.

There’s no way he can see Kurt past the barrier of steel and crowds and concrete he’s placed between them. But Blaine knows he’s in there.

Blaine sits by the window every morning, and again at lunch each afternoon, surveying the steady stream of customers that flows in and out of Kurt’s shop like bees to nectar. He wonders if Kurt’s hands touched the cups they hold in their own; if Kurt’s eyes ever lift to search for Blaine prowling along the periphery – never knowing that he’s close, so close, just yards across the street.

For five days, Blaine sits and spies, blending seamlessly with the swarms and shadows. No one notices him; no one sees his sickness slowly simmering inside.

No one ever really sees Blaine.

But it’s not enough anymore. The need for more, closer gnaws at him like a wild animal until it consumes his waking hours, crippling his already tenuous control.

So today he lingers – long after the lunch crowd has cleared away, long after the remnants of his food and coffee have turned cold and stale in front of him. His gaze stays fixed on Kurt’s café, chasing the shifting glint of the sun against its windows as minutes stretch into hours. The only symptom he displays of his jittery, caffeine-stimulated anticipation is the furious drum of his fingertips on the tabletop.

When at long last he spots Kurt’s figure emerging from the front doors of the coffee shop, Blaine’s up in a flash. The legs of his chair scrape loudly against the floor of the deserted lunch café.

He’s waited for hours. Waited for this. He only has a minute – mere seconds that tick as loud as thunderbolts in his brain – to catch up with Kurt before the sidewalk crowds swallow him up.

Outside, a moment of frantic searching reveals Kurt quickly retreating away – farther, farther from where Blaine stands. Kurt is a study of urban poise: purposefully striding down the sidewalk on long, slim legs clad in tight, black denim. Blaine clumsily weaves among mobs of people, the antithesis of Kurt’s agility; he doesn’t spare a single glance away as he follows on the opposite side of the street.

It’s only four blocks before Kurt disappears behind a nondescript white door nestled between an empanada shop and a dry cleaner. His apartment, Blaine realizes with a start. He stops abruptly on the corner and observes, evaluates. Decides.

Closer.

On the next walk signal, he darts across the street to Kurt’s door – Kurt’s locked door. “Come on, come on,” Blaine implores under his breath as he jiggles the handle, willing it to give under his violent grip. When it doesn’t, he spits out a curse and slams his fist into the offending metal blockade.

He hastily switches tactics, pressing doorbells at random, hoping somebody, anybody’s foolish enough to buzz him in. “FedEx,” he blurts into the intercom at the first response he gets. And suddenly, miraculously, he’s inside – standing in a tiny, barren lobby, closed off from the cacophony of New York. One step closer.

Blaine’s gaze roves over the names printed on a wall of mailboxes until he spies K. Hummel in fresh black lettering on the box for 5E.

“You’ll see my name in lights someday,” Kurt declared on their sixth morning together, waving his hand in a sweeping arc across the electrified air between them. Blaine could see the dreams of stardom twinkling in his eyes. “Kurt Hummel. Remember that name, Blaine.”

Blaine remembers.

With that, he’s gone – scrambling, stumbling up the stairs in a mad dash to get closer, closer. He chants the words with each steep, creaking step, over and over; the manic prayer loops through his mind and around his racing heart.

When he reaches the fifth floor, he hears singing – a rainbow of faint notes fluttering high above him, just out of reach. They’re like tiny magnets that pull him, helpless, down a dim, stale hall until he’s perched outside the door labeled 5E in tarnished brass.

K. Hummel. 5E.

It’s Kurt’s voice.

Kurt’s singing.

Shivers tingle along Blaine’s spine in perfect rhythm with the sound of Kurt’s voice gliding up and down the warmup scales. Music rains down on Blaine, all around – a fragrant spring storm that melts away the bitter winter chill inhabiting his soul. 

It’s beautiful.

Blaine chest heaves under his heavy coat as Kurt breaks out into song; each torrid note is wrapped in passion that’s palpable even through the door separating them.

Oh, baby, won’t you play me Le Jazz Hot maybe
And don’t ever let it end
I’ll tell you, friend, it’s really something to hear
I can’t sit still when there’s that rhythm near me

Kurt’s muffled voice dances through the air, alternating fluidly between husky growls and feather-light purrs. It’s a delicious, intoxicating mix of sweet and salty, and Blaine wants to feast on it.

He digs his fingernails into the door frame and leans in close, closer, hovering a mere millimeter from Kurt’s door. Nothing touches but his hot, ragged breath, reverberating back onto his face in damp bursts.

This is the real Kurt – nothing like the man Blaine stumbled upon three weeks ago, slogging through his insipid work day chained to a coffee shop register. The private moment makes Blaine’s mouth water for more, more. 

What does Kurt do while he sings? Does he flit about his apartment, tidying up dirty dishes and discarded clothes as he croons each sultry note? Or does he stand in place, proud and tall like the world’s his stage?

Does he close his eyes – those dazzling blue orbs that haunt Blaine’s days and nights – so he can feel the music coursing through his veins, interwoven with and indistinguishable from the blood giving him life?

Does his tongue glide over his pretty pink lips between each verse, coating them glossy and wet? 

Blaine roughly shoves the heel of his palm against his cock – a punishment against his body, his fucking body that only ever listens to his sick mind. But the gesture does nothing to quell his growing arousal; it only pushes him closer, closer to the edge, until he’s teetering far beyond the point of return.

Casting a sideways glance down the silent, empty hall, Blaine reaches under his coat for his zipper.

Zzzzzzzzip. The sound echoes loudly, too loudly, off the walls around him. Blaine freezes, waiting with bated breath for somebody to discover him, to learn his filthy secret. His pulse pounds in his blazing-hot cheeks, his chest, in time with his throbbing cock.

Nothing happens. Slowly, Blaine’s hand inches down again, pushing away the denim, the cotton until he finds heat and hardness. A low groan rumbles in his throat as he strokes once, twice over the head.

It’s not enough. Still not enough. He needs more.

Blaine lets the sweet seduction of Kurt’s singing paint a picture that lights up the darkness behind his eyelids.

Kurt’s hands – his slender fingers, wrapped in soft, pale skin – envelop him, smooth and warm, like a home he’s never known. So different than his own knobby brown fist, chapped and cracking from winter’s unforgiving cold. Kurt’s grip is snug and confident. He’s done this before: curled his hand around another man’s cock, learned his shape and weight and what makes him beg for more. And yet Kurt’s alive and unbroken and beautiful and why, why can’t Blaine be beautiful, too?

But then Kurt’s pulling him back into his daydream with a lascivious grin that gives away the pleasure he takes in making Blaine fall apart. His searing breath burns a fiery path along Blaine’s neck as he murmurs his promise into Blaine’s ear.

“I’ll show you whatever you want to see, Blaine.”

Show me everything, Kurt. Please. It’s what he’d wanted to write back; it’s what he wants to plead from his knees. It’s what he whispers now to the airless, vacant hallway where Kurt exists only in song.

When you play me Le Jazz Hot, baby
You're holding my soul together

There’s nothing but a door separating them. Just a door. A dark, varnished slab of wood; an inch-thick barricade between his twisted fantasy and the untouchable reality that’s bewitched him.

Blaine’s never been closer. To another man. To Kurt. So close. The realization makes his blood run hotter, wilder – a renewed eruption of lust that’s tamed only by his skin and veins. So close, and he doesn’t even know I’m here.

A cauldron of pleasure swirls in the pit of his stomach as he pumps his cock as hard and fast as his aching hand will work. Shame lurks along the fringe, but Blaine can’t see it, not now; not when he’s climbing, climbing higher than he’s ever ascended.

Don't know whether it's morning or night
Only know it's sounding right

He’s lost to the world – drowning in an exquisite reverie, swaying on quaking legs that barely hold his weight. Sweat prickles along his forehead, down his back – an imperceptible chill against the sparks of friction and fervent desire setting his skin ablaze.

Harder. Tighter. Faster. Closer, closer. God, so close.

So come on in and play me Le Jazz Hot, baby
‘Cause I love my jazz...hot

Blaine bites down on his arm, hard, muffling his choked gasps and lewd groans as he comes unglued. He plummets from his peak, high in the sky, spurting thick ropes of cum across Kurt’s door – a gift, a mark, a claim on the man on the other side of that immobile boundary between them.

Ecstasy collides with agony as his teeth dig into the pits and gashes littering his skin. The pain slices through his foggy afterglow like jagged shards of ice – sharp, sudden, stunning his entire body silent.

He stares, stares, stares; his lucid mind reels in horror at the image of his cum dribbling slowly down Kurt’s door.

“That’s sick, Blaine.”

As Kurt starts his song from the top, Blaine bolts down the hall – farther, farther away – the beautiful music crushed under the raucous, humiliating laughter of his demons roaring in his ears.