When he was younger Sam like many children would play games on shopping mall tiles, avoiding the menacing lava channels or bottomless pits that lurked invisibly beneath squares of plane white with daring leaps and careful strides. These days he sometimes helps Stevie devise elaborate courses between storefronts and over tables in the food court but mostly the colored patterns remind him of tablature, each shining stripe of seaweed green or ocean blue really the patinaed bronze of an old guitar string. His feet become fingers as he paces the ceramic, and he finds himself walking chords to match his mood: Stubby isosceles triangles on their sides form airy Ds that make him think of trickling streams and happy sighs; stairway shapes that alternate gentle-steep as they climb to the left are Cs, heaven-harking cataracts; a quick pair of huddled steps alone on either side raise the deepwater darkness of E minor.
All well and good when he is by himself, but if the looks Mercedes is giving him are any indication, not something best done in polite company.
"Sorry," he thinks to mutter shyly, stopping one note short of the warm arm of A major. In his head it hangs unfinished, a pensive sus 2nd, truer to his mindset, he supposes.
Mercedes' eyebrows, lifted in skepticism, fall and she smiles. Like always her smile comforts him the way his mom's cooking does, makes the world feel smaller. "Naw, don't be. It's cute. Whatever the hell it is you're doing." She takes his arm and pats it affectionately. "Just maybe save it for when there aren't so many people around."
"Yeah." She keeps hold of his arm as they walk, so he doesn't check his phone for the time. The damn thing is prepaid, and only barely, but it's something, and given that his only watch counts the minutes via spinning Star Fleet insignia it's a useful timepiece for social situations. His eyes are no longer busy counting frets so he scans nearby shops for wall clocks. Over some jewelry clerk's desk he spots a sleek analog that reads 8:00, or close enough. Later than he'd thought. The nearly vertical minute hand looks to him like an advancing shark fin and for all it sets his pulse racing it might as well be.
Mercedes looks at him sideways. "Are you ok?" She releases his arm and tugs gently on one of her new earrings, a hoop so large Sam half expects to see Master Chief chasing Covenant along its flat interior. "You've been acting kind of funny all week." She glances down at his feet. "More so than normal, I mean. Plus we've been here what, an hour, and you haven't quoted me a single line from Dawn of the Dead."
Sam shrugs. His face is a poor liar, and so to communicate blankness he thinks of nothing, lets his neurons ricochet off any memories that threaten to crystallize and refract his thoughts into visible emotion. He lets that unresolved chord echo deep in the mine of his mind. "It's been a long week."
"Why did you want to come here, anyway? You hate shopping." He is grateful for the way she phrases that—he hates shopping, not he cannot afford shopping. He checks his hair in a store window and smooths a wrinkle out of the nicest shirt he owns.
"Just needed to get out of the house." Out of the room sounds pathetic, so he says house. Sue him. They are passing the food court, and he swallows, putting his hands in his pockets so that Mercedes can't see them ball into nervous fists. "I'm hungry, mind if we sit down somewhere?"
She "mmm"s an affirmative like the uncertain groan of a wood floor, and though Sam knows she has not accepted the deflection he moves quickly toward a gray table beneath the fibrous leaves of an artificial ficus and sits facing the restaurant displays so that his eyes can't scan the evening crowd bustling behind him. Instead he looks up, tracing a narrow skylight with his gaze, a gloaming blue river crossed by white beams like bridge girders.
Mercedes sits across from him and tilts her head down so that her confused look comes at him filtered through her bangs. "Uh, blondie? If you're going to eat something, you better hurry. We have to leave in like ten minutes, my dad wants me home by 8:30 to help him sort through periodontal x-rays." She rolls her eyes.
"I'm not hungry," Sam says absently, toying with the plastic tree trunk in front of him. Its skin is hard. His own skin feels hard.
She grimaces and takes one of his hands in both of hers. "Sam what is up with you? Did I do something to offend you, or something?"
Sam frowns. Her words have triggered something, but he cannot put his finger on what or why. For a moment he lets loose those crystals of memory and laces her voice through them. Like prisms they split her statement into its component parts, reveal the rainbow of her emotions: a rusty red certainty that she is not the cause of his funk, a fragile violet worry that she is somehow at fault, a polluted yellow shame at her own insecurity. But the sensations her words rouse—the touch of hot steam, and of subtle disappointment—seem independent of her tone, even of the sound of her voice.
"Sam?"
"No—no, of course not," he says, shaking his head, partly to sync with his assurance and partly to clear his thoughts. He shows energy in his eyes and with effort centers his focus on her. "You've been great, Mercedes, and I really am fine, I'm just tired. There's just a lot on my mind, and I promise next week I'll be—I'll—Mercedes?"
She is squinting at something over Sam's shoulder, and before he can turn to look himself she snatches her hands back to her lap and with a startled face says softly, "Be cool, be cool, be co—Heeey!" Her wide smile is impressively convincing.
When he does finally turn his head and see Kurt he is not sure whether to smile or nod or what, and if Kurt's face, frozen in mid-greeting, is any indication, neither is he. So Sam settles for merely looking. His next decision, then: Where to look? Part of him aches to wax flirtatious, to let his eyes gnaw gently on the triangle of pale flesh Kurt's collar reveals, or ride the inseams of his jeans like railroad tracks. Part of him remembers nothing but Kurt's harsh timidity, his bright menace and rattled retreat, and urges Sam to keep his scrutiny chaste. Part of him feels childishly vindictive, hurt by Kurt's relentless refusal to acknowledge his existence, to answer his jumbled texts or return his friendly calls or show up anywhere he knows that Sam may be, and wants to stare disinterestedly past him the way he does when people bitch about late pizza deliveries. Ultimately he compromises. With a casual glance he peruses Kurt's face like a graphic novel, each feature an individual frame of events: long cheeks that threaten always in Sam's mind to widen at the tug of a smile, ghosted by specters of pink; sculpted hair that he feels reduced to raw material in the memory of his fingers; privileged ears that stand at attention, poised to catch every empyreal pitch Kurt throws their way. "Hey," Sam says.
Kurt's mouth, half-open, closes. "Hi," he manages to reply quietly, expression unreadable. He sits down next to Mercedes, setting his shoulder bag on the bench beside him. "You didn't tell me Sam was coming," he says, doing a decent job of sounding pleasant.
"Oh," Mercedes says nonchalantly, "we just ran into each other. In the parking lot." Her eyes flash once in Sam's direction, which Sam chooses to interpret as Yes, fine, we need to have a brainstorming session to come up with less repetitive excuses for being seen together, but if you say a damn thing about it you're going to wake up in an alley somewhere with a headache and only one kidney. It has never been clear to Sam exactly why Mercedes is so dead-set on keeping their relationship a secret. Her standard excuse—that once a relationship goes public, drama is inevitable, especially given their group of friends, not to mention the fact that Sam has made out with or been crushed on by half the Glee club—is a good one, to be sure. But he senses there is something else, too. She has never said so directly, but it is clear that she feels, or did feel, at any rate, cut off from and by Kurt's interactions with Blaine; Sam wonders if this secret is a form of small revenge, consciously or otherwise.
His musings are cut short as Kurt's lip twitches like a fish dancing on dry ground. "What were you doing at the mall, Sam?" he asks.
Mercedes' smile falters. "Sam was just, uh, picking up some things—" Her forehead creases her head comes forward. "Wait, did you say I didn't tell you Sam was going to be here?"
Kurt takes his eyes off Sam and looks at her as though he does not understand the question. Sam holds his breath. When Kurt is silent, Mercedes continues: "I didn't tell you I was going to be here."
"Yes, you did," Kurt says, his mouth caught between a bemused smile and a worried frown. He pulls out his phone and reads: "Hey white boy, we should 'chill,' meet me at the mall food court at 8."
It is Mercedes' turn to look confused. "I didn't send you that."
Kurt is still staring at his phone, though, looking puzzled. "White doy," he corrects to himself, and narrows his eyes.
Sam decides to study the fake tree again.
"Well whatever," Mercedes says, shaking her head. "Maybe you've got the wrong number in there under my name. We have to go, though, my dad wants me home at 8:30 and I still have to drop off Sam. Uh—'cause I said I'd give him a ride."
In his peripheral vision Sam sees Kurt's head turn toward Mercedes. "What?" Mercedes asks him.
"Mercedes, it's ten after 8, there's no way you're going to make it."
"Pff, it is not," she says, glancing down at her watch. "It's not even 8 yet." There's a pause and then Kurt holds out his phone. "—huh—aw what the hell?" she says, leaping to her feet. "Stupid cheap-ass watch! Sam we got to go, my dad is going to killll meeee..."
Sam swallows, and works up the courage to break his staring contest with the ficus. "Hey Mercedes, why doesn't Kurt just give me a ride? That way you can still make it home on time."
If Kurt's eyes were narrow before, Sam has no word for what they are now. "Well look how that worked out," he says. Sam does his best to pretend the waves of animosity shooting through his bones like radiation are Kurt's way of showing his appreciation for how downright clever Sam is.
Mercedes puts a hand on Kurt's shoulder, and with an agitated voice pleads, "Could you Kurt? I'm sooo sorry about this, but you know how my dad gets. I was late for church last week and he made me scrub cuspidors all afternoon."
"Of course," Kurt replies, his death glare never wavering. "My pleasure."
"Oh thank you thank you thank you," she says, grabbing his head and kissing him on the cheek with an audible "mwah." She hesitates, and then gives Sam a shy wave, a smile, and a "See you later" before hustling out of sight.
Kurt's expression doesn't change, so Sam taps his fingers on the tabletop and smiles patiently. "I was having trouble getting a hold of you." It's funny—now that Kurt is here, and they are alone, Sam's nerves, though still tightly coiled, feel less poised to strike down his heart than they do charged with potential energy.
"That's because we have nothing to talk about."
Sam shrugs. "K." He is not going to fight him, not yet, and his acquiescence has its intended effect: Kurt's ire is partially disarmed. With a deep exhale Kurt breaks eye contact, hands idly spinning the table's salt shaker so that it twirls like Stacie did back when his parents could still afford her dance lessons. Sam leans back in his chair and stretches. "Well. You want anything to eat? Any stores you want to poke your head in?"
Kurt snorts, and still staring at the dancing shaker he smiles in an exasperated way. "No."
G. Two short steps, right-left, and then a lunge forward, an ebullient gallop, the most major of major chords. He feels faint as his whole body tries to smile. Sam is caught so completely off guard by the sheer volume of affection that suddenly brims in his chest at this simple response that he tries to breath in twice at the same time and hiccups loudly, startling himself and Kurt, too, who flinches and spills salt all over the table.
For a moment they both stare down at the messy curve of white crystals, transfixed in surprise. Then Sam hiccups again and they break into kiddish laughter, suddenly tense and amused by everything. Kurt brings a bent knuckle to the table, hunched and mischievous, and flicks a few granules in Sam's direction. Sam holds his breath until the urge to hiccup fades, and then lets out a puff of air, spraying Kurt's bare forearms with salt that catches in his rolled-up sleeves. Kurt giggles the way he had at the pool, and Sam dissects the sound in ways he was too distracted to before: It reminds him of a skipping stone whose ripples are lost in trembling water, and the glow in Sam's stomach deepens to a slow burn, and he feels again the bristle of shaded summer grass against his ankles, and when Kurt grabs the brown shaker and moves to pepper him Sam is ready, grabs Kurt's wrist and feels his heartbeat against his thumb, is mildly startled at Kurt's strength as he pushes forward until Sam remembers with strange clarity his first sighting of Kurt, dancing in goofy sunglasses and black fingerless gloves, remembers the shape of his arms, and then the feel of them, last week, when his eyes were locked with Kurt's and useless besides, strong and sure like—
A mother at a nearby table loudly clears her throat, scowling at their ruckus, and Kurt sobers quickly. He pulls his hand back, sets down his weapon and pulls a napkin from the table's dispenser to wipe the table clean. His wide smile shrivels and he clears his throat.
Sam's breath is still coming strangely, and he feels cheated, robbed of a moment. He tweezes grains between his nails and blows them at Kurt, but he receives only a brief strained smile in response. "We should go," Kurt says, rising, and the irrational anger that shadows interrupted lust thickens Sam's blood, so that when he follows suit he feels heavy and grim.
Kurt is silent and looks straight ahead as they walk the gauntlet of late-night shoppers and loitering teens to the mall exit and then through the bug-clogged cones of yellow light reaching from parking lot streetlamps. The cool twilight dims but does not snuff out the indeterminate fire of Sam's emotions. When he climbs into the passenger seat of Kurt's car he smells leather and oil blended with Kurt's pheromones and feels slightly dizzy. Kurt turns the keys and cold air steadies him.
"I'm sorry I dragged you out here," Sam says, planning to guilt Kurt back out of his shell with niceties, but his last words are drowned out by the sudden blaring of the stereo. Sam doesn't know the song, but it has an electronic feel to it, a neon beat. He can't help himself; he pumps his arms and sways his shoulders in an exaggerated rhythm, smiling sideways. Immediately after he begins a sudden fear takes him that Kurt will read his moves as mockery or, worse, a sincere effort at breaking it down, but by the time Kurt's killed the song his musical laughter is weaving a far superior rhythm through the evening hush.
"You're such a dork," he says, and Sam feels like it's the greatest complement he's ever received.
Kurt puts the car in gear and turns down the AC. "What is it?" Sam asks, leaning forward to adjust his seat (Finn, he assumes, requires all this extra leg room). "The song, I mean."
"Oh, just something Blaine gave me to listen to," he says with a dismissive wave. "It's… fun, I suppose."
Sam tries not to smirk too obviously. "Doesn't really sound like your thing."
Kurt shrugs one shoulder and looks over the other as he backs out of narrow the parking space. "I don't dislike it. I just... dislike it," he says with a guilty smile. Once Kurt is no longer distracted by driving maneuvers, Sam bouncily rehashes a few choice dance moves and Kurt chuckles again. When they trickle out, he adds, "And… I'm not sorry I got 'dragged out.'" He half-shrugs again. "It was weird not seeing you."
Sam figures that's as close to "I missed you" as Kurt is going to get, and as he watches Kurt's wrist (what a goddamn wrist, thin and powerful, crossed by graceful tendons like the prongs of a tuning fork, shining in the transient light) twitch slightly to nudge down the lever of the turn signal, he nods and says before he can chicken out, "That was fun, at the pool."
Inertia locks Sam in a shell of space as the car jerks forward, and then propels him forward when the breaks engage. He braces himself with two hands on the dash as Kurt slams a palm into the steering wheel. "Damn it, Sam! Things were going so well, why did you have to—agh!"
Sam did not exactly expect Kurt to spontaneously offer to relive the memory, but the force of Kurt's reaction is disorienting, and Sam feels the tower of his confidence sway precariously. For the first time, he unguardedly acknowledges the possibility that his perception of the chemistry between them is entirely one-sided. He feels vulnerable, abashed, and so he cannot keep the edge from his voice when he says, louder than he means to, "What do you mean, why did I have to?"
"I mean—I told you to forget it! Remember? And you said—"
"I said I wouldn't go announcing it around town, I didn't say I'd forget it!" Sam pivots his body toward Kurt so that the other boy cannot avoid his eyes. "I don't want to forget it, Kurt—" (Kurt winces at the sound of his name) "—and I don't believe for a second that you do either, and if—"
"Well you're wrong." Kurt's voice is hard. "Ok? You're wrong. I do want to forget it, because—" Kurt's voice begins to tremble, and the vibrations further unbalance Sam, shake tears into a glaze over his eyes, open cracks which parch his skin of sensation. Kurt makes a groaning noise. "God, Sam, why don't you understand that thinking about that, that the thought of that is harder on me than it is on you?"
Sam hates the feeling that he is not being taken seriously and projects his frustration as volume. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"'What does that mean, What does that mean'—do I have to spell out everything for you?" Kurt says, voice strained and venomous. The fragment of Sam's mind still unconsumed by doubt assures in a whisper that Kurt does not mean it this way, but all Sam can hear are old taunts that have rotted in a swampy corner of his brain, memories of reading essays aloud to hostile classrooms, snickers that grate his morale into ribbons to be stolen by the dark breeze of self-loathing. "You fucking idiot," is what he hears, and he shuts up and turns toward the door.
A moment passes in hurt silence before Sam can bring himself to say neutrally, "I'll call my dad, he can give me a ride."
He is reaching for the door handle when the chrome shriek of a car horn jolts the air and they collectively realize that Kurt is still idling in the mall's right turn exit lane. Flustered, Kurt jerkily accelerates onto the street and cruises forward. Scenes of action heroes barrel rolling out of speeding automobiles flash through Sam's head, but ultimately he sulks into his seatbelt and presses his forehead against the window, enjoying with mild masochism the thud of his skull on the cool glass as Kurt's wheels graze potholes and stumble over gravel roads.
Sam's stewing is on the brink of becoming deliciously indulgent when Kurt finally says, "I didn't mean to imply that you're dumb, Sam. I don't think—"
"Just drop it, ok?" Sam sits up again. He does not want to be condescended to. "It's fine." He does his best to sound sincere but doesn't even fool himself.
"No, it's not, and I feel like I need to explain—"
"You don't. You don't," Sam repeats. "Of course you're not... obligated to have enjoyed it, or whatever, you can shut me down all you want. Just—you don't have to trivialize my feelings."
"I wasn't trivializing them!" Kurt insists, vexation creasing his face. "I was just trying to explain. You can't understand—" He shakes his head and reconsiders his words. "It's just not the same. You don't have anything at stake. I could lose Blaine over this, if he found out." He sighs. "And it's not that I'm not... flattered, that you chose me to... experiment with. But these sorts of things aren't just an experiment to me, this is—"
"Whoa, hey, whoa," Sam interrupts. "This isn't an experiment."
Kurt looks at him with a pitying smile and puts a hand on his chest. "Sam. Of course it is."
So that's it. This again. The goddamn tautology of Sam rears its ugly head.
He is somewhat embarrassed whenever he remembers that it was through superhero comics that he originally discovered his sexuality, though it was almost a full year after he began crushing on Iron Lad that the implications of his infatuation occurred to him on a conscious level. By then he had real-life targets for his attraction, and he can still evoke with perfect clarity his first nervous confession of homosexual desire, delivered to his mother almost five years ago. Her face is effervescent when he admits to having to a thing for one of his classmates, and he can tell that she is excited to gossip, ready to tease him in a friendly way. "Who is she?" she asks.
"It's..." he begins, excited himself to finally be free of his secret even as anxiety makes his ears ring. "It's on a boy."
It is as though someone has taken a picture of her face and edited the light from her eyes. "What?"
His throat is dry. "I like a boy," he repeats timidly.
When she is rendered speechless he tries to explain that he still is attracted to girls, but this only makes things worse. "Then—then why can't you have a crush on a girl?" She assures him so many times that she is merely concerned about him living a difficult life that he begins to think she is trying to convince herself more than she is him.
He tries to explain it, that he is like everyone else—completely unable to influence who it is he falls for. Still she is befuddled. He tries an example: Wouldn't she have had an easier life if she'd fallen in love with a millionaire? Why didn't she make herself do that? But it's no use. To her, to everyone he's ever told, sexuality is ruled by the most basic form of tautology, a statement that by definition must be true: Something is the case, or it is not. Their false tautology for Sam reads: Sam is either straight, or he is gay. Pick one, Sam, and don't tell your pastor if you choose the latter.
So in the car with Kurt he vents: "No, Kurt, I'm not experimenting, and don't try to tell me that I am."
"But—have you ever done this sort of thing with a guy before? How can—"
"Had you ever done anything with a guy before Blaine? Does that mean you were just 'experimenting' when you kissed him?" Kurt opens his mouth to respond but Sam doesn't let him. "I've liked guys for years, and I've liked girls for years, and no it is not a phase, and no I don't plan on ever 'making up my mind' about it." He turns away; he does not want to see incomprehension play out on those features. "And for what it's worth, I do have something to lose, because I'm dating Mercedes, so get off your high horse."
Once again, Sam underestimates the intensity of Kurt's reaction, and nearly hits his head on the roof of the car when Kurt exclaims, "What?"
Sam scratches his shoulder and coughs once. "Uh. Yeah, since prom."
Dozens of questions battle along Kurt's eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, the plane of his jaw, before one ekes its way out: "Then what the hell were you doing making out with me?"
Kurt's loss for words helps Sam regain his footing, so to speak, and he is able to smile slightly as he points out, "I could ask you the same question."
Kurt has the gall to look affronted. "You kissed me. I was shocked. The response was automatic."
"Oh, come on," Sam insists. "Like you weren't begging for it." He pitches his voice high and rations his breath, filling his eyes with exaggerated desire. "'Should what, Sam? Should what?'"
Kurt's face progresses through four shades of pink as Sam watches. "I don't sound like that," he grumbles meekly, and spends a few moments fingering one of his sleeves. "—You're really dating her?"
Sam is mildly confused, not by what Kurt says but by his tone. He sounds... hopeful? Sam cannot decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, so he defaults to the truth and nods.
"Mm." Kurt lets his free hand glide across the dashboard, slowly, back and forth, like a caress. Sam shivers.
Kurt clears his throat. "Well," he says, chagrined. "I'm sorry for... assuming things. But you know we can't ever do anything like that again. It's—it wouldn't be right."
Sam feels minor disappointment, as though his heart, buoyed on high water, is sinking temporarily with the tide. But the part of him capable of delaying satisfaction is shouting tentative victory cheers ("Maybe Later!"). In half an hour he has helped Kurt move from "It never happened" to "It wouldn't be right." He is not sure how to quantify this progress but will do his damnedest to help it continue. Sam is nothing if not determined.
For now, though, he voices agreement. "Yeah." He tilts his gaze back to window and opens it with the push of a button. After a moment, he dares to add defiantly, "It was still pretty damn good though."
Over the rush of early night air Sam is shocked to hear Kurt demurely chirp "Yes." He swallows and focuses on the dark.
Phantasmal trees hint their presence with fleeting silhouettes beyond the constellation of streetlights that wind serendipitously, it seems, with the lonely road. The sky smells rich with prenatal rain but looks purple-black and empty; false stars hide the real ones, Sam thinks, and struggles to map this insight onto his life. Astronomy, again. He thinks of Quinn and paper mache planets, and draws a long line from then to now. And a much shorter line, from that distant moment, the origin of his duet with Quinn, to his reluctantly aborted duet with Kurt. Did I do something to offend you? Yes—in the shower, when Kurt had broken things off. Sam's own words. Did it mean something, to hear his own words mirrored so long after the fact? A third line links that moment with now, by those words and more importantly by Kurt himself.
An asterism formed by three points, and Sam recognizes it instantly. Two close notes, right-left, and then a long leap forward. G major, sprawled in the heavens. A sign from God if ever he saw one.
His contemplation is interrupted only once, by Kurt, who asks curiously and out of nowhere, "What were you doing with your feet, on our way out of the mall?" Sam turns his head to him, frowning. Kurt looks at him out of the corner of his eye. "The way you were walking. I was half worried you'd hurt yourself as part of your little plot, hoping I'd have to take you to the hospital," he says drily.
Sam feels an itch stretch up the back of his neck and knows he is blushing. He had not realized at the time, but in memory he can feel the chord pounding through him. "Oh, uh. D7."
"What?"
Sam folds his hands together and stares at them. "Nothing."
"D7?" There is no skepticism in his voice, merely curiosity.
"Yeah, um. Like a guitar chord."
He tries to read Kurt's silence but can't. After a few still seconds he hears a faint "hm."
"What?" he asks defensively.
"Oh, nothing," Kurt says pensively. Sam is not going to press it, but a moment later Kurt adds, "It's just I do the same thing. Not the same thing, but." Kurt taps the steering wheel lightly. "Sometimes I read notes in light patterns on walls," he confesses bashfully.
Sam doesn't reply, but he feels goosebumps. As another surge of affection threatens to inflate him like a balloon he shifts his shoulder so that his arm rests against Kurt's elbow, and Kurt doesn't push him away.
In a few minutes Kurt parks in the motel lot, oddly far from the Evans' room, and at first Sam wonders if Kurt has somehow forgotten its location, or if Sam is being subtly punished by being made to walk the few extra yards. But when he looks at Kurt to raise an eyebrow he finds the boy's attention anchored firmly to a zone of nothing unlit before them, and becomes with truly stupefying speed entranced by the outline of Kurt's stomach moving in and out, his singer's breath defined by the tight cling of his shirt. And his face—Kurt's face defies shadows. The dark cannot confine it. It springs forward from darkness, conquers darkness, is pale luminescence. The impulse to kiss him again, to relive the desperate heat of Kurt's delicate tongue, is nearly overwhelming, and without meaning to Sam leans in, pulled by the deep white of Kurt's magnetic north, until the tip of his nose startles Kurt's cheek and he yelps sharply, turning his face into Sam's and flinching back, eyes wide and lips parted as though holding a note too ineffable for sound.
"—Don't," he mouths, and Sam pours every cold thought he can think over the coals of lust stoking fire in his groin, and manages to forge a sheet of ice to hold down the flames. He pulls back, barely, so barely that he can watch his hypothetical self through this thin layer of ice continue forward, and is darkly jealous of his imagination.
Kurt's breath is hitching like broken clockwork and time loses its normal flow. It is seconds or years before he sits up fully again, and by then Sam has reconstructed with scientific certitude in his mind every smooth detail of Kurt's bare legs, has extrapolated from unsubtle scrutiny the gaps in his knowledge, can taste again the human salt of Kurt's neck. "Do you—" Kurt begins, but his voice cracks. He tries again. "Do you have your phone?"
Sam does not care about his phone. "Yes."
"Can I see it?"
Sam does not understand, but he fetches the item from his pocket with some difficulty, and he does not care if Kurt can see the cause, hopes that Kurt can see the cause.
Kurt takes it and opens it, searching his contacts. "Just—need to make sure you have my number right," he explains, voice more air than tone. Sam does not understand. He has been texting Kurt all week; of course he has Kurt's number right. "Mmhm," Kurt confirms, and spins the phone in his fingers. He smiles nervously, impishly. "Well guess you should go."
Sam knows he is right but hates him for saying so. "I could not," he suggests. "I could stay here and..."
Kurt shakes his head. "Mm-mm. Bye." He gives a stupid, childish little wave, and Sam can't stop a frustrated grunt from escaping him.
"Fine. Give me my phone."
Kurt shakes his head again, more quickly this time. "Mm-mm."
"Kurt, I need my phone. If Stevie or Stacie or my boss needs to get a hold of me..."
The countertenor shrugs his shoulders with false sympathy. "Too bad," he says, the hint of a giggle bubbling through his words.
"Kurt!" Sam is not in a mood to be toyed with. He snaps out his hand to grab the phone from Kurt but Kurt pulls it out of his reach, laughing with his mouth closed. "Give me—" He tries again, but Kurt is too fast, tossing it to his other hand, and with another growl Sam lunges with his other arm, and Kurt dives backward, laughing, Sam thinks in his rage, dementedly, and their arms tangle like vines and Sam reaching is pressed into the trunk of Kurt's chest, and smells woody cologne, wants to strip him of his bark, and his inability to do so does more than heat his anger, it torrefies it, so that he feels roasted and rich with passion, and Kurt still grinning slips the phone into his pants pocket, and when Sam chases it he meets no resistance, feels his fingers against Kurt's thigh and through the denim of the pocket's interior feels too Kurt's hard shaft, and when Kurt shudders and the lids of his eyes flutter down Sam forgets what it was he was after, does not dare to ask permission as he removes his hand and unbuttons Kurt's jeans, and as the zipper grazes Kurt the boy says, adorably, incredibly, "Oh," and Sam uses one hand to pull Kurt up while the other paws clumsily his pants down, learns the contours of him through his boxers, sinfully tight in the truest sense of the word, a sin against God, and he shucks this last barrier and feels as though he is pulling the red curtain off an unseen work of art; and for all the rapturous length of his prize he finds himself watching the creases of Kurt's cheeks that protest Sam's patience and the quaking orbs closed to the world, and Sam feels fear for a moment, sharp fear, and asks Kurt his own name: "Say my name," he says, and without hesitation Kurt whines "Sam"; "Open your eyes," Sam says, and Kurt does; and when Sam is sure Kurt is thinking of nothing else and no one else he grips Kurt and strokes him long and slow, feels slick sweat moisten his fingers, watches Kurt's pupils dilate, and Sam's revenge for everything, for this whole fucking mess, is not to kiss him; he will not kiss Kurt, dammit, Kurt will kiss him. He rubs his thumb around the ridge of Kurt's head and his heart chokes as Kurt moans, and Sam lets his fingers stretch down, and pulls him faster, and watches Kurt watch him, and watches Kurt lean forward.
There.
A scarlet pitch dazes him as Kurt's mouth gently chimes against his bottom lip, and then they are kissing fiercely, and when Kurt's hands pull hard on the fabric of his shirt Sam confesses, still groping Kurt, "I want, I want to, to feel all of you"; and Kurt with both hands grabs his hair and sucks the air from him, and as Sam releases his cock to lift Kurt's shirt over his head he feels those hands suddenly at his waist, feels his shorts forced down and air assault his hips before Kurt's fumbling touch blooms white light through his core, blinding his hearing and deafening his sight. "Kurt," Sam pants, "oh fuck"; and by the way Kurt's fingers haphazardly experiment, caressing him with the backs of his fingernails, his knuckles, wrist and palm, fondling his balls and tickling him up and down, Sam knows in his soul that he is the first Kurt has touched this way, feels harder than ever for this knowledge alone, Kurt's imperfect technique be damned. And he does not care that Kurt lets go when Sam lifts him by bare shoulders to his lap, and their erections press together, and Sam makes a noise without a name as his mouth fills with the flesh of Kurt's chest and his hands ply the svelte curves of Kurt's ass, tease the forbidden territory where he vows with religious conviction one day soon to venture, and as his chest warms, his shirt barraged by thick liquid, he succumbs to blissful friction and comes, too, scarring Kurt's pale skin with warm white.
There is silence and heavy breathing.
Sam worries that Kurt will panic again but he doesn't. As they clean and dress the need for words is comfortably suffocated by psychological haze, the aftermath of craving quenched.
Kurt speaks first, once he is seated again in the driver's seat. "That was nice."
His understatement does nothing to shake the daze of adoration in which Sam finds himself. "You're telling me," Sam says, and puts a hand on Kurt's shoulder, massaging with two fingers. "When, uh. Or I mean, do you want to..."
Kurt looks as though he would be looking stern if he had the energy. "Samuel. You know we can't do that again."
Sam succeeds in not laughing because he is tired. Kurt Hummel, the boy who cried chastity. "Sure." Kurt frowns, clearly trying to gauge Sam's sincerity. "But uh, hey, if this is our last time," Sam asks, "one more kiss isn't going to hurt anybody, right?"
Kurt's frown threatens to lift to a grin but hovers instead in purgatory. "Well. I guess not." Sam is sure that the measured pace at which Kurt leans forward is calculated not to belie his enthusiasm. Their lips meet again and their mouths open, but they work gently together, and Sam feels like crying at how wonderful it feels. When they finally break apart, they wish each other goodnight wearing unsure smiles and add nothing more.
As Kurt drives away, Sam wonders if it is by accident or intention that he has left his phone in Kurt's pocket.
In the parking lot his mental fog condenses to a pure liquid in which his thoughts wade easily and in whose reflection he sees the radiant profile of a dark-haired boy. And he realizes as he walks into the motel room, saturated with these clear swells of feeling and preceded by the vital roar of television cartoons and the mechanical drone of his parents' voices, that he has identified at last and for certain the tautology of Sam, the undeniable truth that haunts his every hour, that soaks into his clothes and rides on his every breath:
He is with Kurt, or he is not.
