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“Sorry I’m late,” Kurt says breathlessly as he joins Blaine by the counter at the Lima Bean. “Carole is beside herself with all of the events she and Dad have to go now, and I had to talk her off the ledge about finding enough appropriate and flattering outfits for a woman of her age and newly acquired stature.”
Blaine interprets that as Kurt badgering his step-mother into letting him be in charge of her wardrobe for fear of what she might choose on her own, and he says with a smile, “It’s okay. I ordered you your usual. I hope that’s all right.”
“That sounds perfect. Thank you.” Kurt unwinds his scarf and smiles back.
“And I didn’t order half of the bakery case,” Blaine tells him. “Which you always seem to think I’d do without your supervision.”
“I’m impressed by your self-restraint.”
“One tall nonfat mocha, one peppermint latte with an extra shot and whipped cream,” the barista calls.
Blaine steps forward. “That’s me.”
Kurt raises an eyebrow at him. “An extra shot and whipped cream? I take back what I said about self-restraint.”
“I’m living on the edge,” Blaine says, collecting both of their cups and thanking the server. He can’t help it; he loves holiday beverages. Next time he might get one with sprinkles.
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard.” There is a distinct, dry edge of amusement to Kurt’s voice as he guides them away from the counter.
“What?”
Kurt picks a table and slides onto one of the chairs. He waits until Blaine takes the seat across from him and hands him his drink before saying, “I’m apparently dating McKinley’s resident bad-ass. Even Puck is scared of you now. That’s quite impressive; I thought the only person who scared him was Lauren.”
“What are you talking about?” Blaine asks.
“Dalton Fight Club? I heard all about it from Finn.” Kurt looks more amused than worried as Blaine breathes in wrong and chokes on his drink, though he is kind enough to pass over a napkin.
“That was a joke,” Blaine manages to say. He’d been making a last-ditch effort to keep his temper in check and deflect the situation yesterday instead of lashing out, not that it had helped.
“I’m sure,” Kurt tells him as he leans back in his chair, “but for some reason Finn didn’t take it that way, so now you’re infamous bordering on legendary. I believe you may also have shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but don’t quote me on that.”
“It was a joke, Kurt.”
“I know. I mean, really. You running a secret fight club? At Dalton? What was the dress code? Shirt-sleeves and tie, no blazer except on Sundays?”
Blaine can’t stop himself from frowning, because although he knows Kurt is mocking his brother it feels a bit like he’s mocking him at how outlandish the thought of him fighting seems. “I did take boxing.”
“And as someone who gets to be in close personal contact with your biceps and shoulders I salute you for it.” Kurt raises his cup, his gaze warm and appreciative in a way that goes straight to Blaine’s gut and chases out the chill of the air better than his coffee. “But I just can’t see you presiding over the human equivalent of cock-fighting. Did you make them shake hands at the end? Write each other formal apologies for any bruises?”
“Am I that stuffy to you?” Blaine asks more sharply than he’d like, but he can just picture that cartoon version of himself and what Finn or Puck would think of it. Their derision would have none of the fondness that colors Kurt’s. “That boring and rigid?”
Kurt freezes for a second in surprise, and he composes his face as he sets down his drink. “No,” he says carefully. “I don’t think you’re stuffy or boring, Blaine.”
“Sorry.” Blaine rolls his shoulders a little to keep from hunching in on himself with the sudden frustration reverberating through him. He thought he’d managed to push it a little further back than that.
“No, I am.“ Kurt looks at him, clearly confused, and puts his hands in his lap. “All I meant was that Finn is an idiot who doesn’t understand humor when he hears it.”
Blaine breathes in through his nose. He doesn’t want to fight with Kurt. He never wants to fight with Kurt. This isn’t even really about Kurt. “Okay.” He doesn’t know what else to say.
“I think you impressed him, though,” Kurt says, filling in the silence growing between them.
“With my non-existent Dalton Fight Club?”
“Well, yes, but... He said you really knew how to hit a bag. Which I take as high praise.”
“The credit for that goes to my trainer,” Blaine says, toying with his cup.
“And to you for working at it, like you work at everything,” Kurt replies. The acknowledgement soothes a little of Blaine’s edginess. “Anyway, boxing was a good choice; it’s more impressive to straight boys than tae kwon do if you’re trying to meet them on their level.”
Meet them on their level. Like it’s not something he could want for himself, because he’s gay, because he wears ties instead of track suits, because he’s Blaine.
He had wanted it. He still does, sometimes.
Blaine looks down at his cup and doesn’t tell Kurt about his anger after being attacked. He doesn’t tell him about how good it felt to pound his fist against the bag when he first started to train and to pretend it was the faces of the guys who had jumped him. He doesn’t tell him how, as much as he was sickened by the pain in his fingers where they were broken in the parking lot, he loved the ache in his hands from hitting the punch mitts too hard, too long, how he felt a sense of grim satisfaction when his hands were so stiff the next day that he had trouble holding his pen at Dalton.
He doesn’t tell Kurt about what it was like to be in a practice ring, where there were rules and gear to make the fight about skill instead of blind hatred, and get to try to beat the crap out of someone else. He doesn’t tell Kurt how good it felt to be slammed in the ribs by his trainer’s glove instead of a pair of sneakers and to be ready and able to hit back. He doesn’t tell Kurt how his opponent grunting because of the impact of Blaine’s fist was right then better than the most beautiful music in his ears. He doesn’t tell Kurt how the surge of triumph was like the best kind of high when he’d figure out his sparring partner’s weakness and get in a sweet, powerful shot beneath his defenses.
He doesn’t tell Kurt how good it felt to be angry. He doesn’t tell him how good it felt to be allowed to be angry.
But that’s not who Blaine is to Kurt. It isn’t lost on him that it wasn’t Kurt who sought him out after the fight, and that’s okay. That’s not who Blaine’s supposed to be to him. To anyone. He’s supposed to be in control. He’s supposed to be polite and respectful. He’s supposed to be the guy who takes Finn’s apology and his hand instead of continuing to shout out his frustration, no matter that it’s still roiling inside. He’s supposed to be the guy who rises above the anger that sometimes snaps and snarls inside him like there’s a wolf waiting just beneath his skin. He’s supposed to be a better man than that.
He is, most of the time. Sometimes he slips, like in the parking lot at Scandals or yesterday with Sam and Finn, but mostly he keeps it in. He does what he’s supposed to. He acts like the man he was brought up to be.
That includes being a good boyfriend, he reminds himself.
He directs his attention back to Kurt and forces an apologetic smile. This isn’t Kurt’s fault. Kurt has always listened to him. Kurt has always respected his opinions. Kurt has always treated him as an equal and someone whose company he enjoyed. And now that things are smoothed over with Finn, Blaine can’t even be angry with him. He has to let it go.
It just takes a little more than a few deep breaths and one good rehearsal to push the anger back down, not when it’s been simmering for so long. Years.
“How’s your coffee?” Blaine says, like his mother always asks her guests when she wants to change the topic of conversation. He hates that it slips out with Kurt, but once it’s out there he can’t call it back. He presses on. “Did they get your order right?”
Kurt’s watching him from across the table. “Yes, it’s fine. Thank you again.”
Blaine hates Kurt’s politeness, too. This isn’t who they are. This isn’t how they act, all pretense and no content, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He knows he’s behaving strangely.
Kurt is quiet for a little bit longer and then narrows his eyes and raises his chin. “Do you box often?” he asks, and Blaine finds that he isn’t surprised that Kurt is tackling the issue head-on, as much as he’d like to avoid it. That is who they are.
“When I’m frustrated,” Blaine admits. He has to take a sip of his coffee to wet his dry throat. “We have a bag in the basement.”
“Will you show me?”
“You want to watch me hit a bag?”
“Well,” Kurt says, tilting his head thoughtfully, “that’s a picture I hadn’t considered. Yes, I think I might enjoy that. But I was asking if you’d show me how to hit it.”
“You want to box?”
Kurt crosses his arms over his chest. “One, I can’t believe you just said it like that, like I am incapable of lifting my hands to any sort of physical activity. You of all people should know better.” Blaine nods quickly in apology. “And two, no, I have no interest at all in taking it up as a sport.”
“Then why?”
“It seems like it’s important to you.”
“It’s kind of brutal,” Blaine warns. Kurt can be cutting, cruel, and hard when pushed to it, but Blaine cannot think of him as that physically aggressive. He just can’t see it. If he could, he’d have to ask why Kurt didn’t step forward when he and Sam were going at it. He knows Kurt will defend him with the nastiest barbs his tongue can sound, but fists are another matter.
“Is that why you like it?”
Kurt’s question is quiet but direct, and Blaine is caught like a butterfly on a pin. He can wiggle all he wants, but he knows he’s not getting away from the point in Kurt’s sharp eyes.
Blaine breathes the answer out and waits for Kurt’s revulsion. “Yes.”
“Hmm.” Kurt’s expression turns thoughtful.
Blaine isn’t sure if he’s glad Kurt isn’t looking away as he weighs whatever is on his mind. He feels exposed and under judgment, though it’s fair enough. Kurt should judge this part of him, too. He knows it isn’t pretty.
Finally Kurt sets his cup aside and says, “Show me.”
And so somehow Blaine winds up in his basement taking off his sweater, toeing off his shoes, and strapping on his gloves while Kurt perches on his weight bench and watches with intense interest. He’s still dressed to the nines, from the cap on his head down to his meticulously kept boots, and looks wildly out of place in this bastion of sweat and aggression.
Blaine isn’t sure how he feels about Kurt being here, because he’s never going to be able to forget his face in this room as it shifts through whatever expressions are ahead. But Kurt has already made his mark on Blaine’s memories of the space as well as the inner workings of his heart, so Blaine takes a deep breath and tries to make the best of it.
“I usually warm up before,” he says, rolling his shoulders and swinging his arms to loosen them, “but right now it probably isn’t necessary.”
“It’s fine if you want to.”
Blaine shakes his head. He wants to get through this and out the other side. It’s not like this is going to be a proper workout. He swings his arms a few more times and takes up a sparring stance in front of the bag, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet and holding his hands out front of him. “You just - “ He taps the bag a few times, no force behind the movements.
“I’d say you hit like a girl,” Kurt says, “but apart from that being incredibly offensive I know for a fact that Tina hits with a heck of a lot more power than that.”
Snorting out a laugh, Blaine lets himself actually hit the bag. It’s nowhere near as hard as he punches when he’s working out, but the impact still feels good. “Is that better?”
“Hmm.” Kurt stands up and slowly walks over. “That doesn’t look too difficult.” He touches the bag with the tips of his fingers.
“Here.” Blaine grabs his old pair of gloves from the shelf and hands them to Kurt; they probably won’t fit right, but it doesn’t really matter for today.
Kurt’s expression wavers between determined and vaguely displeased as he slips on the gloves, and he stares at his hands for a second before turning to Blaine with a lift of his eyebrows. “Okay.”
“You aim here,” Blaine says, pointing at the target square of tape on the bag. He mimes a punch in slow motion. “You want to hit with this part of your hand, like this.” He mimes again, then throws a solid punch. The smack of his glove against the bag is loud, the impact a buzz up his arm, and Kurt jumps beside him.
After a second, Kurt sets his jaw, like he refuses to be daunted, and draws his arm through a similar path to what Blaine had shown him. “Like this?”
Blaine adjusts Kurt’s hand a little. “Like this. You don’t want to hurt your fingers or wrist.” He nods when Kurt does it again properly; he isn’t surprised by how quickly Kurt can pick up the movement, given his aptitude with choreography. The thing about boxing, though, is that, despite the long history of pugilism as a gentleman’s sport where men dance about each other while following the Marquess of Queensberry rules, it’s really the opposite of choreography. It’s a battle that can look like ballet. It’s fire wrapped up in finesse. Blaine knows Kurt can follow his lead, but he’s also pretty sure that once Kurt is on his own he won’t feel the steps from inside himself.
“And I just... hit it?” Kurt touches the target square.
“Yes. But even though your fist hits here, you want to be trying to hit here.” Blaine slaps the far side of the bag. “You’re trying to project your fist through the bag, so your power doesn’t just stop at the edge.”
Kurt nods, swallows, and then narrows his eyes. With a flashing glance at Blaine, he punches the bag. It’s a good punch - firm, powerful - and Blaine is impressed. He didn’t expect Kurt to hold back, and he knows Kurt is strong, but he’s still impressed. He probably should be ashamed of that.
“That’s...” Kurt rubs his gloved hand with the other like it hurts. “You find that satisfying?”
“Not just hitting it once, but yes. I do.” Blaine watches him, waits.
Kurt refocuses and hits the bag three more times, each with a loud, satisfying smack, before stepping back. He’s breathing hard, far harder than the exertion of the punches should require, and he pulls his hand back against his chest. He looks down, away, and then back up at Blaine, his eyes clear but somehow still shuttered.
“Show me,” he says yet another time, and the flatness of his voice leaves Blaine’s chest feeling hollow. Kurt retreats to the bench, takes off his gloves with sharp, decisive movements, and drops them beside him. The rejection is obvious.
“Show you what?” Blaine asks.
“You. This. What you like.”
The thing about feeling hollow is that it means there’s room for other things to fill you up. So Blaine lets it all in: the loss of the hope that somehow Kurt would catch fire the same way he had, the frustration that so much of his life is a fight to be able to be himself, the anger at being overlooked, ignored, disrespected, passed by, not just at McKinley but for years apart from Dalton. It’s Finn, and Sam, and jocks, and bullies, and parents, and Dalton not being the way the world works, and everything perfect and special about Kurt and their relationship that other people want to cheapen or take from them or not want them to have in the first place.
It’s that despite the fact that he has Kurt, who is amazing and who loves him, there is so much Blaine will always have to face alone, alone, alone.
He lets it fill him up, and then as the emotion begins to crest he aims for the far side of the bag and lets go. He lets all of his feelings coil up in him and burst through his fists into the solid weight of the bag. “You know - “ left, then right “ - when you’re belting out a big note, a real showstopper - “ right, right, left “ - and you get that rush of power at just - “ jab, jab, cross, just the way his body remembers from when he had trained in the gym and not just in his basement “ - pushing your voice out there as hard as you possibly can, to the back of the theater, all the way to the people in the lobby?”
“Yes,” Kurt says as Blaine keeps working at the bag.
“It feels good, right?” Blaine starts to hit harder, faster.
“Singing?”
“That you can do that. That your body can do that.” He sways with the shift of his weight as he pounds against the bag, like he’s dancing to some rhythm deep in his blood. “That you can make people hear you. That people have to. That people have to listen.” He punctuates the last word with an uppercut that hits hard enough that he wishes he’d wrapped his hands before putting on his gloves. The impact reverberates up his arm and into his shoulder and side and makes his fingers ache.
Kurt makes a soft noise of distress, and Blaine steps back sharply, his chest heaving. Oh, god. He can’t do this in front of Kurt. He shouldn’t. What was he thinking?
He’s afraid to look over, and when he does he’s treated to the sight of Kurt staring at him with his eyes as big as saucers. He did that. He made Kurt look like that. Kurt, who usually watches him with nothing but love, is now looking at Blaine like he’s never seen him before. Maybe like he’s overwhelmed by what’s usually hidden inside of him.
Ashamed and distinctly sick to his stomach, Blaine forces himself to drop his arms to his side. He looks at the floor. “Kurt,” he says, “I don’t want you to think - I would never hurt you. This isn’t - I wouldn’t - “
“I know.” Kurt’s voice is quiet but rough.
“No, you have to understand. This isn’t about you. And I know it looks like... I don’t know what it looks like, but I wouldn’t do it to a person. Especially not someone I cared about or - “
“Blaine,” Kurt cuts him off, and it’s surprising enough that Blaine meets his eyes. Kurt is looking up at him with a calm stillness. “I may not want to hit that bag or anything else ever again, but I’m not scared of you. And if you pull out some idiotic line like telling me I should be I will use my newly acquired knowledge to punch you in your large but attractive nose. I will be very sorry to break it.”
There’s so much that Blaine could say, about how part of boxing is knowing how to harness the aggression already inside yourself, about how there’s always a part of him that is burning hot beneath his smile, about how he doesn’t know how Kurt can somehow manage to contain all of his wondrous, talented, passionate, awe-inspiring self in his slim frame while Blaine sometimes feels like he’s about to burst out of the edges of his own body if he doesn’t focus on doing the right thing and being the man he wants to be. He could talk about how good it feels when he does let the reins slip a little, when he does let out his frustration and anger at the world, but he could also say just how terrifying it is that sometimes he’s not sure he’ll be able to pull it all back inside the way he should be able to.
He doesn’t say any of that. Instead he focuses on Kurt, who looks overwhelmed but truly, honestly not scared. And Blaine knows Kurt sees him, because Kurt always sees him. He sees this, too, and he’s not scared of it. Blaine can be, but Kurt isn’t. It’s enough of a comfort that Blaine can respond to what’s really important. “You think my nose is large?”
Kurt tilts his head and shrugs his agreement. “But attractive.”
Blaine lets out a breath that is almost but not quite a laugh.
His posture loosening with something that looks like relief, Kurt pats the bench beside him. “Come sit.” When Blaine does, still kind of stiffly, Kurt gestures at Blaine’s gloves. “You don’t need these.”
Blaine swallows and says, “Sometimes I do, Kurt.”
“Yes, I’m getting that,” Kurt says gently, putting a hand on Blaine’s bare forearm. It’s such a familiar, trusting touch, and something inside of Blaine’s chest twists.
“You need to know, I would never - “ he begins to insist again.
“I know. I’m not worried about that. You have far more devastating ways of hurting me.” Kurt states it like it’s just fact instead of an awful truth.
“That’s not really comforting.”
“It is to me.”
Blaine slowly breathes in and out, listening to the air rasping in his throat. “Why?”
Kurt turns more toward him and laces his fingers over his crossed legs. “I’ve been bullied, too,” he says. “Not like you, but still. I know. I know what it’s like to be hit. Not exactly punched, but - ”
“Close enough.”
“Yes.”
“I know,” Blaine says, and it hurts his heart all over again that Kurt’s had to see him doing anything like those guys did to him. Anything like other guys did to Blaine. Blaine shouldn’t be that kind of person around Kurt. He probably shouldn’t be that kind of person at all, except that he is. At least he could be better about not showing it.
Kurt puts his foot back onto the floor and sits up straighter. “But I also know that if you came at me, if you were so angry you couldn’t see straight, you’d talk. Yell. Throw everything back at me you’ve ever hated about me. You could break my heart. It would take all of ten seconds. Less if you were determined.”
“And this is comforting?” Blaine can barely get the words out around the bile rising in his throat, because he’s done that, hurled his anger at Kurt, not even that long ago, and it doesn’t matter that he was drunk because he did that. His hands twitch in his gloves, and he wishes he were within punching range of the bag.
“Yes,” Kurt says with fierce fire in his eyes. “Because that’s how I fight. I know how to do it, and I do it well. Very well. It would be mutually assured destruction.”
“I can’t believe we’re even talking about this,” Blaine says hoarsely. He can imagine it. He really doesn’t want to.
“It’s a good thing, Blaine. I mean, I obviously don’t want us to do that, either, but... as much as it would tear us both to shreds, it would be equal. That’s comforting.” When Blaine doesn’t answer, Kurt adds with less confidence, “To me.”
“I’m sorry if it’s hard for me to think positively about how badly we can hurt each other even when actual battery isn’t involved.”
Kurt sighs. “I think you’re missing the point.”
“Maybe.”
“As attractive as a show of testosterone-driven aggression can be under certain circumstances, I have absolutely no interest in taking part in it,” Kurt says. “And you don’t, either.”
Blaine lifts his still-gloved hands from his lap. “Obviously I do.”
“Not with me.”
“No, not with you. Of course not. But sometimes I need this.” Blaine gestures at the bag.
“I see that.”
“Do you?” Blaine asks. “Because I want to be the boyfriend you want. I want you to like the way I act, but this is a part of me, too.”
Kurt rolls his eyes, but he smiles a little as he does it. “I know, Blaine. There’s a fire in you: a fire to perform, to win Sectionals, Nationals, a fire to be better, to make a difference, to connect with the people around you. It’s all the same fire that makes you want to fight back when someone or something gets in your way of doing that.” He reaches out to touch Blaine’s chest, and the light press of his fingertips flows all through Blaine’s body like the sweetest caress. “I love that about you.”
“But you have fire, too, and you don’t need to hit things.”
“Only high notes,” Kurt agrees. “It doesn’t mean I don’t understand. I’m here in Lima, too.”
Blaine nods and hopes it’s true, because if Kurt doesn’t understand nobody will. He’s pretty sure, though, that even if he weren’t in Lima this would still be a part of him.
Kurt watches Blaine for a minute. “How does it make you feel? Boxing?”
Blaine thinks about it. He could say powerful, free, in control, out of control, strong, impossible to ignore, a force to be reckoned with, not a victim. Ultimately he takes a breath and chooses to say, “Better.”
Kurt smiles at him and curls his fingers into Blaine’s shirt above his heart. “Then how could you think I have a problem with it?”
“Because you didn’t like it when you hit the bag. You can’t tell me you did; I saw your face.”
“You aren’t me, Blaine,” Kurt says softly. “And we all have to do what it takes to keep going. If this makes it so you’re the wonderful boyfriend you are then it doesn’t matter if I would prefer to live my own life without engaging in violence. Especially since it got Finn to back off. Finally.”
Blaine can smile at that, because it was a very good outcome to his outburst in the choir room. New Directions will be much better, and so will his time at Kurt’s house. “Finally.”
“Besides,” Kurt continues, running his fingers along Blaine’s shoulder, “you really do have the best arms.” Blaine turns his head away and laughs, because he’s more turned on than he should be by the dreamy tone of Kurt’s voice. “What? I never said I was selfless.”
Wrapping his arms around Kurt, Blaine pulls him in tight, and after Kurt recovers from a second of surprise he hugs him right back. “Thank you,” Blaine says. He means for listening, for understanding, for being a partner in this struggle to grow up gay and out in a community that values neither, for loving him even though he’s not perfect or everything Kurt might choose for him to be.
Kurt just smiles against his cheek and says, “You’re welcome.” The kiss that follows is so soothing to the last of his raw nerves that Blaine is more than happy to strip off his gloves and let his touch be gentle again. For now.