A/N: The actual title of this is 'A Tale of Ambien and The Home Shopping Network, but FF shortened it. Inspiration for this comes from the Glee Collage Fest prompt 'sleep, dreams, and nightmares' and Chris Colfer's revelation that he sometimes sleep shops. Rated M. (This is a future fic that assumes that Kurt and Sebastian didn't meet in high school. They met as adults.) Alot of people requested a second part to this one, so it's coming soon :)
Kurt didn't sleep well when Sebastian went away on his monthly business trips. Kurt knew these trips came with the job, but that didn't mean he had to like them. Kurt didn't like being alone in the penthouse. He didn't like eating alone, he didn't like showering alone, and mostly he didn't like sleeping alone. He detested it so much that he couldn't even sleep in their bed without his boyfriend there. It was too cold without him. Sebastian generated heat like a furnace and Kurt loved it. It eliminated the need for pesky pajamas, even during the winter. Without him, Kurt had to resort to sweats and sweaters (preferably Sebastian's so that he could be wrapped up in his scent).
There were also too many pillows without his boyfriend there to steal them from underneath Kurt's head in the middle of the night. He tried sleeping in the bed for the first night that Sebastian spent away, but no matter how he twisted or turned, how many different angles he tried, no matter what combination of pillows/blankets/comforters he used, he couldn't seem to find a comfortable position. Out of desperation, he even broke out Bruce, his old boyfriend pillow, but that didn't help at all (probably because Bruce was still resentful that Kurt tossed him aside for a real man. They had been exclusive, after all).
So Kurt resorted to sleeping in the living room on the sofa when Sebastian went away. He would watch late night television and sip hot cocoa with peppermint, waiting for Sebastian to call. After they talked, sometimes into the early morning, Kurt would take an Ambien to help him knock out for a couple of hours.
This was how Kurt Hummel survived Sebastian being away.
Sebastian's most recent business trip, however, promised to be a nightmare for Kurt, Ambien or no. He was negotiating an extremely important takeover of a company whose home base was in London. Between meetings and reassignments and all the legal paperwork that went along with buying out a business, he would be gone for almost a month.
There wasn't enough late night television and cocoa in the world that was going to make not having Sebastian with him for a whole month okay.
Kurt didn't let his misery show, and Sebastian didn't let on that he knew. They just enjoyed each other to the fullest for the three days before his flight. When Sebastian finally left, Kurt watched from the living room window as the car service drove his boyfriend away.
Then he sat on the floor and cried.
The days without Sebastian weren't the hard part. Kurt had plenty to occupy his time. He was designing a new line and preparing for Fashion Week. He was a featured designer at one of the many exclusive preview shows. His new onslaught of responsibilities involved plenty of PR at Vogue which meant time spent with his ex-fairy Godmother, Isabelle Wright.
It was the nights Kurt found difficult to handle. He ended up falling into a routine of watching America's Next Top Model re-runs until Sebastian called, and then some pretty explicit phone sex, a hot shower, and an Ambien to see him through till morning when he got up and started the cycle all over again. He was pretty productive with the moments in between, keeping his tablet beneath his pillow on the couch and sketching new ideas when they popped into his head. Ambien had the side-effect of giving him some massively crazy dreams, and after seeing a couple of his more eye-opening designs – a lot of them more suited for the bedroom than anywhere else – he felt he might have a new hook on something he hadn't tried to design before.
Lingerie. Specifically, leather lingerie.
Other than being a little hazy first thing in the morning, he felt he was handling things pretty well.
A few days before Sebastian was scheduled to come home, boxes started to arrive. At first, Kurt thought they were from Sebastian – presents his boyfriend had sent ahead before his arrival so that he wouldn't have to juggle bringing them home on the plane. But the box Kurt signed for had a return address label from HSN After Dark. Kurt scrunched his nose when he looked at it. Then his brow furrowed when he noticed that the next three boxes – each one bigger than the previous one – were also from HSN After Dark.
Kurt was definitely no stranger to The Home Shopping Network, but he swore it off after his last purchase of the entire Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies Collection, and he hadn't bought anything else since.
Kurt was determined that the purchases had to be a mistake, that someone must have gotten a hold of his credit card number and ordered a bunch of shit, but then why would it come to Sebastian's penthouse? Unless this was some stupid practical joke.
He didn't have the time to deal with it right away, even though he knew that identity theft was a serious crime and that he should cancel his credit cards immediately, but with his line almost finished and Sebastian coming home, he had too many other things to worry about.
Somewhere between emailing a revised itinerary to Isabelle and putting the final touches on Sebastian's coming home dinner (smoked salmon steak, roasted fingerling potatoes with red peppers, and a chocolate mousse for dessert), Kurt remembered the boxes that had swiftly become a small pyramid in the corner of the bedroom. Sebastian would be home in a little under two hours and Kurt didn't want them cluttering up the space. Everything had to be perfect, and brown cardboard boxes took away from the romantic ambience he was trying to achieve. Besides, he was far too curious to know what was actually in them. He grabbed a small-ish one and sat down on the end of the bed. He sliced through the tape and was greeted by a flurry of packaging peanuts. He huffed at HSN's overuse of the environmentally unsound polystyrene material and silently praised himself for his decision to cut all ties with the company.
After digging through the mess, he found an invoice for whatever was still hidden inside. On the top he saw his own name and address, along with the last four digits of his credit card number. Under the contents section he saw the words 'Mighty Max' and some numbers that meant nothing…except for the price - $119.95.
"Hmm…" Kurt muttered, grimacing when a tidal wave of packaging peanuts fell onto the floor, "sounds like a blender, maybe…"
When Kurt finally lifted the blister package and brought it up to his face, his eyes went wide.
This was definitely not a blender.
What he held in his hands was the largest dildo he had ever laid his eyes on. It was blue and translucent, with frightening looking ribs and ridges. All around it just screamed, "This is going to hurt!"
"Holy hell!" Kurt grumbled, shoving the sex toy back in its box and reaching for another package. He sliced the box open quickly, not caring about the mess the packaging material made on the carpet, not even bothering to look at the invoice, and pulled out the contents one at a time – another dildo, a vibrating butt plug, and about half a dozen mesh jock straps, each in a different color.
"What the fuck?"
For a second, Kurt entertained the idea that this was all an elaborate prank by Sebastian. The studded leather collar and the testicle cuffs he found in the next box struck him as something Sebastian would definitely buy, but before he called up his boyfriend and ripped him a new one, he would try his claws out on HSN for even approving all these purchases without his permission.
Kurt moved to the living room and sat down on the sofa with the invoice in hand, ready to make the call and hand some poor customer service representative their ass. He entered the number into his cell phone and pressed send with all the righteous indignation he could muster. Immediately the number came up from his contacts with the name 'Home Shopping Network' already programmed in.
Kurt immediately disconnected the call, confused as to why he would have this particular number programmed in his cell. He didn't even own his iPhone when he made his last HSN purchase.
He checked his phone log and his mouth dropped. Between the hours of ten thirty p.m. and three a.m. it was literally call after call to the Home Shopping Network. Kurt's heart started to pound. This had happened to him before during college when he took Ambien because he was so stressed out over finals he couldn't sleep. He would make 'Ambien purchases', buying stuff while he was slightly conscious but loopy, not remembering a thing the next morning. Then weeks later he'd get boxes in the mail filled with the most asinine shit, like a portrait of Marie Antoinette and corkscrews in the shape of men posed in suggestive positions.
Kurt raced to the bedroom and tore through the remaining boxes one at a time, each one filled to bursting with dildos and vibrators, butt plugs of all shapes and sizes, and a variety of fetish-style clothing – assless chaps, mesh muscle shirts, chain halter tops, even a few pairs of liquid-look thigh high stockings.
"Oh dear God," Kurt whimpered, holding up a string of extra-large anal beads in his shaking hands. "Oh dear sweet non-existent God."
Kurt looked at the digital clock on the table by his bed.
11:25
Sebastian would be home soon, and believe it or not, this was not the kind of homecoming Kurt had planned. Yes, they had been dating over a year now, and yes, Sebastian had seen most of Kurt's freak flags fly, but this…this was going to be a little difficult to explain.
He had to clean this up, but morbid curiosity drew him back to the living room and the flat-screen TV. All those calls were made between 10:30 and 3:00, which meant the program was on now.
What exactly did HSN After Dark look like without the Ambien goggles?
Kurt sat on the sofa and reached for the remote. He switched on the TV and surprise of surprises, it was already on the HSN channel.
Suddenly, Kurt couldn't remember the last time he had watched anything else. Even though his normal reality show line-up was a part of his usual nighttime routine, he simply couldn't recall a single episode from the last week or so.
The segue screen had a black background filled with images of multi-colored vibrators, and in the foreground, a woman scantily clad in lace lingerie, with her head thrown back and her eyes shut, lips parted in a gasp of ecstasy. The words 'HSN After Dark' blinked in a neon-light font over the whole scene. That image slid away, cutting back to the program already in progress. After the current item up for sale (a 'Perfect Positioning Pillow') dissolved into the background, a bubbly blonde woman in an incongruous baby pink pant suit came into view and addressed the camera.
"So, that was sale number 150,000! That's 150,000 of that item sold, so please call in now to get your own Perfect Positioning Pillow while supplies last." The lady looked down at the gold watch on her wrist, and then beamed back up at the camera. "Well, it's about 11:30," she announced, smiling brightly with the insane look of a woman who's been hawking useless products on late-night TV for far too long, "and that's the time when HSN After Dark's favorite repeat customer usually gives us a call. So, Mr. Kurt Hummel of Manhattan, New York, give us a ring! We're waiting for you."
Kurt jumped at the sound of his name, switching off the television and tossing the remote to the opposite end of the couch for good measure.
"Oh my God!" he muttered, putting his hands to his head and grabbing fistfuls of his hair. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…"
Not only had he been sleep shopping and spending hundreds of dollars on raunchy sex toys from a cheesy X-rated after-hours home shopping show, they had just given him a shout-out…on LIVE television.
How many people heard that? They had just sold 150,000 of those stupid pillows, so at least 150,000 people, right?
Shitshitshitshitshit!
"What if word gets out?" he argued with himself, reasoning with the empty air, needing to hear his thoughts out loud. "How many Kurt Hummels are there living in Manhattan, anyway? There has to be a few. They can't automatically pin this on me just because I'm an up-and-coming designer about to be featured for the first time in Michael Kors's New York Fashion Week Preview Show ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod!"
What if Isabelle found out?
Well, there he didn't really have a problem. She'd probably laugh like a hyena for about four hours and then tell him that it was hot.
His mind backpedaled to the mess in the bedroom.
Sebastian would be home any minute!
He needed to act quickly.
He needed to box up those God forsaken toys before Sebastian got home.
He had to hide them, and then send them back first thing in the morning. Then he could flush the rest of his Ambien down the toilet and forget that this whole thing ever happened.
But first, he had to run to the bathroom and throw up.
It was amazing how long it took Kurt to empty his stomach completely, but with every heave that took him away from hiding his illicit purchases, he reassured himself with the memory of packaging up 115 Christmas presents in 32 boxes a good fifteen minutes before the UPS man arrived during what was affectionately labeled 'The Chrism-Apocalypse of 2013'.
By the time he was done vomiting, the overall plan was to just shove everything in the corner of the closet with a comforter over it until Sebastian fell asleep.
It would have worked, too. Kurt could have done that and been in the clear if Sebastian's plane hadn't landed early, if the car service hadn't been sitting at the curb waiting for him, if the traffic hadn't been light and they didn't catch every green the moment they entered the city.
But luck was entirely on Sebastian's side, which meant for Kurt it was nowhere to be seen.
Kurt stumbled out of the bathroom, a little weak and woozy from being sick, and found Sebastian grinning from ear to ear, looking through the contents of the boxes open on the bed, chuckling with each new revelation. He already had several of the vibrators, a few mesh jock straps, and a pair of leather shackles laid out on the mattress. He looked up as Kurt entered the room, holding up a huge dildo covered in what the package described as 'stimulating and massaging bumps', a teasing and hungry glimmer in his gorgeous green eyes. Kurt stared at him, face pale, gripping onto the door jamb for dear life.
"Kurt," Sebastian said with an eyebrow raised, "you've got some explaining to do."