Title: Suburban Trash
Rating: R
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Puck/Kurt, OCs
Genre: Drama.
Word Count: 2427
Warning: Sex, swearing, sometimes-graphic violence. Possible OOCness.
Disclaimer: I don't own it and I'm not making any money from it, this is pure entertainment and not intended to offend.
Author Notes: This chapter you get to have a couple of hints to do with those missing six years between this story and the first.
Summary: Kurt has this plan for how his life is meant to turn out. This plan includes very specific ideas of what he should be doing, and where he should be living, and who should conveniently die.
.
.
Kurt's eyes snapped open in the middle of the night, the glow from the alarm clock telling him that it was just after four in the morning. He could hear the front door shut in the strange suburban silence, he could track the heavy footsteps even through the thick walls – to the foyer where a pair of steel cap boots were dropped one by one to the floor.
Kurt closed his eyes again and snuggled against his pillow, naked under the blanket draped lazily over his waist. He sighed against the smooth cotton as he listened to the muffled movements as they passed through the hallway and into the bathroom. He opened his eyes again when he felt the mattress dip and found himself looking into Puck's face.
Kurt smiled, lips pressed against his cheekbone, and he rolled onto his side to look at his boyfriend. "Good morning," he teased.
"Good night," Puck replied, sliding his body under the blanket.
"How was work?"
"Dark," Puck replied, stretching. He settled stretched out on his back on his side of the bed, hands tucked behind his head under the pillow. Kurt could smell him, a manly scent of sweat, antiperspirant and dirt – he hadn't showered. "Full of tools."
"I want you to have breakfast with me," Kurt said, sliding several inches over until his body was brushing Puck's side and their thighs were pasted together. "I'll make pancakes."
"Bribery," Puck muttered, eyes closed.
"Noah..."
"Wake me up when it's ready," Puck replied, and snaked an arm around Kurt's shoulders. "And I'm going back to sleep after."
Kurt woke up at seven in the morning only because the sun was streaming in through the curtainless bedroom windows. He crinkled his nose and groaned softly, baffled by how exactly Puck could sleep with a sunbeam right across his face like that. Kurt thought about kicking him awake to make him suffer the same way he was being forced to suffer, but thought better of it when he imagined what Puck could do (or refuse to do) when he was pissed off and tired.
Instead Kurt rolled out of bed and found a dressing gown to throw on while he gathered his clothes for the day and retreated to the bathroom. He loved this bathroom. It was attached to the master bedroom by a door, and yet wasn't considered the en suite. It was tiled in black and green, an unusual colour choice for a house like this, spacious, and sported a two person tub as well as a separate shower stall and a generously sized mirror above the hand basin.
Kurt dropped his dressing gown and turned on the shower, humming in appreciation of the excellent water pressure. The rent on this place was ridiculous, but worth every cent. He showered in a bliss of hot, steamy water and dried off on a new fluffy black bath sheet bought to match the decor. Half an hour of morning routine later and he was standing barefoot in the kitchen in slacks and a clean white button-down shirt. He made the pancakes with chocolate chips, stacked several onto a plate, and tiptoed into the bedroom to wake up his boyfriend.
He knew from experience that cooing Noah's name into his ear wouldn't do a thing. There were only reliable two ways to wake Puck, and Kurt had been shocked to discover that Puck had the ability to sometimes sleep through morning blowjobs. He jabbed his fingers sharply into Puck's side just below his ribs, snapping; "Wake up!"
He had learned that one from Puck's mother, of all people.
The reaction was still less than spectacular. Puck stretched, groaned, and cracked his eyes open against the sunlight to squint up at Kurt. "S'breakfast ready?"
"I made pancakes," Kurt confirmed. He leaned over and pecked his boyfriend's forehead, then stood properly and sashayed out of the room. He paused in the doorway to spare a glance at the bare windows. "Hurry up," he said, "before they get cold."
Puck groaned and rolled over under the blanket until he was on the edge of the bed. He sat up, rubbed a hand over his shaved head, and yawned. He'd stripped down to his boxers before getting into bed, and the morning sun made his olive skin seem more golden tanned than usual. He stretched, hands above his head, lazily popping the kinks out of his back before he sloped over to the almost-bare chest of drawers that was supposed to contain his clothes. He drew out a t-shirt, noted with some distaste that it was new and he didn't remember buying it; He pulled it on anyway, glad that it was only a solid coloured tee.
He turned to leave the bedroom and caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. Puck glanced back at the windows and noticed the curtains in the house next door still swinging.
"Neighbours were perving on me," he announced when he entered the kitchen.
"Yes," Kurt replied, "I figured."
Puck sat down at the table and waited. Within moments Kurt had set a plate of pancakes down in front of him, alongside a glass of pulpy orange juice and a set of shiny new utensils. "New?" he asked, raising his fork. Kurt gave him a look and Puck rolled his eyes. "So what isn't new?" he asked dryly. "Are you trying to buy us a life or what?"
"Eat your pancakes, darling."
"You can't buy normal," Puck pointed out, stabbing the fluffy pancakes on his plate with his knife and fork. "I thought you knew better than that. If this is another one of your 'who-am-I, oh god I'm a creepy little bitch' meltdowns you better tell me right the fuck now. Cause the last one ended so well."
"I'm not having a meltdown," Kurt sighed, putting down his utensils. He picked up his coffee cup instead and frowned at Puck over the top of it. Kurt held the cup like an accessory, as if coffee were a fashion statement just as much as his clothes were. "I'm having a spree. I can't believe I lived in that tiny little box for months on end without tearing my hair out. Now that I have the space to do what I want, I will do what I want."
"Whatever, Picasso," Puck replied around a mouthful of melted chocolate and pancake. "Just don't turn this house into some kind of fluffy, prissy, velour paradise."
"I'm keeping it tasteful. In case you hadn't noticed."
"Tastefully nude."
Kurt coloured a little, and put his coffee cup down. He flicked his tongue out to catch a drop of espresso from the corner of his lips. "Tasteful," he said.
"Don't even bother trying," Puck told him, pointing his fork at Kurt for emphasis. "I know what you did there. What you're doing with these dumb locals. I know you, and I get it. But now you've let them all know what a class-A stud I am can you put up some curtains already?"
Sometimes Kurt hated that he'd let Puck get so close, close enough to know so much about him. Most of the time it was nice to know he never had to hide anything. Kurt sighed, caught. His fingers traced over the lip of his coffee cup. "Well," he said, "I can see there's no arguing with you."
"Got that right."
"I wanted to give you a name before I went to work," Kurt said, changing the subject. "Robert Cripley."
"Yeah?" Puck asked, suddenly looking much more awake, as if he'd just been injected with a direct shot of caffeine.
"I copied his information onto the flash drive on the vanity by my moisturiser." Kurt sipped his coffee again, and checked his watch. He had yet to pick an appropriate wall clock for the kitchen. "It has everything that's on his HR file to date, and don't ask me how I got my hands on all of that."
"I'm sure it was devious and sexy."
"Point is," Kurt said, "it should give you more than enough for a starting point."
He stood and carried his empty plate to the sink. The house didn't have a dishwasher, but with just the two of them they didn't accrue much of a mess in plates and cups anyway. Kurt placed his dishes into the sink and walked back around the table to give his boyfriend a kiss that tasted like chocolate chip pancakes.
"I have to get ready for work, darling."
"It's Sunday."
"I know." Kurt sighed dramatically. "Decor waits for no man. Plus, weekend rates are to die for."
"Knock 'em dead, baby," Puck said, and managed to grab Kurt's ass before he darted out of reach. They passed each other again in the hallway after Kurt had finished getting properly dressed, Puck clearly on his way back to bed. Kurt let himself be grabbed and pushed up against the wall for a proper goodbye kiss, remembering everything he loved about the other man as Puck's hands closed over his wrists.
"Remember the curtains," Puck told him.
"I love you," Kurt replied, licking his lips.
"I love you too." Puck leaned in for another, softer kiss, then let Kurt away from the wall. "Kinky bitch."
.
.
Puck woke up at four in the afternoon and didn't need to think about leaving for work until eight at night. Somehow, while he was sleeping, curtains had made their way onto the frames of the bedroom windows. They were a heavy fabric, chocolate brown and perfect for blocking out the sunlight. Puck approved of them, they suited his masculinity while still catering to Kurt's need for style.
He got up at his own pace this time, rolling out of bed after five minutes just spent gathering his thoughts together and making sure he was properly awake.
Puck's first stop after getting out of bed was the bathroom. He took a long, hot shower free from Kurt-related interruptions or pestering and dried himself off thoroughly while standing naked in the middle of the tiled floor. He let the towel drop to the floor, forgotten, and walked back out into the bedroom without dressing.
Still naked, he found the flash drive Kurt had left for him and dug out the laptop he'd bought specifically for planning. He only used it for looking up information relevant to his less than legal habits, floor plans of buildings, maps of local and not-so-local areas, specifications for various tools or prices of things he might need to buy in order to pull it off. He put it all on the one laptop so it could be gotten rid of easily if he needed to.
One swipe with a powerful enough magnet and it would all be gone. No proof, no mess, no fuss.
Puck sat down on the edge of the bed, laptop balanced on his thighs, and booted up the computer. He waited for the login scripts to finish and the desktop to flash up, then inserted the drive. He had to smile at the name Kurt had assigned it, 'Edify'. After six years with the same frustratingly wordy boyfriend (give or take, not including that year and a half while Kurt was at college) Puck's vocabulary had expanded enough that he knew a play on words when he saw it.
Robert Cripley was 37 years old, a divorce lawyer, and the son in law of the man who owned and operated Désigne, Studio Six's main competition. Puck frowned as he read the profile, wondering what exactly Kurt was up to here. As far as he knew, Kurt had no plans to jump ship and attempt to join up with another company, so creating a vacuum made little sense to him.
"Not my problem," Puck told himself, instead making a note of Cripley's address and earmarking the street for a drive by. He'd need to research the neighbourhood and find out if Cripley had any sort of routine.
Puck frowned at the screen, thinking about what he knew about the area. Cities were simultaneously harder and yet easier to make people disappear in. There were fewer places you could go for absolute solitude, fewer places to dump a body where it wouldn't be found for a few weeks... But at the same time there was so much going on that people were less likely to look twice at something bad. They didn't want to get involved, so most of the time if they heard a noise they wouldn't follow up on it.
He had an advantage here, the same advantage he always had on new or half-finished building sites. It wasn't weird for a guy like him, for a truck like his, to drive around with random crap in the back. He could haul a tarp, a shovel, cans of bleach or gasoline or bags of cement and it was completely normal.
The building site was a good idea actually, he mused. Plenty of open holes soon to be covered in cement, foundations being set, steel bars to be set in concrete columns... He loved how much easier it was to get rid of a body now that he was older. He would have to do some thinking, some calculations about time, and how to engineer it so that he could get the body encased in concrete without anyone noticing.
Puck was already starting to think of Robert Cripley as deceased. After all, with Puck's sights set on him that was what he was. Mr. Cripley just didn't know it yet.
He spent the next hour or so unpacking the few things that Kurt had left boxed up, washing the dishes left in the sink, and hauling the last few boxes into the shed out in the garden. He was going to have to pick up a lawn mower from somewhere, he realised. Unless Kurt wanted to throw fifty a week into lawn care.
Puck left for an hour then, intending to go out and get some essential grocery shopping done as well as refilling some less essential supplies. He would be home for dinner with Kurt, and then need to leave almost immediately afterwards. When he came back, bottles of bleach hidden under the seat of his truck and groceries on the passenger seat, Kurt's jeep was already parked in the driveway.
The door was unlocked, which made it considerably easier to get inside with both arms full of grocery bags. The kitchen light was on. Puck could hear the muffled sounds of laughter and conversation. He frowned slightly as he clomped to the kitchen – he couldn't remember any of Kurt's friends being invited over for any kind of housewarming, if that was what this was. He entered the kitchen and was proved right. The woman sitting at the kitchen table, wineglass in hand, was not one of Kurt's friends. It was the neighbour from next door.
"Noah!" Kurt greeted him, two glasses in and (to gather from the items currently laid out on the bench) clearly planning on making omelettes for dinner. "Darling. Say hi to Marcie. She was nice enough to bring over a bottle of very lovely wine."
Puck nodded. "Marcia," he greeted her, and cleared space on the bench with an elbow so he could put the shopping down. He turned around and leaned casually against the counter. "If he winds up with a hangover I know who to blame."
Marcia beamed at him, at least a little bit tipsy; "Don't be silly," she said, "Kurt can hold his wine!"
"You don't live with him," Puck quipped.
"You're just jealous," Kurt announced, a small smirk on his lips. One that Puck recognised immediately as his 'I'm being ironic' smirk. "That I have made a friend in our new neighbours and you have not."
"I think I'll live," Puck replied.
"Doug is reserved," Marcia cut in, unaware of any subtext passing between the two men. "But he is a good man. He'd be a good friend. You just need to give him a little time to get over himself."
Puck turned away and started unpacking the groceries. "Noah isn't the kind of guy who has a lot of close friends," Kurt answered for him, sipping from his wineglass. "He keeps in touch with a few friends back in our home town, but the rest of them are just drinking buddies."
Marcia shook her head. "Some people are just more private than others."
Puck had to wonder what exactly she thought she was going to achieve here. From the outside it looked as if Kurt was a cheerful, open, social-butterfly type. He looked like the kind of guy who would immediately induct you into his circle of equally glamorous friends and start sharing secrets over cocktails and spritzers. He could keep up the charade for years at a time, but the reality was that nobody was as close to Kurt as they thought they were. Mercedes might have been once, before college separated them, but nobody – not even Kurt's father – knew him the way they thought they did. There was always at least one very large and looming secret hidden behind Kurt's friendly, knowing smiles. Puck was the only one who knew what that was.
He slid a box of rice crackers into the pantry and wondered if Marcia would be so keen to have drinks at their dinner table if she knew Kurt had asked him to kill someone for him just that same morning.
Suburban housewives didn't really seem like the type... But then again, neither had Kurt.
Marcia left when the wine bottle was empty, leaving Kurt to cook dinner which he insisted that he could do by himself (I only had two and a half glasses of wine, Noah. Now shut up) without burning the house down. Puck only believed him because he'd seen Kurt do far more complicated things while tipsy. The omelettes, like most everything Kurt set his mind to, were perfect down to the last detail.
Puck wolfed his in under two minutes, kissed Kurt on the cheek, then announced that he was running late and bounded out to his truck.
"Don't wait up for me, babe," Puck called over his shoulder.
"Don't trip and break your neck," Kurt replied. "You know I can't replace you."
Despite his claim that he was running late, Puck actually got to the site early. He spent the spare time walking around the site, giving the entire area a quick look over for potential drop-points for a body. Parking in the employee lot was out, obviously. He eyed the fence thoughtfully. It was a rental fence, aluminium pipe and chicken wire squares. Six foot by six, sitting on top of weighted plastic struts and held together by bolted couplings. Easy to put together and easy to take apart.
It would be easy enough to open up a section of the fence big enough for a person to slip through.