They say, sometimes, that lives can be rented out. You can take on the persona of somebody else entirely. You can learn their words, their mannerisms, every last iota of being that makes up a breathing consciousness. You block in the dialogue so that it becomes palatable and communicable, you learn your marks and you pick up notes from the director on inflection and body language so that it all becomes believable. You’re renting somebody else’s life so that you can showcase that life for an audience.

But what about the heart? Can a heart so easily have a claim laid upon it?

FOR RENT: One heart. One previous owner, not without its faults, but charming and located in the center of an attractive and sought-after neighborhood. Good long-term property. Offered without condition.

Blaine thinks that it’s pretty easy, slipping into someone else’s skin. It’s a process—not entirely unlike that of a snake—shedding your own cells and pulling on those of something different, something more or less evolved, with the flesh still shiny and pink and entirely new. It’s exhilarating, though he never dwells on why. Not for too long, anyway—he’s too busy rehearsing scenes and running lines with his co-star, Kurt.

And there are an endless number of personas. It never ends, the creation, and sometimes he thinks that people just like playing God. The realization that there’s only a finite number of human entities on the planet seems to make them want to create new ones. And that’s fine, that’s good. Great, even. It keeps him in a job. But the endlessness of it all. Sometimes he’s hitting the ground running before he even gets out of bed in the morning.

He couldn’t ask for a better co-star than Kurt. He’s driven, professional, and he reads constantly. He breaks up his lines and scrawls notes across them with a purple pen, pushes his glasses further up his nose and laughs with the principle make-up artist when she has to reapply because he’s smudged.

Blaine watches. He’s fascinated. He’s practiced at wearing someone else’s personality, but for some reason Kurt remains a mystery to him. The moments their characters share in those endless seconds before a screen kiss seem to expand inside in the inch that separates them, only becoming more potent the more takes they have to do because Blaine’s touching the wrong side of Kurt’s face, or the lighting isn’t positioned correctly, or because Kurt laughs when Blaine’s fingers brush that ticklish spot just south of his jaw.

It’s funny—Blaine’s learned more about the secret parts of Kurt Hummel than he has about Kurt’s character, yet still the intrigue and locked doors mystify him. Not least when they’re in Blaine’s trailer after the day’s filming wraps and Kurt’s moaning into his mouth before sucking gently on his lower lip, fingers buried knuckle-deep in his hair and pulling.

“Practice,” Kurt had whispered the first time he had backed Blaine up against the inside of the closed trailer door, eyes aflame with a secret and a promise.

It’s a dance between them, now, a turn and shift that they know by rote. It’s a thing. A private, altering thing that’s kept behind doors and between scenes. It’s about the sex. Mostly. Blaine thinks that it would drive him to the brink of insanity if he let it.

It takes another two months for Kurt to find the sky blue Post-It stuck to the underside of Blaine’s bed.

“What’s this?” he quietly asks from the floor, and Blaine props himself up on one yawning elbow to lean over the side of the bed. His lazy grin immediately drops and he reaches down to pluck it from Kurt’s fingers but Kurt simply scoots under the bed. When he speaks again, it’s muffled through open coil springs and memory foam, wrapped up in matching sky blue three-thousand thread count sheets but Blaine knows it by heart and can translate the murmuring lilt into words. ”For rent: one heart. One previous owner, not without its faults, but charming and located in the center of an attractive and sought-after neighborhood. Good long-term investment property. No onward chain.”

Blaine stays silent, fingers frozen in mid-air like he would sometimes catch himself as a teenager, arm raised high above his head and suddenly aching when he realized. Sometimes, he would bring it back down to curl across to his other shoulder, the numbness in his hand tricking him into thinking that the hand belonged to another.

“Blaine.”

“It’s nothing.”

Kurt’s hand reaches out from beneath the bed, fingers slipping between Blaine’s, and soon his head and shoulders are following, the light inebriation that initially caused him to fall off the bed washed out of his eyes and leaving behind only curiosity.

“How long has the property been vacant?” he asks, no hint of humor. How, in eight months of whatever this is, have they never had this conversation?

“A while,” Blaine answers. Kurt worries at his lip for a moment before he grips Blaine’s hand tighter and pulls himself to his feet, gently pasting the Post-It onto the bare skin just above Blaine’s heart.

Kurt crosses the room to Blaine’s desk, retrieving a pen and the twisting stack of Post-Its and bending at the waist to scribble something. When he returns, it’s with his own note adhered to his chest, covered with his hand as he climbs onto the bed and sits cross-legged, opposite Blaine. Once he seems sure that he has Blaine’s attention, he uncovers it one finger at a time.

“For rent,” Blaine reads, “one heart. Two previous owners, fixer-upper. Solid, 20th century architecture but in need of some repairs. Ideally offered for exchange.”

The silence stretches as Blaine considers.

“So?” Kurt finally asks.

An audible reply seeming too impersonal when all day, all either of them do is speak other people’s words, to the point where their own somehow get lost in the ether, he simply reaches for Kurt’s note and swaps it for his own.

- fin