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DECEMBER
It was cold when Sebastian stepped off his plane in Columbus, but he hadn’t lived in California long enough yet to forget what winter felt like. He hadn’t been home since early September, had purposely stayed in LA for Thanksgiving weekend, but this wasn’t exactly his first white Christmas. He had a hoodie in his backpack for now, and when he got up to the gate he pulled it on. The one from Dalton Academy lacrosse was one of the few he’d brought to school with him and he was comfortable in it, even though he didn’t really feel like a Dalton boy anymore.
Slowly, with the crowd of passengers from his flight, he made his way to baggage claim and waited, bored, for his suitcase. Southern California to Ohio wasn’t exactly a short trip, and he hadn’t had anything to eat since the shitty Starbucks bagel he’d picked up during his layover in Vegas. He was probably dehydrated, and he had a twinge at the back of his neck that was going to become a headache sooner rather than later.
Eventually his suitcase showed up and he hauled it off of the carousel. His mom was waiting for him at the curb with a water bottle and his winter jacket, and he gratefully accepted both before offering to drive.
When they got home she started dinner right away and shooed him out of the kitchen, telling him to bring his bag upstairs and take a nap while she cooked. He did as he was told and dragged his bags up to his room. Both his backpack and his suitcase got dumped unceremoniously on the floor before he collapsed back on his bed.
Sebastian stayed there for a few minutes and even considered actually napping before giving in and taking his phone out of the front pocket of his hoodie. Nick knew he was flying in today, which meant everyone else did too, and plans were already being made. He’d probably missed a dozen texts between Las Vegas and Columbus, although it didn’t really matter since he didn’t plan on responding to most of them.
He should probably check anyway. He plugged in his passcode and, reluctantly, turned off airplane mode.
His phone started pinging immediately, but it wasn’t quite the onslaught he’d braced himself for. It was a relief; Sebastian was exhausted and in no mood to have to decide what plans he was even willing to show up for. He flipped through the new texts he did have, answering where he felt like it, clearing out the unread notifications until there was only one message thread left.
His thumb hovered over the most recent message preview from Blaine.
I can pick you up from the airport if you want
He turned his phone off instead of opening it. He’d seen the messages come in, less frequently after the first few weeks, but hadn’t read any of them.
Sebastian closed his eyes. He could probably swing a decent nap before dinner if he fell asleep now.
MARCH
It was 9am, so about three hours before Sebastian liked to be up on a Sunday morning, and his phone was blowing up. He was a popular guy and not unused to getting a lot of texts, but this was excessive, especially this early in the morning. Something must’ve been happening.
He got an incoming call from Nick before he could even look at his notifications, which was annoying, but he figured answering was probably the most efficient way to get the full story on whatever the hell was going down.
“Fucking what, I was sleeping,” he said, because it was early and it was Nick so he was allowed to be a bitch about it.
“No shit, asshole,” Nick snapped back, and Sebastian rolled his eyes even though Nick couldn’t see him do it. “It’s an emergency.”
That didn’t tell Sebastian much. “What kind of emergency?” he asked. “Did something bad happen, or did another bird die?” If he’d been woken up for a heated debate about cufflinks (again) he was going to set someone’s car on fire. Probably Nick’s.
“Kurt broke up with Blaine.”
All of the annoyance left Sebastian’s body at once, leaving space for a cold, creeping dread.
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Last night. Check your messages, we’re holding an emergency meeting tomorrow morning.”
“Okay, sure,” Sebastian said, dragging his hand over his face. “I’ll bring the coffee.”
One of the baristas at the Lima Bean was in love with him, and he always got the employee discount on the to-go boxes. He’d been bringing coffee to every emergency Warblers meeting for two years, and was pretty sure that was half the reason they’d let him on the council.
Nick was still talking.
“...just please, for the love of god, don’t be a dick about this.”
Sebastian frowned. “Blaine’s probably really messed up, why would I be a dick?”
Nick sighed like Sebastian was supposed to know what he was talking about. “We all know how you feel about Kurt, okay? Maybe right now isn’t the best time to gloat about being right about him.”
He would be offended by the assumption that he’d gloat if it wasn’t so fucking early. He rolled onto his back and blinked against the light starting to filter through his curtains. Genuinely, he wouldn’t have started shit right now. Blaine was probably a fucking mess and that would be a dick move, even from him.
The obvious strategy was to let the other guys do the hugging and crying and then when it was time for moving on and trash talking the ex, Sebastian would step in with a bottle of tequila and all the insults he’d been keeping to himself since he promised to be nicer. Blaine would realize he’d dodged a bullet, and all would be right with the world again.
And maybe in that world Sebastian would have a chance.
He sighed and said to Nick, “I’m not going to be a dick about it. Blaine’s my friend, I don’t want to make him feel worse. When he’s ready to slash Kurt’s tires, then I’ll be a dick. A dick with a knife and a getaway vehicle.”
Nick groaned. “Oh my god, there’s no way you’re going to be normal about this. Just–try not to hit on him, at least. It’s so not the time to be offering yourself up for rebound sex.”
Sebastian resisted the urge to say fuck you, there’s more to it than that and hung up on Nick instead. It’s not like Nick knew how much more to it there was.
DECEMBER
Regardless of what they told anyone else, Nick and Sebastian were actually really good friends. It was a begrudging friendship, one in which Sebastian openly told Nick he was annoying and Nick openly told Sebastian he was an asshole, but a friendship nonetheless. Truth be told, Nick was probably one of Sebastian’s best friends, but neither of them were willing to say it out loud.
Nick was the first one to get back to Ohio after Sebastian, so Sebastian ended up at his house not long after Nick flew in from Boston. Nick had immediately pulled out his XBox, so they parked themselves on his living room couch and determined what to play via rock, paper, scissors.
A rare win by Nick meant they were playing Grand Theft Auto, which Sebastian found to be a bit gauche, but he couldn’t deny that there was something extremely satisfying about shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher.
“What’s going on for New Year’s?” Nick asked, not looking away from the screen where he was taking a hot rod off-roading. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard anything, Wes used to mail invitations requiring a formal RSVP by Halloween.”
“And that’s why Wes doesn’t get to host New Year’s anymore,” Sebastian said. “Just text Trent and ask what he wants you to bring.”
Nick frowned, and not just because he was being shot at in-game. “I did,” he said, “he never got back to me. Are you guys phasing me out? Like, it starts with being left on read and then next thing I know you all blocked me on Twitter?”
“I blocked you on Twitter months ago,” Sebastian lied. Nick was actually pretty funny when forced to stick to a character limit. “Just text him again, he’s got the new number so he might’ve missed it.”
Nick seemed to realize something, which made him miss a turn, which caused his hot rod to hit a wall and burst into flames. “Oh I’m an idiot,” he said, and then continued on before Sebastian could agree. “I forgot he had to change it. Do you know the new one?”
Sebastian was busy trying to shake a wanted level, so he pulled his phone out of his pocket and tossed it to Nick one-handed. “It’s in there, code’s 4942.”
“Not a Face ID kind of guy, huh?” Nick said as he unlocked Sebastian’s phone. “Not like you to turn down a chance to look at yourself.”
“What are you, a cop?” Sebastian asked, t-boning a police cruiser in-game. “They need a warrant to get your code but can make you use your face whenever they want.”
Nick raised his eyebrows as he sent himself Trent’s contact info. “Learn something new every day,” he mused. “Wait, hold on, why do you have so many unread texts from Blaine?”
In the split second Sebastian was caught off guard, the GTA police gunned him down. Annoyed, he snatched his phone back from Nick as his screen faded to black.
“Okay, you lose passcode privileges,” Sebastian said, already opening his settings. “I have to change it now, asshole.”
“You’re avoiding him,” Nick said, picking his controller back up and casually flipping through menus in a way that Sebastian knew wasn’t actually casual at all. “Is this about whatever happened before you left?”
Sebastian scowled and saved his new passcode, pocketing his phone before sitting back against the couch with his arms folded. “Nothing happened,” he said, “and I’m not sure I remember asking for your input.”
Nick shrugged, still trying and failing to act casual about it, but said nothing. It was worse than if he’d tried to press, because it didn’t give Sebastian a reason to deflect and change the subject.
Dammit.
“Why do you even care?” Sebastian asked, because he wasn’t able to help himself. “Did Blaine say something?”
“He told me nothing happened,” Nick said, still toggling through different screens without actually selecting anything. Sebastian fought the urge to smack the controller out of his hands. “And like, I think you both actually believe that? So I figure it’s safe to assume you didn’t argue or fuck or something so much as you both got weird and tense about whatever ‘didn’t happen.’”
Sebastian sat frozen on the couch, not sure if Nick realized how close to the truth he was actually getting.
“You talked to him?” he asked, feigning disinterest and… mostly getting it right. He should’ve tried insulting Nick some more to goad him into sniping back so Sebastian could steal his controller and make him play Super Smash Bros, but he couldn’t stop poking at the bruise.
“Well duh, that’s how I know you haven’t,” Nick said, and Sebastian finally caved to the urge to swing his legs up onto the couch, kicking Nick’s controller out of his hands in the process. Unfazed, Nick shoved his feet away before standing up and fishing the case for Super Smash Bros out of the stack next to the TV. It should have felt like a victory, but as Nick swapped out the games Sebastian got the distinct impression he was being humored.
“You know, he seemed just as interested in whether or not I’d talked to you,” Nick continued. “Maybe you guys should just… talk to each other. Wild concept, I know.”
“If you were as good at relationship counseling as you think you are, your parents wouldn’t be divorced and you’d have a girlfriend,” Sebastian said. He regretted the followup questions; it was one thing to poke a bruise, but this was more like trying to force himself to walk on a sprained ankle.
Nick sat back down on the couch and handed Sebastian his controller. “Who says I don’t have a girlfriend?” he asked, and Sebastian was so grateful for the change in subject that he let Nick be Waluigi.
He’d be annoyed later by his own transparency. Granted, Nick knew him better than most (unfortunate), so it made sense that he’d known when to drop it and move on, but Sebastian didn’t need to be coddled about it. It wasn’t Nick’s business to begin with, nosy asshole.
Nothing had happened, so there was no reason for Nick to treat him like he was fragile over some imaginary heartbreak. It was fine. He was fine.
JUNE
“I’m fine, oh my god,” Blaine was saying to Trent when Sebastian found them. “It’s been like three months, I’m not wasting away like everyone seems to think I am.”
“Well that would be a waste,” Sebastian said, sitting down next to Blaine at the edge of the pool and sticking his feet in. Trent groaned and got up to get another drink rather than endure more wordplay. Coward.
Not that being left alone with Blaine was a hardship.
“Are you here to ask me how I’m doing?” Blaine asked Sebastian, swinging his feet through the water. “Because if you are, I’m going to push you in the pool.”
“Oh, so you want to push me around a little, do you?” Sebastian asked, more as a reflex than because he thought it would get him anywhere, he knew better than that by now. He half-heartedly arched his eyebrow and said, “Usually I prefer being in charge, but I might just make an exception for you.”
“And what if I did?” Blaine asked.
Sebastian chuckled into his drink, still not sure the tacky plastic cups were worth keeping broken glass out of the pool. “Okay, sure. Let’s go find a wall for you to push me into, it’s cute that you think you have big enough top energy for that.”
He expected another retort from Blaine, maybe playful splashing or some kind of admonishment about being nice. But Blaine didn’t say anything. After the silence ticked on a second too long, Sebastian looked up at him, and what he saw on Blaine’s face made him do a double-take.
“Wait, are you serious?” he asked. It had been so long since Sebastian thought he actually had a shot with Blaine that he’d almost forgotten what this bubbling hope felt like. He set his drink down next to him and turned towards Blaine. “Because–“
Sebastian didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, all he got was a split second to see Blaine’s pensive expression crack into a mischievous grin before he unceremoniously shoved Sebastian into the water.
As he went under, Sebastian felt his heart sink alongside the rest of him. He’d shown his hand too soon, there had been way too much genuine interest in whatever he’d been about to say to Blaine. There was no way Blaine hadn’t seen it.
Whatever, Sebastian could recover from this. He’d played off worse.
He righted himself in the water and pushed up from the bottom of the pool, and when he broke the surface he made a show of pushing his wet hair out of his face while treading water with just his legs. The water polo league he’d joined the year his family summered in Marseille had only been good for a few blowjobs from repressed old money jocks, but he was still a strong swimmer and didn’t miss the way Blaine stared. Good, he could work with that.
“Oh no,” Blaine said, face full of faux-concern as if butter wouldn’t melt in his fucking mouth. “Are you okay? Looks like you tripped over your own ego there, good thing it’s inflated enough to keep you afloat.”
“Could be,” Sebastian said, still making a point to not use his hands, “or maybe I just have really strong thighs.”
The remark worked perfectly: Blaine’s eyes flicked down to where his legs were working under the water, and Sebastian used the split second of distraction to reach out and drag Blaine into the pool with him. He was careful about it; he pulled Blaine in by his forearms so that he’d safely topple forward into the water, away from the ledge where he could hit his head. Sebastian had already done enough of that kind of damage for a lifetime.
He didn’t account for Blaine’s yelp of outrage though, or the clumsy way he flailed around before latching onto Sebastian’s shoulders and using them to pull himself upright. There was a short and surprisingly unsexy scuffle before they found their balance and Sebastian took Blaine’s weight, treading water with his arms now but supporting them both easily.
“Was that enough pushing for you?” Sebastian asked, blinking water out of his eyes. Blaine had ended up with his arms wound around Sebastian’s shoulders, hanging off his back like a cape with his feet trailing in the water behind them.
“Hmm,” Blaine hummed, pretending to think, and Sebastian felt the thoughtful noise reverberate through Blaine’s chest and into his back. “Nope!”
Sebastian only barely managed to not inhale any water as Blaine dunked him again, this time using his grip on Sebastian’s shoulders to push down. In the ensuing chaos, Blaine got dragged down too, and the scuffle that followed was a lot sexier than the first one.
Sebastian steered them back towards shallower water and gave as good as he got (yeah he did) while Blaine got his fill of pushing, hands all over Sebastian’s bare skin to stay upright as they tumbled and splashed through the water. It was one big teenage boy cliche, the kind of roughhousing Sebastian had always assumed was at least a little bit psychosexual even for straight guys. Especially for straight guys. If Sebastian saw Nick and Jeff doing this, he’d call it a homoerotic mating ritual. He tried not to wonder if that’s what it was for Blaine.
Sebastian’s feet were able to touch the bottom a lot sooner than Blaine’s were, giving him enough of an advantage to lunge forward and grab Blaine around the middle. He turned them in the water and, once they were both standing steadily enough that Sebastian knew he wouldn’t accidentally drown them both in the process, he caught Blaine’s wrists in his hands and pulled them both behind his back.
It was hard work to get his voice dispassionately seductive given the way they were both out of breath and laughing, but Sebastian managed to lean forward and say into Blaine’s ear, “Am I going to have to make you say uncle?”
Whether or not the move would have worked, Sebastian would never know, because a beach ball smacked him in the back of the head before Blaine could answer. Sebastian hissed out a surprised curse and let go of Blaine’s wrists to turn and glare at the culprit.
He honestly expected it to be Nick, who’d been too busy burning hot dogs and drinking all the good beer to be much of a cockblock yet, so it was surprising to see Jeff apologetically shrugging at him from a lawn chair.
“Sorry,” Jeff said, and at least he had the decency to look a little sheepish. “You know the rules, man. We’re being nice to Blaine.”
“Rules?” Sebastian heard Blaine ask from behind him. He realized belatedly that Blaine’s breathless giggles had gone quiet–Jeff would fucking pay for that–and the way Jeff winced told him everything he needed to know about how Blaine felt about this new information.
“Blaine, wait–” Jeff started, but it was too late.
“Rules?” Blaine asked again as he climbed out of the water, loud enough this time that other people started to look.
“I never agreed to them,” Sebastian said, following him up the steps. He’d made that perfectly clear at the emergency meeting back in March, knowing that this was exactly what would happen when Blaine found out.
Trent broke away from the group hanging out around the grill. He must’ve picked up on Jeff’s subsonic Warbler distress signal, something Sebastian had never quite managed to tap into.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, cherubic brow furrowed in a way that made Sebastian want to flick him between the eyes. He considered it more seriously than he otherwise would have; it wasn't like there were teachers around to stop him now that they’d graduated, and the rules had been Trent’s idea.
“What the fuck, Trent?” Blaine shouted, and anyone who hadn’t been watching before was watching now. Sebastian could count the number of times he’d heard Blaine say ‘fuck’ on one hand. It commanded attention. “Do you guys really have rules about being nice to me? Like, was there some kind of meeting to make sure no one accidentally hurt my feelings?”
Trent blanched, and Jeff looked away guiltily. That was enough of an answer for Blaine. Alarmingly, he stalked over to the chair where he’d stashed his stuff, dripping water everywhere while he piled it all back into his bag.
“Wow, okay, you guys must think I’m really pathetic, holy shit. I’m not going to start crying because Sebastian got my hair wet, if that’s what you’re worried about. Jesus, if you’re so sure I’m going to ruin the party with my ruined relationship I can just leave.”
“It’s not that,” Trent said desperately, scurrying after him with Jeff in tow like a line of ducklings. “We just… we know it’s been hard, okay? We didn’t want anything to make you feel worse.”
Sebastian tossed Blaine a towel, which he glared at until Sebastian said, “I don’t give a shit if you’re too sad to dry off, but that’s a leather bag, Blaine. Think of the chlorine.”
Blaine scoffed but accepted it, and shut down any further attempts to talk to him. Sebastian just watched, helplessly, as Blaine gathered up his clothes and went inside to change.
Actually, fuck that.
He followed him in, grabbing Blaine’s bag plus a towel and t-shirt for himself so that by the time Blaine was done he’d be adequately dry and leaning rakishly against the wall outside the bathroom door. It was probably for the best if neither of them rejoined the party just yet.
Blaine was wearing a lobster-patterned polo shirt when he emerged, and it was so mind-numbingly stupid that Sebastian’s shocked silence must’ve come across as residual pity.
“Not you too,” Blaine said miserably. He was already out of steam, never able to stay mad for long even when it was justified. Sebastian wondered, not for the first time, if Blaine and Kurt would have lasted as long as they did if Blaine was the type to fight back when he was being treated like shit.
“Not me,” Sebastian said. “Literally never. Like I told Trent when he made the rules, that’s fucking stupid and I’m not doing it. You got dumped, it’s not like you have cancer.”
That was a little more callous than Sebastian tried to be these days, but Blaine’s shoulders slumped in relief so it must’ve been the right thing to say.
“God,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “This sucks. It’s bad enough that half of McKinley stopped talking to me after we graduated because they were Kurt’s friends first, it really doesn’t feel better when it’s you guys freezing me out because you feel sorry for me.”
“Don’t lump me in with those idiots,” Sebastian said, “I only ever felt sorry for you when you were still shackled to the human version of one of those horrible hairless cats. We should have been celebrating the second you were free. Fuck all of them, let’s just blow off the rest of the party and find something better to do.”
Blaine looked at him blankly. “You can’t be serious.”
Sebastian pulled his car keys out of the pocket of his mostly-dry swim trunks. “If we leave now you can be buying me coffee before anyone even notices we’re gone.”
“Sebastian, this is your graduation party. We’re at your house. You can’t just leave.”
“It’s good to keep them guessing, it’ll add to my air of mystery.” He jingled the keys a little and saw the exact moment Blaine’s resolve began to crack.
“Fine, let’s go for a drive.”
DECEMBER
This phone call could have been a text message, Sebastian thought to himself as Trent segued from the menu for the annual Warblers New Year’s Eve Gala into the decorations.
“You know, I really hoped that when Wes stopped hosting we’d stop calling it a gala,” he said as soon as Trent paused for breath. “Calling the snacks hors d'oeuvres isn’t going to make it any classier when Thad’s puking before midnight.”
“Oh hush,” Trent said. Sebastian had also hoped that six months of low contact would make him more tolerable, but no luck. “Wes is providing the alcohol on the condition that Thad gets no more than one drink per hour. We’re hoping to avoid a repeat of last year.”
Sebastian shuddered. His poor shoes.
“So what exactly is it that you need from me?” Sebastian asked. “I thought we all decided that it was best for everyone if my help stayed strictly financial.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do anything else for the party, though I’d appreciate it if next time you Venmo me you don’t put ‘strippers and coke’ as the message.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes hard enough to feel the sockets twinge. “Then what,” he said, “could possibly be so important that you had to call me at 9pm on a weeknight? You’re going to be back here in less than 24 hours, I’m assuming I’ll see you at Nick’s tomorrow.”
“Have you talked to Blaine?”
Sebastian paused, but only long enough to make sure that what he said next came out skeptical but vaguely bored, not revealing any of the sharp frustration he actually felt.
“Isn’t your whole thing telling me to stay away from Blaine? The entire first year I knew you it was the only thing you’d say to me, and you basically put a protection detail on him after the breakup so I couldn’t talk to him for like a month. I can go back to stalking him in coffee shops if you want, but I thought you were gonna go all ‘Code of Hammurabi’ on me if I bothered him.”
Trent made a choked-off noise of distress and Sebastian knew the deflection had worked. Referencing the Code of Hammurabi anywhere they could reasonably shoehorn it in had been an in-joke for a handful of Warblers in the immediate aftermath of the slushee incident, their way of telling Sebastian what they thought he deserved: an eye for an eye. Vague enough to circumvent the anti-bullying policy, not that it mattered. Sebastian had already proven that "zero tolerance" didn't mean what they'd all thought.
“That’s not what I meant,” Trent insisted, sounding a little guilty. If nothing else, Trent was easy to read, exhaustingly incapable of hiding his feelings. “I just wanted to check in. According to Sam he’s been acting like a kicked puppy and he can’t get Blaine to tell him what’s wrong.”
“Sam?”
“Evans, from McKinley? We text sometimes.”
Sebastian had clearly missed a memo somewhere, because he’d had no idea Trent was friends with the redneck himbo. He needed to put a stop to this now; it was bad enough for Nick to be up his ass about Blaine, Trent and Stripper Ken getting involved would only make everything worse.
The problem with talking to Trent was that he was so goddamn transparent that he was harder to lie to than most people, even Nick. He was so infuriatingly honest about everything that he was really good at picking up on it when someone else wasn’t, and more likely to push if he thought he wasn’t getting the whole truth. Sebastian sighed, he was going to have to say just enough to shut him up.
“I haven’t talked to Blaine,” (true) “so I don’t know what his deal is” (partially true, though Sebastian could probably guess) “and if I did I would have told Nick when he asked me yesterday.” (outright lie) “I don’t know why everyone keeps assuming I did something” (even bigger lie) “but I really didn’t.” (true, but likely part of the problem)
“I never said you did,” Trent said carefully, clearly afraid to start throwing around accusations now that his petty little bullshit from junior year had been brought up. “Just, if you hear anything–”
“I will absolutely not tell you,” Sebastian assured him, the first genuine thing he’d said so far. “This gossipy shit has got to stop, do you really not get how it keeps making everything worse?”
That was true too, and shutting it down had the added benefit of no one fucking asking Sebastian about it anymore.
Trent sighed. “You’re right,” he said, but he kept talking before Sebastian could feel properly victorious. “Speaking of making things worse–I’m sorry about the Code of Hammurabi thing. We were being assholes and honestly didn’t think you even noticed.” That had been deliberate on Sebastian’s part, refusing to react just annoyed them even more. “You know none of us would have physically hurt you, right? It’s not like Thad was going to take your eye out in the middle of bio if you pissed us off.”
“If he had, he might've gotten into Stanford,” Sebastian said. “I’m pretty sure bombing the frog dissection is what tanked his final grade so hard he got waitlisted.”
He was deflecting again, but he needed to find a way out of this conversation. He didn’t know why he’d picked up the phone in the first place.
“Okay, well on that note I’ll let you go,” Trent said, gratifyingly affronted. “I need to get up early if I’m going to beat traffic.”
“It’s a two hour drive, I think you’ll be fine,” Sebastian said, and hung up.
He stopped for beer on his way over to Nick’s the next night (Ohio cashiers didn’t stand a chance against an LA fake), getting a six pack of the good stuff for himself and a case of Nick’s favorite for everyone else. He wasn’t really sure who would be there, most of the guys were home by now but a lot of them were busy with family or girlfriends, neither of which Sebastian found particularly relatable.
He let himself in the front door without knocking, and was met with a fuller house than he’d expected. He was flagged down a few times on his way to the kitchen by people who wanted a beer or to say hi or both, and the case he’d brought was a lot lighter by the time he loaded it into the fridge. He was introduced to Jeff’s new girlfriend, who he liked, and Nick’s current situationship, who he didn’t. He avoided talking to all of them by getting into a heated discussion about lacrosse with David and Wes.
He was in the middle of making David understand exactly why his thoughts about the new crop of recruits for Dalton’s varsity team were so wrong when Wes suddenly perked up. He’d been ignoring their bickering for the most part, but he spotted someone over Sebastian’s shoulder, stood up a little straighter, and waved.
Sebastian wasn’t sure who he’d been expecting to see when he turned around, but it wasn’t Blaine, headed towards them looking like something out of a goddamn Hallmark Christmas movie. He looked softer, somehow. Not just his cardigan, which was a deep maroon cashmere, but the way the cream-colored shirt underneath it wasn’t buttoned up to the collar in the way that always made him look vaguely strangled, and how his hair was looser, curls secured but visible rather than being super glued flat to his head. Sebastian took a long pull from his beer, mouth suddenly dry. What a fucking cliché. He shot a sidelong glance at the bar, because a six-pack of beer suddenly didn’t seem like enough to get him through the night ahead.
“Hey guys,” Blaine said, a stupid little smile on his face as he joined them. He always bounced a little on the balls of his feet whenever he was excited to see someone, an annoyingly earnest habit that made Sebastian’s pulse kick up just a little bit. He chose to not notice the way Blaine’s smile flickered when he saw him, turning almost nervous for a split-second before he breezed past it like nothing happened.
“Blaine!” David said, reaching out to shake his hand like he was networking and not saying hi to a guy he’d known for years. Sebastian would have blamed it on business school, but David had been speaking in corporate jargon for as long as he’d known him, and Sebastian wouldn’t have been surprised if his first words had been “let’s circle back.”
Blaine clearly knew this about him too and went with it, somehow turning David’s cold, professional gesture into something warm and friendly. Wes hugged him in greeting, more openly affectionate than was with anyone else, but Blaine just had that effect on people, especially the Warblers. Sebastian was going to puke.
There was a moment after they parted that could have become an awkward silence when Blaine looked at Sebastian expectantly, but fuck that, Sebastian didn’t do awkward. He lifted his beer in an imitation of a toast, put on his best devil-may-care grin and drawled, “Merry Christmas, Blaine.”
“Yeah,” Blaine said, carefully neutral, and Sebastian found himself in the unusual position of not being able to read his expression. “Merry Christmas, I guess. How’s LA?”
“Hot,” Sebastian said, with a suggestive smirk. Blaine raised his eyebrows knowingly, though what he thought he knew, Sebastian couldn’t tell. “Great weather, very sunny. How’s–“
He stopped short when he realized he didn’t know where Blaine had ended up. He’d been accepted to NYADA but didn’t go for obvious reasons, and it was a topic they’d carefully avoided all summer.
“Columbus,” Blaine finished for him. “Sam and I got a place. It’s fine, but probably not as sunny as California.” Ah, so that explained where Trent had been getting his intel.
“Nice,” Sebastian lied. Blaine could do so much better. “I hear they have a decent gayborhood. At least, decent for Ohio.”
Wes interjected, immediately ready to defend Ohio against anyone who rightfully called it a shithole. Sebastian would have been fine to let him rant until he could find an excuse to leave, but Nick came in from the kitchen and caught his eye. Sebastian watched him murmur something to his “girlfriend” (who was obviously using him as a rebound) and nope, absolutely not. If Nick started in on meaningful looks meant to encourage him to talk to Blaine, Sebastian was going to burn the house down.
He ducked out of the conversation under the pretense of needing more beer, only offering to grab more for the others because he knew they wouldn’t take him up on it. He bypassed the kitchen entirely, giving Nick a wide berth, and ended up on the back porch instead.
It was fucking cold out, but it was quiet. Sebastian set his bottle down on the railing and shoved his hands in his pockets, tilting his head back and watching his breath as it drifted skyward like smoke. Cigarettes had never really been his vice of choice, but he could go for one right about now.
He heard the door to the kitchen slide open behind him. “Nick, for the love of fuck, if you get annoying about this I’m watering your Christmas tree with vodka.”
“Not Nick,” Blaine said, “but if it comes down to that you should know that his mom has been using the same fake tree since before he was born.”
Sebastian didn’t even turn around, just kept staring up at the stars as Blaine joined him at the railing.
“Figures,” Sebastian said. “I guess I can just drink his vodka instead.”
Next to him, Blaine picked the forgotten beer up off the railing and took a drink. “What’s-her-face from Crawford County Day brought Grey Goose, I think she’s trying to make up for the fact that she’s going to dump him in three weeks when her ex-boyfriend decides to commit.”
Sebastian felt better about hating her, Nick was going to be insufferable for weeks when it happened.
“Fifty bucks says she does it before New Year’s,” Sebastian said, turning his head just in time to see Blaine kill what had been a mostly full bottle in record time. “You might want to slow down there, killer. Unless you’re trying to get white girl wasted, in which case we should start with the Grey Goose.”
Blaine chuckled, but there wasn’t any real humor behind it. He didn’t necessarily look sad, Sebastian had seen plenty of what Blaine looked like when he was sad and had been gracious enough not to bring up that it had mostly been before Kurt broke up with him. This look was more akin to disappointment, and Sebastian wondered what had brought it on.
“David asked me how I’m ‘coping’ with my first Christmas without Kurt,” Blaine said, before Sebastian could even ask. Goddammit, he was going to have to work on his poker face. “Wes shut him up but like, wow. Was being his boyfriend really that much of my personality that people still don’t know what else to talk to me about? Don’t answer that, I know you don’t care.”
The note of genuine bitterness in Blaine’s voice surprised Sebastian enough that he spoke without thinking. “I care,” he said. “Like don’t get me wrong, yeah, for a hot minute you were definitely Kurt’s Boyfriend more than you were you–” Blaine scoffed “–but not anymore. And for the record, I never didn’t care, it’s why I fucking hated him so much.”
It was true, but he’d never said it to Blaine so directly. Kurt was the kind of self-centered bitch Sebastian saw a lot in small-town gays: so desperate for every drop of validation he could wring out of his first and only boyfriend that he didn’t even realize he was bleeding Blaine dry. Sebastian had known from day one that Blaine would only ever be collateral damage as Kurt clawed his way out, it was what sparked the stupid vendetta in the first place. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered trying to taunt the jealous boyfriends (or sometimes, girlfriends) of the guys he was trying to fuck; they’d come to him on their own either way, so it wasn’t worth making it messy by getting involved.
Getting involved came too close to caring, and Sebastian wouldn’t allow it. Except, apparently, with the one guy who didn’t even notice.
Blaine looked at Sebastian for a long moment, then shivered. Sebastian was contemplating using the cold as an excuse to bail, but Blaine spoke before he got the chance.
“Do you want to get out of here?” A slow, almost shy smile crept onto his face. “If we leave now you can be buying me coffee before anyone even notices we’re gone.”
Jesus fuck, Blaine was the bravest idiot Sebastian had ever met. And coffee did sound good, if nothing else it might thaw out Sebastian’s fingers, which had been numb for the past five minutes.
Against his better judgment, Sebastian sighed performatively and said, “Fine. Let's go for a drive.”
They went back inside just long enough to get their coats and swipe the bottle of Grey Goose off the bar on their way out.
JULY
Sebastian spent an awful lot of time at Scandals for someone who didn’t actually like it there. Before moving to Ohio, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in such a pathetic excuse of a bar, but before moving to Ohio he’d been in Paris where the legal drinking age was more of a suggestion and he’d had free reign of the city. Here, the best he could do was a dance floor, bartenders who didn’t look too hard at his ID, and lower odds of being hate crimed for propositioning another guy. For Sebastian, all Scandals would ever be was a means to an end; a place to get drunk and get off before getting out.
Blaine loved it.
Without the perpetual buzzkill that was Kurt Hummel weighing him down, Blaine took to Scandals with the unabashed enthusiasm of someone who’d never had a chance to be gay anywhere better. He got friendly enough with the bartenders that his tab was always somehow missing a few beers at the end of the night (infuriating, since Sebastian had unsuccessfully been trying to flirt his way into free drinks since day one) and refused to believe Sebastian when he explained that they were hoping Blaine would tip them with something other than cash.
Blaine didn’t hook up with the bartenders though, and as far as Sebastian could tell, he didn’t hook up with anyone. He seemed to like going just to dance, but that was fine with Sebastian.
He hadn’t been hooking up much, either.
It was the longest he’d gone without getting laid in a while, but he wasn’t willing to call it a dry spell. He could find a hookup if he wanted to, he just… didn’t want to. It was out of character enough that Blaine started giving him weird looks every time he turned down a drink from a stranger, but whatever. He contained multitudes, he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone.
It wasn’t the summer he’d envisioned for himself when he started getting ready for college. He’d been planning his last hurrah before he’d even officially submitted his application for UCLA: it was going to be a few months of debauchery that would go down in Dalton history, and then he’d fuck off to California and Ohio would never see or hear from him again. The Warblers would stalk his Instagram, seething with envy and just a little bit of lust, and if he deigned an appearance at a Christmas party or class reunion, he would show up with a tan and a Rolex and it would be all anyone talked about for weeks.
But instead of being a one-man gay awakening for every “straight” prep schooler in Westerville, looking so debonair at parties that everyone would want to either be him or fuck him, instead of nudging the uptight Warblers into having some fun for once even if that meant breaking the rules a little, he barely even saw anyone but Blaine.
After the fallout of the pool party, Blaine hadn’t been particularly eager to hang out with any of the Warblers who weren’t Sebastian. As a result, Sebastian spent most of his days lazing around on pool floats with the radio at top volume, bickering over song selection before lighting up the fire pit, or going back to Blaine’s to watch a movie. Nick was there sometimes; Blaine didn’t seem as mad at him, probably because Nick hadn’t been able to play along with the “rules” for more than a month. Sebastian was pretty sure Nick had just forgotten about them.
Sometimes he and Blaine just went on long drives, doing nothing at all for hours. Nick didn’t come with them for those.
Once Sebastian had convinced Blaine to skip the fireworks and spend the Fourth of July at Scandals’ IndepenDANCE party, they’d started coming more frequently. It wasn’t like they had anything better to do, and Blaine always had fun. Against his better judgement, Sebastian started having fun too.
He had a lot of thoughts on their music selection, though. Blaine could bop around to Carly Rae Jepsen and Britney Spears all night long, but would it kill them to get something with a little more bass?
Blaine twirled in front of him, spotting his turn like a proper theatre kid, and finished out Cut To The Feeling with a flourish. They’d already heard it four or five times this week, but repetition never seemed to dampen his enthusiasm.
Sebastian had wanted to tap out since they’d played back to back Robyn songs; if they were going to cycle through this same playlist again he’d need to be considerably more wasted, but before he could suggest taking a break to do shots, the music changed to something a little heavier.
“Did you…?” he asked Blaine as he broke out into a slow, easy smile that he didn’t even bother schooling into a smirk.
“Flirt with the bartender who makes the playlist until he added something sluttier?” Blaine asked, his grin matching Sebastian’s. “Yep.”
The next hour was the best time Sebastian had ever had at Scandals. They were too busy dancing to keep drinking, but Sebastian felt it like a shot of tequila when Blaine moved in closer during Into You and stayed there, one hand wrapped around the back of Sebastian’s neck, the space between them growing ever smaller until Partition turned into Born This Way and it seemed as if the bartender had had enough.
“Ugh,” Blaine said, apparently not liking the shift any more than Sebastian did. “Do you want to get out of here?”
If looks could kill, Sebastian would have dropped dead from the way the bartender was glaring at him as he left with Blaine. He winked, not caring if it meant watered down drinks for the rest of the summer.
No one was home when they got back to Blaine’s house. If Sebastian didn’t know any better, if this was anyone but Blaine, he would have assumed he was there to hook up. He’d been hooking up a lot less than usual lately, but he still knew how it went: empty house, a bottle of rum manifesting out of nowhere, all signs pointing towards an easy fuck and a quick getaway.
But this was Blaine. Sure, there was a part of Sebastian that would always be 100% down if Blaine asked, but Blaine hadn’t asked and wasn’t going to, so he accepted the drink Blaine made him and didn’t comment on the fact that it was only about 10% mixer.
“Where’s Mrs. Anderson?” he asked, settling across from Blaine on the couch.
Blaine rolled his eyes. “She and Cooper are camping in Santa Barbara. He got a role as a hiker who gets murdered on Law & Order or NCIS or whatever, so they took a trip to bond and work on Coop’s backstory.”
“They’re glamping, aren’t they.”
“Yep.”
“It’s basically a hotel, isn’t it.”
“Mhmm.”
“And Cooper is going to get attacked by the first wild animal he sees, isn’t he.”
“Oh yeah.”
Sebastian wasn’t phrasing anything as a question because he already knew the answers. He’d only met Cooper once, and only briefly, but he could picture it: a rabid animal would emerge from the woods, foaming at the mouth, and Cooper would point at it until it mauled him.
“He’ll be fine as long as the raccoons stay away from his face,” Sebastian said.
Blaine kicked him in the shin, his legs only just long enough to reach Sebastian’s in the middle of the couch.
“What?” he asked innocently, knowing full well what. He took a sip of his drink as nonchalantly as possible given that it was basically straight rum. “He’s an actor, I’m only thinking about his career.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Blaine said, “totally shameless. I never should have let you meet him, but I guess it’s my fault for not realizing you’d just flirt with him the whole time.”
“Don’t worry,” Sebastian said, catching Blaine wince a little at how strong his own drink was before resolutely pushing through, “your brother is the most tragically heterosexual man I’ve ever met. I had to shoot my shot because he’s like, the tenth best-looking man in North America, but not even I could turn him.”
“Tenth?” Blaine asked, looking at Sebastian warily. There was something in his eyes that Sebastian recognized but couldn’t quite name, a sort of disbelief that an offhand comment about Cooper Anderson’s relative attractiveness didn’t really warrant.
Sebastian shrugged. “Cooper isn’t even the best-looking Anderson in North America.”
He expected Blaine to roll his eyes and change the subject because that’s what they did. Sebastian would flirt, more out of habit than anything else, Blaine would begrudgingly endure it, and then they’d move on. He expected to finish his drink, switch to water, and argue about contemporary musical theatre until they’d both forgotten all about it and he was sober enough to drive home.
He didn’t expect Blaine to keep his drink topped up until they stopped bothering with mixers and started drinking straight from the bottle.
He didn’t expect to wake up in Blaine’s bed in a borrowed t-shirt, hungover, with Blaine passed out fully-clothed next to him.
He didn’t expect to stay there for the rest of the day, getting Denny’s delivered before napping through the last of their headaches. Sebastian didn’t even like sharing a bed with people he’d just fucked, he didn’t expect that sleeping with Blaine–in the literal sense of the word–would be the best sleep he’d gotten in months.
Sebastian had always assumed that the careful distance between them was a condition of Blaine giving him the second chance he’d asked for after everything had gone wrong. Hell, maybe Sebastian had been keeping it himself without realizing it. Apologizing was new to him; he’d never asked anyone for a second chance before because he’d never wanted one. Maybe he’d been maintaining the careful distance as much as Blaine had, to the point where it had just become second nature. Maybe that was why he hadn’t noticed how much it had eroded until now.
Closeness like this wasn't something they did, but as Sebastian fell back asleep next to Blaine, he wondered if maybe it could be.
DECEMBER
“What did you do?”
Nick’s voice was almost shrill. Sebastian was going to throw his phone into a snowbank if he didn’t learn to stop answering it. There was no way it was a coincidence that Nick was calling less than an hour after he’d woken up to the sound of his front door closing behind Blaine as he left without a word. They’d taken Sebastian’s car last night, so it made sense that Blaine had needed a getaway driver, and Nick was enough of a pushover to do it.
“Why does everyone immediately assume I did something?” Sebastian groaned. He wasn’t the most hungover he’d ever been, but was certainly hungover enough to be a bitch about it. “I’ll have you know that stealing your vodka was Blaine’s idea, and so was drinking all of it.”
“That’s where it went?” Nick asked, before recalibrating. “Actually, no, that’s not what’s important here. I just picked Blaine up at your house and drove him home like that’s a totally normal thing to be doing with my morning. What the hell happened?”
“If Blaine didn’t tell you, why should I?”
“Because I’m currently driving back to your house with Denny’s, asshole.”
“You can choke on it.”
“I got you a Grand Slam.”
Jesus fuck, Sebastian was getting predictable.
“Fine,” he relented, “it’s not like Blaine locked the door behind him, but if you didn’t get a milkshake too I’m calling the cops and having you arrested for breaking and entering.”
Fifteen minutes later, Nick handed Sebastian a strawberry milkshake and a styrofoam container with enough fried food to make him feel marginally less like garbage.
“Oh, this fucks,” he said around a mouthful of eggs, not even bothering to greet Nick as they settled at the kitchen table. Normally he’d try to be more mysterious or refined or debonair or what the fuck ever, but unfortunately Nick had always seen right through that particular act. He never called Sebastian out on his bullshit though, and maybe that was why Sebastian had allowed their unacknowledged, vaguely annoying friendship to insinuate itself into his life like a dandelion stubbornly growing through a crack in the sidewalk no matter how much weed killer he poured onto it.
Nick had rung the doorbell, forcing Sebastian to get out of bed to let him in even though it was unlocked, and followed him inside without a word. He sat down across the table from Sebastian, watching him eat with a bemused frown on his face but still not saying anything. Sebastian was so used to having to beg Nick to shut up that the silence was unsettling.
He offered up a piece of bacon, the closest thing to a thank you Nick was going to get and the closest to grateful Sebastian was willing to act. When Nick didn’t take it, not even to have something to petulantly throw back at him, Sebastian swallowed his eggs and his pride and said something first.
“What?” he asked, unwrapping his straw and shoving it through the plastic lid on his milkshake. He knew full well what, but hoped that it was another thing Nick wouldn’t call him out on.
“You know what,” Nick said. He was annoyed, but not in the way he’d get when Sebastian kicked his ass at FIFA or convinced the Warblers to give him a solo without even holding auditions.
Sebastian’s first instinct was to deflect. “Aww,” he said as he set the rejected strip of bacon back down in the to-go container. If Nick didn’t want it, he certainly wasn’t going to eat it. He put on his best imitation of Trent’s patented Concerned Face. “Did the Crawford County Cunt finally go back to her ex-boyfriend?”
When Nick flinched, it wasn’t as satisfying as Sebastian had hoped.
“You know her name is Sarah.” Sebastian did. “And I’m serious.”
He was, and it was even more unnerving than the uncharacteristic succinctness. Nick never took anything seriously, it was one of the things Sebastian refused to admit he liked about him.
“I still don’t see why I should tell you anything Blaine didn’t,” Sebastian said. It was true, and also a great excuse to not talk about it. “I don’t remember him taking too kindly to people talking about him behind his back, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish here.”
That was enough to at least get Nick to roll his eyes.
“I’m not stupid,” he said, plowing through even as Sebastian opened his mouth to contradict him, “but I’m starting to think you might be. Like, I kind of thought that after whatever happened last summer–no, shut up, I don’t want to hear it, something went down whether you’re willing to admit it or not–you and Blaine would push through it and eventually things would go back to normal, but you’re not being normal about this.”
Sebastian scoffed. “Tell me more about what normal people do, Nick. Do you think it’s normal that Sarah won’t call you her boyfriend even though she dumped her ex because she wanted something serious?”
Nick looked genuinely hurt by that, but Sebastian refused to feel bad for him.
“Okay, see, this is what I’m afraid of,” Nick said. “You’d rather be a huge asshole than have a single feeling.”
“That’s never been a secret.”
Nick stood up, apparently having hit his limit, but before he turned to leave he said, “Remember how we talked so much shit after Kurt moved to New York because he was clearly done with Blaine but wouldn’t cut him loose? If you’re going to be an asshole, at least try not to be that asshole.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so Sebastian just stared at him, exhausted by the whole exchange, and shoveled another forkful of pancakes into his mouth.
“Right. Wow. Okay. I’m… I should have known. I’ll see you later I guess.”
Sebastian didn’t see him out.
He was tempted to be properly dramatic about it by sweeping everything off the table in a fit of pique, but their housekeeper was off for the holiday and he didn’t feel like cleaning maple syrup off the tile. Plus the food really was helping his headache.
Dammit.
He kept eating until the only thing left was the bacon Nick had rejected. Feeling the most pathetic he’d ever felt in his life, Sebastian shoved the whole thing in his mouth and opened his texts, scrolling until he found the thread with Blaine that he’d been ignoring for more than four months.
September 2 at 11:58 AM
sorry, that was weird
September 3 at 6:32 PM
did you make it to campus okay?
September 25 at 1:15 AM
Sam and I are at a gay bar in Columbus and wtf, we should’ve been bringing him to scandals with us all summer
he’s like catnip for these guys, they won’t stop buying him drinks even though they know he’s straight and he just keeps giving them to me lol
I haven't been this drunk since we did the les mis drinking game
we still need to finish it
October 7 at 2:03 PM
is living in LA so glamorous that you’re too good for me now?
October 9 at 9:33 AM
I was kidding I don’t actually think that
November 12 at 11:11 PM
are you coming home for Thanksgiving? Thad said you haven’t gotten back to him about game night
December 1 at 2:22 AM
guess not
December 12 at 12:30 AM
Nick says you’re flying back for Christmas soon
I can pick you up from the airport if you want
Sebastian almost dropped his phone when, right as he reached the bottom of the thread, the typing bubble popped up. He wasn’t sure why Blaine had kept texting once it was clear that Sebastian had ghosted him, or what Blaine could possibly want to send him now, but he watched anxiously as the bubble disappeared and reappeared, not wanting to lock his phone and walk away any more than he wanted to see what Blaine had to say.
He wasn’t as relieved as he thought he’d be when the typing bubble disappeared for a final time without a text ever coming through.
AUGUST
Sebastian threw his phone in the backseat and started the engine. He wouldn’t need it; Blaine was in charge of navigation and music, and he’d learned his lesson about texting and driving the first time he’d tried it with Blaine in the car and had been subjected to an hour-long lecture about spinal compression and one of Rachel Berry’s bridesmaids.
“Okay, so Halcyon Fields has two albums out so far, plus the EPs,” Blaine said, buckling himself into the passenger’s seat and grabbing the aux cord, “so with the remixes and bonus tracks, that’s about two and a half hours of music. If we take the long way we should be able to cover it all.”
“Works for me,” Sebastian said, turning the key and easing the car out of the driveway. He’d heard their music before and liked it, which was good considering there was always at least one of their songs on every playlist Blaine made, but it was Blaine’s first time seeing them live and he clearly wanted to make it an Experience.
By the time they’d worked their way through the entire discography, with a few stops along the way for gas and food, Blaine was practically buzzing, bouncing eagerly on the balls of his feet as they waited outside the venue. When the doors opened, he smiled up at Sebastian, who let himself get caught up in the excitement.
They found the perfect spot, close enough to have a good view but not so close that they’d get crushed by the crowd. Sebastian got them a few beers while they sat through a mediocre opening act, and then the show started.
Sebastian had to hand it to them, Halcyon Fields put on one hell of a show. He’d learned enough lyrics through osmosis from Blaine’s playlists that he was able to sing along to more than he expected, and Blaine lit up when he caught him at it, the happiest Sebastian had seen him in months. He could feel the bass in his teeth and the kick drum in his chest as he wrapped an arm around Blaine’s shoulders and lost track of time.
His ears were still ringing as they spilled out onto the sidewalk with the rest of the crowd, but as he started towards the parking garage, Blaine grabbed his wrist.
“Are you sure you just want to go home?” he asked.
Sebastian had no idea what he was talking about. “Do you want to wait until the traffic thins out?” he asked, giving it his best guess. “This is a small venue, I don’t think we’ll be waiting that long.”
Blaine hesitated, but didn’t let go. “No, I mean–did you want to do anything else while we’re here?”
“We’re in Cincinnati, Blaine. There isn’t anything else.”
Blaine sighed and dropped his wrist. “You’re right,” he said, “besides, it’s already going to be like 2am by the time we get home, it’s not like we can just go get wasted at the nearest bar and spend the night.”
He looked at Sebastian with the full force of his huge, disappointed eyes, and Sebastian waited for the other shoe to drop. Sure enough, Blaine wasn’t able to keep up the act for long. He finally broke, raising an expectant eyebrow at Sebastian before tilting his head towards the bar across the street where some of the concertgoers had started to congregate.
Sebastian rolled his eyes, but couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “You know, I’m not sure if I ever mentioned this, but I’m an authorized user on my dad’s Hilton rewards card.”
“No way,” Blaine said, sounding so genuinely surprised that Sebastian might have believed he really hadn’t known if not for the fact that they’d used that very card to get a suite for Nick’s birthday three weeks earlier. “That’s so crazy, there’s one like two blocks from here.”
“You don’t say,” Sebastian said dryly, already pulling the app open.
By the time they stumbled into the lobby a few hours later, they were tipsy enough that the person at the front desk eyed them a little warily, but the account had diamond status and the only pushback they got was a pointed reminder that there was a hold on the card for any damages incurred during their stay.
The room was nice, not that they’d be there long. Sebastian probably could have asked for a later checkout to make up for the fact that there had only been singles left, but sharing a California king with Blaine wasn’t exactly a hardship. It wasn’t even unfamiliar territory; after that day spent napping off their hangovers at Blaine’s house, it had become something of a habit, with or without the booze.
Evidently, Blaine felt the same way. He unselfconsciously stripped down to his undershirt and boxer-briefs before rummaging through the free toiletries for a toothbrush, and Sebastian did the same. Once again he was struck by the fact that with anyone else, he’d be here to fuck. Hell, half the reason his dad let him be an authorized user on the rewards card was because for a while, Sebastian’s clandestine hotel hookups were what kept them at diamond member status.
Sebastian couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, though.
He wasn’t tired, but Blaine insisted that they try to get at least a few hours of sleep before driving home. They settled into a comfortable silence, phones charging on the nightstand, and Sebastian was starting to think that maybe that was for the best when–
“I got into NYADA,” Blaine said quietly, though not quietly enough that Sebastian could pretend he hadn’t heard.
He hadn’t expected this to come up considering they’d been doing a pretty good job of not talking about what was going to happen at the end of the summer. Blaine only knew about UCLA because Nick told him, and Sebastian had assumed Blaine was applying to NYADA but never actually asked.
“I’m not going,” he continued. “I thought I wanted to, but lately…” he trailed off, and Sebastian held his breath without meaning to, waiting for whatever came next. “I think I want something else,” Blaine finished in a whisper, “and I’m not going to find it in New York.”
Sebastian froze and wondered for a hysterical second if this was what it was like to get slushied, his heart suddenly stopping with the ice-cold shock of it even as it set his head spinning.
He couldn’t do this. Blaine was the bravest idiot he’d ever met, but the idiot part had made him too brave for his own good. Sebastian knew right then, with a sickening clarity, that Blaine would follow him to California if he so much as implied an interest.
Clearly Blaine had felt his body go tense, and combined with the few seconds in which he’d had a silent internal crisis, it was enough to interpret the rejection. It was too dark for Sebastian to make out his expression, but he felt the shift as Blaine pulled back in more ways than one.
They didn’t talk much on the drive home. Blaine still had the aux cord and Sebastian didn’t object when he turned up the volume, just kept his eyes on the road and tried not to read too much into the songs that got queued up.
By the time they pulled back into Blaine’s driveway, some of the tension had eased. The last few songs were the ones Sebastian had sung along with at the concert, and he took the peace offering for what it was. Blaine didn’t move to get out of the car right away and Sebastian didn’t push him. He could tell that Blaine had been gearing up to say something for the last 50 miles.
“When do you leave?”
Sebastian had a feeling he already knew, but answered anyway.
“Next week,” he said. “I’m flying out of Columbus.”
Blaine finally looked at him, smiling a little even though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I can take you to the airport,” he offered. “It’s the least I can do after you drove us to Cincinnati and back.”
There were a lot of things Sebastian could have said, that he should have said.
I don’t think that’s a good idea. Uber is fine. You don’t need to go to the trouble. I’m afraid you’ll offer to come with me. I’m afraid I won’t say no.
Instead, he gave Blaine the same not-quite-smile and said, “Sure, why not?”
DECEMBER
Christmas came and went. Nick didn’t try to talk to him again, not even to annoy him into responding to the group chat about the New Year’s party. No one had removed him so Sebastian assumed he was still invited, but he was on the fence about attending.
Logically, he knew that Nick had a right to be mad. It wasn’t just that he’d acted like an asshole, Nick had never cared about that. It was that he’d been mean about it, lashing out at the first easy target he could find with the kind of thoughtless cruelty he’d given up as soon as he’d heard the news about Dave Karofsky.
It had been a hard change to make but he’d made it and he liked himself more for it. Funny how that worked.
Blaine didn’t try to talk to him again either which sucked, because unlike with Nick, there was no reason for it. The way Sebastian had thrown away two years of painful introspection and gradual self-improvement because Nick had tried to figure out what happened that night was made even more pointlessly stupid by the fact that legitimately, nothing had.
After leaving the party, they’d gone back to Sebastian’s house, opened the Grey Goose, and put on Les Mis. He’d agreed to watch it over the summer but only if they turned it into a drinking game, and it turned out “drink when you hear French” meant blacking out before they even got to the barricade. They picked it back up at Eponine’s big solo (Blaine insisted that was the best one, Sebastian thought it was a touch too maudlin) and with some adjusted rules got through the entire movie and the entire bottle before passing out fully clothed in Sebastian’s bed.
They’d barely even talked.
That was what bothered Sebastian more than anything else. Not the not talking, he was fine with that. He welcomed that. But when Nick had called him demanding to know what he’d done, he legitimately hadn’t done anything, and Nick refused to believe it.
Blaine was the one who wanted to leave the party, and it had been his idea to steal and then drink an entire bottle of vodka. Sebastian hadn’t even lied to Nick about that part. Blaine had suggested Sebastian’s house, knowing full well that his parents weren’t home, and they’d only picked the Les Mis drinking game back up because Blaine had insisted they finish the movie.
And then he’d just… left. But instead of calling an Uber or Sam Evans or his terminally straight brother or literally anyone else, he’d called Nick. Sebastian had at least had the good manners to not drag any of their friends into it when he’d bailed for LA, but Blaine had called the one person invested and stupid enough to turn around and go back to Sebastian’s house just to ask all the wrong questions.
He couldn’t be sure if Nick’s assumption that he’d done something wrong was what had driven him to live up to those expectations and finally say something irredeemably shitty; there was a good chance he would have been an acid-spitting bitch either way. It still fucking sucked though, because Nick should know better than that by now.
There was a reason Sebastian had the reputation he did. Granted, he’d spent a lot of time and effort cultivating that reputation, but it wasn’t unearned. People knew him as a talented asshole because he was unquestionably talented and unrepentantly an asshole. He’d done selfish, cruel, and occasionally violent things. The rumors were true.
Except, not quite. Not the unrepentant part. Two years ago he’d sat in that stupid cafe drinking shitty coffee and said he would stop treating life like it was one big joke. He’d promised to do better.
The comparison to Kurt stung, but seeing it through Nick’s eyes, it did make a fucked up kind of sense. Kurt had promised Blaine that it would all be okay, that they’d be together and happy and all he had to do was wait for Kurt to be ready to be a good person. So Blaine had waited, glued to his phone halfway across the country, and it hadn’t done an ounce of good.
The difference between Kurt and Sebastian was that Sebastian wasn’t willing to make promises he didn’t think he’d be able to keep.
He could have. After a certain point, he would have been an idiot to not see it, and contrary to what Nick obviously believed, he wasn’t completely stupid. It had taken him too long to figure it out though, and by the time he put the pieces together he’d already booked a one-way flight to California.
That night in Cincinnati he could have promised Blaine that they’d be okay. The day he left, in Blaine’s car, he could have promised that he’d be back. He could have let him–
He could have promised Blaine a lot of things, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to give Blaine a reason to wait, glued to his phone halfway across the country, for him to figure out whether or not he was the kind of person who kept those kinds of promises. His own feelings, whatever they were, were irrelevant.
Maybe he’d hurt them both in the process, but he’d done his best. It wasn’t his fault that Blaine had waited for him anyway, and it wasn’t his fault that Nick was holding him responsible for everyone else’s feelings while simultaneously accusing him of not having any of his own.
Whenever something went wrong, Sebastian always got a text or a call or someone showing up at his house asking him what he’d done. It never seemed to matter that he’d kept his promise. He’d left the McKinley kids alone, he hadn’t blackmailed or threatened anyone since he’d promised to stop, and he hadn’t tried anything with Blaine.
He’d held up his end of the bargain every single time and yet here he was, watching the replies come in after Trent had texted the group chat asking everyone to confirm if they were showing up for New Year’s, wondering if he’d even be welcome.
Fuck it.
He’d already committed to going, and Sebastian kept his fucking promises.
He texted back. I’ll be there.
SEPTEMBER
Sebastian had flown out of Columbus before, so logically he knew that the drive to the airport wasn’t a long one. It felt long though, and his fingers itched for the steering wheel, unused to being the passenger. It was better than going on a road trip with his parents, who would be meeting him in California with his car and most of his stuff, but not by much.
Blaine had put on one of the newer Halcyon Fields CDs before picking him up, but the volume was turned too low for the music to fill the silence. Sebastian could feel them careening towards something inevitable, but he couldn’t control it anymore than he could control Blaine’s car.
It was a relief to finally pull into the drop-off lane, and Sebastian had a fleeting moment of hope that maybe they’d get through this. He’d leave as uneventfully as possible and then get enough distance between them for everything to chill the fuck out. Blaine would find a boring theatre queer to date and Sebastian would find a good local fuck and by Christmas everything would be back to normal.
“You don’t need to–“ he protested when Blaine unclipped his seatbelt, but it was too late.
“It’s fine, I want to,” Blaine said, popping the trunk as he climbed out of the driver's seat.
Sebastian sighed and followed him out, letting him help unload the suitcases even though it really wasn’t necessary.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said once his backpack was settled on his shoulders and the rest of his bags were safely on the curb. He stuck out his hand for Blaine to shake but Blaine just gave him a wry look before smacking it away and going in for a hug.
Sebastian could roll with this. He hugged Blaine back, but the impatient honk of a car trying to find somewhere to pull up cut it short. Blaine withdrew, but not completely. Sebastian held his breath. The car moved on and found a spot further up.
Any hopes Sebastian may have had about an uneventful departure were dashed when Blaine went up on his toes and leaned in to kiss him. He turned his head and stepped back, tripping over his carry-on in the process, and Blaine stumbled too.
With the moment well and truly ruined, Sebastian took a second to right his bag and pull up the handle before finally risking a glance at Blaine. He didn’t need to worry though, Blaine was looking anywhere but at him.
“I should go,” he said, “TSA is probably going to be busy.”
“Yeah,” Blaine said, blinking up at the gate signage. “You should–yeah.”
“I’ll see you around?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Sebastian felt like he should say something else, but he couldn’t say what Blaine wanted to hear, so he left it there.
Just before he passed through the sliding doors, he heard Blaine call “Good luck!” from behind him, but he was dragging a suitcase with each hand and couldn’t wave in acknowledgment. It was fine, Blaine would know he’d heard.
It didn’t really hit him until takeoff. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, wishing he could order a drink but knowing that an airplane was probably not a great place to be flashing a fake ID.
What was it he’d said to Kurt, back at the start of it all? Odds are by the end of the school year, I’ll have Blaine and a nationals trophy. He hadn’t managed it that year, or the year after. Getting Blaine to kiss him had been his mission since the day they’d met, but by the time he’d pulled it off it was too late.
So much for things going back to normal.
DECEMBER 31ST
Sebastian arrived fashionably late as usual, ready for whatever the night had in store for him. The impulse to go scorched-earth had faded, but he was still prepared for the possibility if anyone said anything out of line.
He realized somewhere between Trent taking his coat and David offering him a beer that he’d been overthinking it. Whatever was happening with him and Blaine, and whatever Nick thought about it, didn’t seem to have carried over into the larger group. Sebastian was sure people were talking about it, and he got a fair bit of pointed ribbing about the disappearing act he’d pulled after leaving for California, but that wasn’t why anyone was here. It was a halfway decent party, and on principle, Sebastian didn’t ruin parties when it could be avoided. No one liked a buzzkill, and everyone seemed to still like Sebastian.
It didn’t escape his notice that Blaine and Nick were both missing. He found Jeff in the kitchen and leaned against the counter next to him, taking a pull of his beer so as to not seem too eager to know when he asked the question.
“Blaine’s picking Nick up from Sarah’s party,” Jeff said before Sebastian could even swallow, confirming Sebastian’s theory that people were in fact talking about it, even if it wasn’t the focus of the evening. Jeff didn’t look up from the plate he was piling food onto, but he did give Sebastian a sideways glance out of the corner of his eye. “Something happened. I didn’t get a lot of details but it sounded messy and I think Nick was already pretty wasted when Blaine went to get him. I’d be careful around him tonight.”
Sebastian didn’t really know what to say to that, so he went with the obvious question. “Let me guess, what’s-her-face’s ex finally decided to commit and she didn't need Nick as a placeholder anymore?”
Jeff didn’t dignify that with an answer, but the way he cringed spoke volumes.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to be an asshole,” Sebastian said, because even though he looked vaguely skeptical, Jeff was one of the few Warblers who wouldn’t take the obvious opening to disagree. “I feel…” he said, taking a bracing breath and ignoring the way Jeff finally looked up in surprise at the words, “...bad. For Nick. It’s a shitty situation and even though he’s been a huge pain in my ass lately, I don’t want to make it worse.”
He neglected to mention that he’d in all likelihood already made it much, much worse. The fact that he’d been right about Sarah would just be adding insult to injury; Nick hated when he was right, especially if he’d been a dick about it.
For the second time in his life, Sebastian considered apologizing. Sure, Nick had been nosing into matters that didn’t concern him, complicating an already tangled mess of a situation, but it seemed to come from a place of embarrassingly genuine care. Nothing he’d said to Sebastian was worse than what Sebastian had said first, and even that was only after he’d been provoked.
Ugh. Sebastian needed to go back to California, where the only interest anyone showed in his life was comfortingly, superficially shallow. He was going to give himself frown lines if he kept this up.
“If–” he said, then paused, not missing how Jeff’s eyebrows retreated behind his bangs at the uncharacteristic hesitation. “If he gets here and he’s not too fucked up, he should come find me.”
He didn’t ask Jeff to relay the message, trusting that it would have circulated the party twice before Nick even showed up, but before Jeff could respond, the front door slammed open and Nick, using every trick for projecting his voice that they’d learned as performers, announced from the entryway, “GUESS WHO’S SINGLE AND READY TO MINGLE?”
OCTOBER
It took less than a month for Sebastian to start to wonder if UCLA wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
First of all, everyone kept assuming he was doing some kind of pre-law, as if Sebastian could ever hate himself enough to be a lawyer. He was obviously there for finance, because he was good at math and liked engaging in risky behavior almost as much as he liked money. It made him a perfect match for Wall Street, as long as he didn’t get arrested for pouring sugar in the gas tank of the next person who assumed he was a Harvard legacy who hated snow too much to live in Massachusetts.
His dad had gone to Ohio State, and Sebastian realized quickly that trudging through the snow in Boston might actually be preferable to sitting in LA traffic.
He spent the first few weeks checking out various clubs with limited success. UCLA took their sports teams way too seriously for him to want to try out for lacrosse, and he’d given up on a capella groups after word got out that he was from Ohio and people kept asking him if he knew someone named Jesse St. James. He suspected Blaine might know who the hell they were talking about, but after a certain point he’d ignored enough texts that it would have been weird to hit him up to ask for the story. He tried not to think about it.
He had plenty of luck finding hookups at the gay clubs in West Hollywood, but the aspiring actors he fucked took themselves even more seriously than the jocks on campus, and honestly, it was exhausting.
He even downloaded Grindr, which he'd previously ascribed to people who weren't hot or interesting enough to find someone out in public who wanted to take them home. It was somehow even more boring than listening to middlingly successful models talk about their workout routine because there was no chase, no way to read someone's body language and tease out the best strategy for getting them on their knees. All he had to do was send a few messages and whatever guy he was talking to would offer to come over, and the whole process felt a little too much like ordering a pizza. Even when he was being an absolutely shameless slut, he at least wasn't lazy about it.
It didn't help that every time he found a halfway decent prospect, something always came up that ruined it. He wasn't exactly known for being picky, but apparently somewhere along the way he'd raised his standards without realizing it. It was endlessly frustrating and he almost missed the nights he spent at Scandals hooking up with anyone who seemed even vaguely interesting.
Somewhere around Halloween, he went home with a guy in a sailor costume that was barely more than short shorts and a vest; tackier than he'd usually go for, but the guy was hot even by California standards and Sebastian hadn't gotten laid in weeks. It was good, really good, but when he looked up at Sebastian through his eyelashes in a move that would normally have been extremely hot, all Sebastian could think about was how his eyes weren't quite the right shade of hazel and how fucked up it was that that was a problem.
He bailed almost as soon as they were done, which he would have done anyway but felt especially necessary now. He managed to get all the way back to his place before the reality of his situation sank in.
The next day, he called his parents and told them he wasn't coming home for Thanksgiving.
DECEMBER 31ST
The rest of the guys flocked to Nick fast enough that Sebastian didn't bother; if he was going to apologize, which he was still on the fence about, he sure as hell wasn't going to do it in public. By the looks of things, Nick wouldn’t remember it even if he did.
Well, shit. Maybe showing up to this thing had been a bad idea after all.
He started to retreat back to the kitchen, planning to follow Jeff's advice by just avoiding Nick until he sobered up, but Blaine caught his eye and pointedly tilted his head back towards the foyer.
Giving Nick a wide berth, Sebastian followed Blaine into what could only, unfortunately, be described as a “man cave.” It had the vaguely musty, still air of the garage it had once been, not quite covered by the layer of fresh paint and desperation that Sebastian associated with suburban heterosexuality. But hey, there was a fridge, and he assumed it was well-stocked.
“I probably owe you an explanation,” Blaine said before Sebastian could even open his mouth to suggest they drink enough to make everything less painfully awkward. Part of him, a very loud part, wanted to just plow through this so they could act like nothing had happened. That had been his goal all along, hadn't it? Leave enough space for them to recover and go back to normal.
Blaine sat down on the atrocious faux-leather couch slowly, carefully leaving an unobstructed path to the door like Sebastian was some kind of spooked animal. It was presumptuous and a little patronizing, but having an escape route did help Sebastian relax a little bit.
Knowing he could bolt if he needed to made the next part easier. He forced himself to look at Blaine, feeling like a spooked animal as he did it, and schooled his expression into one of wry amusement. He didn't say anything, just arched an eyebrow pointedly.
Blaine laughed, which wasn't quite the reaction he'd been trying to get, but then Sebastian laughed too and it broke some of the tension. Somewhere back in the house, Sebastian heard the sound of breaking glass and Nick’s obnoxious drunk laughter.
“He’s really wasted,” Blaine said in a low, conspiratorial tone, like it was some kind of secret.
Sebastian went along with the bit. “No way,” he gasped in mock astonishment. “I never would have guessed, he can really hold his liquor.”
“Oh, he’s known for that,” Blaine said, with an earnestness that Sebastian might’ve believed if he didn’t know better. Nick was an even more annoying drunk than Sebastian had thought possible, and Blaine was a better liar than anyone but Sebastian probably knew.
He dropped the pretense and asked, “She dumped him, didn’t she?”
Blaine grimaced. “I don’t know if it counts as her dumping him if she never even thought they were dating.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah, her ex showed up at the party and did the whole romantic New Year’s declaration thing and she took him back on the spot, because of course she did, but I guess she was genuinely shocked that Nick got upset,” Blaine said. “She set the record straight in front of pretty much everyone at the party.”
“Yikes,” Sebastian said again. He’d been right about her from the start, but it wasn’t as vindicating as he’d hoped. “We probably shouldn’t let him keep drinking.”
“We?” Blaine asked, clearly surprised that Sebastian was willing to participate in saving Nick from himself. It was a fair assumption given that it had never happened before.
Sebastian sat down next to him, not quite making eye contact. “I think,” he said carefully, “I think I fucked up.”
He wasn’t just talking about Nick.
NOVEMBER
“I think I fucked up,” Sebastian slurred into the phone. He rarely drank alone but had opened a bottle of red wine with dinner, and without anyone to share it with he’d had no choice but to finish it. It wasn’t his fault that he never actually got around to cooking.
At least, that’s what he was telling himself.
“California sucks,” he continued. “Everyone here is so hot but it’s the most boring sex I’ve ever had. The closet cases in Ohio sucked dick more enthusiastically, LA gays are a fucking disappointment.”
Nick sighed from the other end of the line. “Is this a booty call or a cry for help?”
“As if I’d ever fuck you,” Sebastian scoffed. “You might be an Ohio eight, but only if you’re not speaking. Otherwise you’re barely a four.”
“You think I’m an Ohio eight?” Nick asked. He sounded pleased, like it was a compliment and not an insult.
Sebastian knocked back the last of his wine and glared at the empty glass as if he could intimidate it into giving him more. It was pretty effective with people, less so with inanimate objects.
“Not the point,” he said. “The point is that I’m surrounded by California tens who can suppress their gag reflexes like deepthroating is an Olympic sport that they’ve been training for their entire lives, and I still hate it here.”
He expected Nick to make some kind of hyperbolic declaration about brain bleach and too much information, because that was how it usually went. Sebastian would say something slutty, Nick would pretend to be grossed out, Sebastian would call him a prude, and Nick would call him an asshole. All would be right with the world because that was how their friendship worked. It should have been a familiar, comforting ritual.
Instead, Nick ruined it by saying, “Cry for help, got it.”
“Fuck you,” Sebastian said.
Nick ignored him as usual. “You realize no one’s forcing you to live there, right? If you hate it so much, just leave.”
Sebastian scoffed again. “And go where, Ohio? You don’t even live there anymore.”
“Blaine does.”
“I don’t care.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care.”
Nick sighed. “You know it’s Thanksgiving weekend, right? Some of us have plans?”
Sebastian knew. He didn’t care. He didn’t dignify the question with a response.
It took a solid 10 seconds of silence for Nick to realize he wasn’t going to get an answer. “Okay, sure,” he said, and his exasperation would have been funnier if Sebastian could see it. “This has been fun, but as much as I’d love to make fun of you for drunk dialing me, I’m supposed to meet Blaine in like fifteen minutes so I have to go.”
“I don’t care,” Sebastian said again. It was less convincing a third time.
“I still don’t believe you,” Nick said, “but whatever. You should call me when you’re not drunk. Or text me. Or text anyone. Someone started a rumor that you got abducted by scientologists and I was starting to believe it.”
Sebastian knew he’d been hard to reach, but that seemed a little extreme. “I’m too strong-willed to join a cult,” he said.
“You’re too strong-willed for a lot of things,” Nick replied, but didn’t elaborate. “Look, I’m going to be late. I’ll tell Blaine you said hi.”
“Don’t,” Sebastian said. It came out sharper than he meant it to, he wasn’t great at controlling his tone when he got wine drunk.
Nick made a thoughtful noise that Sebastian didn’t like at all. “I’ll tell him you’re not dead,” he said. “You know, he asks about you sometimes.”
Sebastian didn’t know, but Nick hung up on him before he could press for more details. Not that it mattered. He didn’t care.
DECEMBER 31ST
Sebastian hadn’t known what he was going to say next, but Nick ruined his chances of ever finding out by barging through the door at exactly the wrong time.
“Fuck off, Trent. I know there’s beer in here,” he said as he tripped over the threshold with Trent and Jeff close behind. He stopped short when he saw Sebastian and Blaine sitting next to each other on the couch, and wobbled precariously until Jeff stepped forward to steady him. Nick just shook him off and pointed angrily at Sebastian. “No!” he yelled.
Under his breath, Blaine muttered, “Oh my god,” and Sebastian couldn’t help but agree.
Admitting he was wrong didn’t come naturally to him. It had been a struggle just to entertain the thought that he should potentially consider the possibility of maybe apologizing to Nick. There was no way he was going to apologize for anything after this, but the knowledge that he probably would have if Nick hadn’t immediately ruined it made him a little more charitable in his response.
“What do you want, Nick?” he asked, surprised by how calm and even he was able to keep his voice. By the looks on their faces, so was everyone else.
Caught off guard, Nick sputtered for a minute before finding his words. “I want you to leave him alone,” he said, pointing at Sebastian and then Blaine, jabbing his finger for emphasis like there was any question as to who he was talking about.
“You’ve gotta stop hanging out with Cooper,” Blaine said, clearly trying to lighten the mood, but Nick wasn’t listening.
“What did I tell you, Sebastian? I told you not to be that asshole. Don’t act like you mean it and then fuck off like nothing happened because you found something better and only care about yourself.” Jeff grabbed him by the arm and Sebastian appreciated the attempt to calm him down or drag him away before things escalated any further, but Nick twisted out of his grip, madder than ever. “You’re being a Kurt,” he insisted.
Blaine looked at Sebastian, clearly confused but understanding enough to be hurt. “What is he talking about?”
“He’s projecting,” Sebastian said. He could feel his control over the situation rapidly slipping away and was frantically trying to figure out how to claw it back.
Trent made another valiant but futile effort to usher Nick out of the room, but it was too late. Things had gone too far and Nick was more than happy to answer Blaine’s question.
“I told him,” he said, staggering forward a few steps, “I told him he was acting like Kurt and stringing you along and to get his shit together before he broke your heart too.”
On the couch next to him, Blaine had gone dangerously still. “How often do you guys talk about me?”
“We don’t,” Sebastian said, at the same time Nick shouted, “All the time! It’s all we’ve talked about for months!”
“Months?” Blaine asked. He didn’t raise his voice, but that almost made it worse. Everything that happened between them before it all went wrong at the airport had been built on the fact that Sebastian was the one person in Blaine’s life who didn’t do exactly what he and Nick had been doing since Thanksgiving.
“Now look what you did,” Nick said to Sebastian, as if he hadn’t started this whole mess on his own. “I knew it, you haven’t changed at all. You’re still the same piece of shit you were when I met you.”
Sebastian reached his limit, the last of his self-restraint snapping as he shot to his feet.
“You think I’m still that guy?” he asked Nick, ignoring the imploring way Blaine said his name from the couch. “Okay, give me one single instance of me being that guy. Objectively, not just in whatever fucked up scenario you made up in your head. I’ll wait.”
It was validating to watch Nick struggle to come up with anything specific. “You took the thing with Kurt way too far,” is what he eventually settled on. “People got hurt.”
“Did anyone think to ask me about any of this?” Blaine asked.
Sebastian barely heard him. “I apologized for that,” he said, keeping his voice low. There was no way Nick’s yelling had gone unnoticed, and knowing the Warblers, there were probably at least a few people listening at the door. “I said I would do better, and if that’s the only thing you can come up with, it looks like I did. We’re done here.”
It would be a shame to leave Blaine behind, but Sebastian had to get out of there before he said something he’d regret, and he couldn’t pass on the opportunity to prove his point: he was reformed now, and refused to fight dirty.
The only problem was that Nick was standing between him and the door, and was either too drunk or too stupid to let him walk away. He put a hand on Sebastian’s chest when he tried to pass, and shoved him, just a little bit, back towards the couch.
Everyone in the room froze, and time stood still. Sebastian had been trying very, very hard to stay as civil as possible, and until now there had been a chance for recovery. He could have slipped out quietly, leaving the others to babysit Nick, and the party would have continued without further interruption, but Nick was determined to pick a fight. On a certain level Sebastian even understood why Nick had chosen him to be the punching bag, but this was a step too far.
“Nick,” he said, clenching his jaw, “get out of my way.”
“No,” Nick said, as stubborn as he was idiotic, “because if you leave now, you’re never coming back. You already hurt him once and you don’t even care that you’re about to do it again.”
“Can we please stop talking about me like I’m not right here?” Blaine asked. He sounded absolutely crushed.
Fuck.
Any remaining pity that might have motivated Sebastian to let this go evaporated in an instant as something inside him cracked. He was taller than Nick and used that to his advantage as he leaned in close, working malice and condescension into his posture like a muscle memory.
“It’s cute that you think you’re better than me, but be honest with yourself, you weren’t even good enough to be some bitch’s rebound. She’s a smart girl though, because you’re two, maybe three years away from blowing into a tube to start your car so you can drive to an AA meeting in a church basement. When you inevitably have to make a list of people you’ve wronged as part of your court-ordered Twelve Step Program, I hope Blaine’s name is at the top because you and I both know that all of this white knight bullshit has nothing to do with what I've done and everything to do with that sick sense of shame you feel when you remember that unlike me, you never owned up to your mistakes.”
He saw the dawning horror on Trent and Jeff’s faces as they realized where he was going with this. Nick caught up just a second too late.
“Don’t,” he said, but Sebastian couldn’t stop now even if he wanted to.
He wanted to.
He didn’t.
“You know what I think?” he asked, and didn’t pause to let Nick answer. “I think that if you really cared about Blaine’s feelings, you would have told him by now that you’re the one who handed me that slushee.”
Sebastian had just enough time to register Blaine saying, “I’m sorry, what?!” somewhere in the background right before Nick reared back and punched him in the face.
NOW
Sebastian had to give credit where credit was due: Nick could throw a truly impressive punch. He could tell that the throbbing bruise under his eye was going to get worse before it got better, but fortunately he’d gotten the hell out of Westerville fast enough that no one but his parents would ever see it.
He couldn’t exactly hide it from them, given that he’d come home from a New Year’s party hours before midnight sporting a black eye and a bloody nose. His mom had asked just enough questions to make sure he wasn’t concussed, and all his dad cared about was whether or not Sebastian had done anything that might involve the cops, or worse, the press.
He’d managed to convince them both that it was just some big misunderstanding and all he needed was to get back to California and focus on school. His flight was in less than 36 hours, all he had to do was pack his bags and wait it out.
It was pleasantly warm when he stepped off his plane in LA, but everything felt a little too bright. Maybe it was his gloomy mood, or maybe it was the fact that his eye still hurt, but he was already annoyed as he squinted against the sun in the rideshare pickup lane.
He slipped on his sunglasses in the backseat of his Uber and told himself that he’d adjust. He’d never fully acclimated to California and realized now that it was because he’d been too reluctant to fully cut ties with his old life, but that wasn’t a problem anymore.
He was finally where he belonged, and there was nothing left to hold him back. He was finally free.
*
The black eye faded, but the feeling that freedom wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be only grew. At first, Sebastian attributed it to the same general discontent he’d experienced during his senior year: being nice sucked. Apparently he’d spent just enough time with the Warblers to be infected with their do-gooder, friendship-is-magic mentality, and it was messing with his head.
Some would call it community, Sebastian called it contagion.
He stopped partying. Drinking had lost a lot of its appeal, at least for the time being, and the handful of friendly acquaintances he’d made during first semester stopped texting him after the third or fourth time he bailed on plans to go out.
No one from the Warblers texted him either. They were probably circling the wagons around Nick, which was kind of bullshit given that the whole ordeal was his fault, but it was equally likely that everyone had (correctly) assumed that Sebastian wouldn’t respond. He’d never really bought into the “once a Warbler, always a Warbler” bullshit, even when the words were coming out of his own mouth, but maybe it just didn’t apply to him specifically.
He wasn’t surprised that he didn’t hear from Blaine. Sebastian had already ghosted him once, it made sense that Blaine wasn’t willing to put up with it again. Sebastian was almost proud of him; that kind of backbone would have served Blaine well when he was still dating Kurt, but better late than never.
*
Sebastian realized that he had bigger problems than who was or wasn’t texting him when he sat down to take a midterm he'd been sure he was going to breeze through and realized he didn't understand a single question on it. He’d never been the type who needed to study and had pulled off a solid 3.7 GPA in the fall without putting in much effort, but he knew even before he got the grade back that he’d failed.
He wrote it off as a fluke, but actually studied for the rest of his midterms anyway. It was harder than he expected, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t outright failed anything else. He hadn’t exactly done well, though, and his grades were going to suffer even if he managed to pull himself together and ace his finals.
On the first day of spring break, he caught himself wishing he had more schoolwork just so he’d have something to do, which was preposterous. There was a lot to do in LA, and if he wanted to get out of town, he had plenty of options. There was a time when he could have spent an entire week just going to the beach, and there was no shortage of those in southern California.
Sebastian loved the ocean, so much so that he was absolutely despondent during his first landlocked summer in Westerville without a trip to Marseille or even Nantucket to look forward to. He’d been so miserable that when the guys started acting suspiciously secretive he didn’t even try to find out why, he just sat back and waited for what he assumed would be another ill-advised flash mob.
What he got instead was a minivan full of Warblers showing up at his house at 8am, dead-set on getting him to open water. Lake Michigan wasn’t exactly the French Riviera, but he’d had a great time anyway.
Sebastian was now driving distance from some of the best beaches in the continental United States, but all he wanted was to be back in that minivan, dehydrated and windswept and elated every time he got Blaine to laugh instead of frowning at his phone as he texted Kurt.
Oh no.
Sebastian picked up his phone, feeling like he should call someone about this, but put it back down when he realized that he didn’t think anyone would answer if he did. For an insane second he considered calling the registrar’s office and dropping out on the spot, but he put that on the backburner for now.
Instead, he called his parents’ travel agent. Usually that was reserved for trips to Corsica or Sicily, but time was of the essence. He had an idea that was slowly starting to unfold into a plan, and he had to go now, before he lost his nerve again.
*
He had to fly economy with an unnecessarily long layover in Denver, but Sebastian made it back to Ohio in under 24 hours. He’d spent a significant portion of that time trying to figure out what he could say to Blaine that was halfway coherent and didn’t sound like total bullshit, but came up with less than he would have liked. He’d decided right away that this needed to be an in-person discussion; he had a lot to answer for, but he had questions of his own and that wasn’t exactly something they could hash out over FaceTime.
Sebastian was also, at his core, a performer, and so was Blaine. The dramatics of showing up unannounced might actually work in his favor.
He had contingency plans for if Blaine wasn’t home or wouldn’t answer the door, and had packed light so he wouldn’t be weighed down by suitcases when he arrived at Blaine’s house straight from the airport. He opened Uber, his hands shaking a little either from nerves or all the caffeine he’d consumed since getting on his 5:45am flight, and realized immediately that he’d made a huge miscalculation.
He had no idea where Blaine lived.
It was somewhere in Columbus, but Sebastian didn’t know any more than that. Social media had shown him pictures of Blaine hanging out with Nick, who was also home for spring break, but there were no convenient location tags and nothing so far that day.
In an act of utter desperation, he swiped out of the Uber app and opened his phone, choosing to call Nick instead of texting him, even though it might not help him beat the sociopath allegations.
He was so shocked when Nick actually answered with a tired, “What do you want?” that he dropped his phone. Nick hung up at some point in Sebastian’s desperate scramble to retrieve it, and he was forced to redial.
It rang for long enough that Sebastian resigned himself to being shit out of luck, but right before the call went to voicemail, Nick picked up again.
“Either you pocket dialed me twice or you’re drunk, and I’m genuinely not sure which would be more embarrassing for you,” Nick said in lieu of hello.
“I’m in Ohio,” was all Sebastian could think of to say back, “at the airport.”
Nick sighed. “Congratulations. Go fuck yourself.”
“I’m not mad that you punched me,” Sebastian said, hoping it was enough to keep Nick on the line.
It worked. “Go on,” Nick prompted, sounding skeptical but interested enough to listen.
“I’ve made some bad decisions in the past few months. Maybe not rock salt in a slushee levels of bad but still pretty bad.” This next part was hard, but the only way out was through. “I think I might have deserved it.”
Nick was silent for long enough that Sebastian pulled his phone away from his ear to check that the call was still going. Eventually he said, “You absolutely deserved it. I still shouldn’t have done it.”
“I’m willing to call it even if you are,” Sebastian said, feeling his anxiety level drop just a little bit.
“Apology accepted,” Nick said, even though Sebastian hadn’t actually apologized.
“Yours too,” Sebastian said, even though Nick hadn’t actually apologized either.
It was so normal, so familiar, that for an alarming moment Sebastian was worried that he might cry.
Nick wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. “I stand by my original question,” he said. “What do you want? Actually, no, my real question is ‘what is wrong with you,’ then ‘what do you want’ followed by ‘why should I care,’ although I’ll accept the answers in any order.”
“The answer to at least two of those questions is that I’m not really sure,” Sebastian admitted. “Right now I just need Blaine’s address.”
“Absolutely not,” Nick said, and Sebastian was prepared to argue his case, but Nick kept going. “I’ll come get you at the stupid airport and drive you over to Blaine’s myself, but only if you have a latte, $20 cash, and a reason for me to do it when I get there.”
Sebastian didn’t tell him that he could have asked for much more. “Fair enough,” he said, and walked back into the arrivals terminal. The Lima Bean had a satellite location next to baggage claim, he could make this work.
*
Nick got there up fast enough that Sebastian wondered how far above the speed limit he’d been driving. He threw his bag into the backseat, handed Nick the latte with a crisp $20 bill tucked into the cardboard sleeve, and waited expectantly for Nick to start driving.
“Well?” Nick asked instead of taking his foot off the brakes. “Are you going to tell me why I should drive you to Blaine instead of kicking you out of my car right now?”
Sebastian froze. He’d hoped a good reason would come to him in the moment, but if he was being honest with himself (which he couldn’t seem to stop now that he’d started) there really wasn’t one. Nick refused to move.
They stayed like that, ignoring the impatient honking of several cars, until a man in a hi-vis safety jacket angrily gestured at them to keep moving and Nick reluctantly pulled away from the curb.
“This doesn’t mean I’m taking you to Blaine,” he said. “If nothing else, you at least need to tell me what the fuck happened between you guys because Blaine still won’t talk about it and I can’t push because I’m still shocked he’s willing to talk to me at all.”
There was a story there, but Sebastian would have to get it later. Instead he just sighed, “I don’t know how many times I can say it, Nick. Nothing happened.”
Nick turned into the airport Park & Ride lot so fast that Sebastian had to brace himself against the dashboard.
“Bullshit,” he said, slamming on the brakes as soon as they were off the road. “If you don’t give me something I’m looping back around to the departures and leaving you there.”
Sebastian, jostled by the sudden stop, lost his patience. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Literally nothing! Maybe that was part of the problem, but truly, genuinely, nothing happened.”
Nick stared at him, clearly trying to work something out, and Sebastian stubbornly stared back. After a moment, Nick’s face softened.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh my god, you’re serious. What the fuck?”
Sebastian groaned. “Can we please just go?”
Nick pulled back onto the road, clearly stunned by either the revelation that Sebastian had been telling the truth or the fact that he’d said please. He was too surprised to say anything, and they were almost all the way out of the airport, so Sebastian spoke first before Nick could change his mind.
“We mostly just got drunk and listened to music.”
“Oh my god,” Nick said. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Shut up.”
“So after graduation when you snuck out of your own party with him…”
“We got coffee and went for a drive.”
“And all summer when you guys were inseparable and not hanging out with us and sharing hotel rooms?”
“We became regulars at Scandals, he liked the music. We shared one hotel room, once, because we wanted to get drunk after a concert. He told me he wasn’t going to NYADA, and I very deliberately didn’t allow anything to happen because I was leaving in less than a month.”
“Holy shit.”
Sebastian sighed and tilted his head back against the headrest as Nick pulled onto the highway.
“Here’s the thing,” Nick said, mostly keeping his eyes on the road but giving Sebastian an occasional sidelong glance, “I actually believe you, but now this makes even less sense. When I picked Blaine up at your house he was hungover and wearing last night’s clothes. If you weren’t fucking, what the hell were you doing?”
Sebastian groaned and buried his face in his hands. He was never going to live this down.
“It was Blaine’s idea,” he said, the admission coming out muffled from between his fingers. “He stole your vodka, made me watch Les Mis, and was gone before I woke up.”
“Les Mis?” Nick asked incredulously. “Like, Russel Crowe, Aaron Tveit, Anne Hathaway, Les Mis? Jesus, no wonder you were drunk, Hugh Jackman was a terrible Valjean.”
It was enough of a non sequitur that Sebastian looked up.
“Really?” he asked. “That’s what you’re getting out of this? Not the fact that I was trying to make things okay again but he left before I could and less than an hour later you showed up at my house and compared me to his shitty ex-boyfriend?”
It was almost gratifying to watch some of the color drain from Nick’s face as he put some of the pieces together.
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
Nick had trusted Blaine’s silence over Sebastian’s words, and it still hurt a little. Granted, Sebastian probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it either way, but if Nick had just let it go instead of poking the bruise until Sebastian snapped, they might have avoided the eventual blowup.
In the driver's seat, Nick seemed to be reaching the same conclusion.
“Oh god,” he said. “Like, don’t get me wrong, you’re for sure still the asshole here, but I probably made things way worse, huh?”
“Yep,” Sebastian said, popping the p for emphasis. It was a lose-lose situation, and it was a relief that someone other than him was finally starting to realize it.
Everyone, including and especially Nick, had been telling him for months, years even, to leave Blaine alone. It didn’t matter that Blaine was Sebastian’s friend too.
Sure, he’d been a little callous about the whole “in a relationship” thing at the beginning, but the expiration date on it was visible from a mile away, and Sebastian didn’t see the point in waiting for the inevitable to make a move. Blaine was cute, it would be fun.
Maybe that was why no one noticed when it turned into more than that. Sebastian couldn’t exactly blame them. He didn’t even notice the shift himself until two days after he’d apologized for Blaine’s eye and Dave Karofsky and everything else, when Blaine had called him and quietly asked if he’d really meant it. When Sebastian said yes, Blaine cautiously agreed to proceed as friends, nothing more, and Sebastian was so relieved he hadn’t lost Blaine for good that he didn’t even care that it wasn’t what he’d wanted.
He behaved himself after that, mostly. A little recreational flirting never hurt anyone, and he kept it light enough that he could pass it off as a joke if anyone pressed.
And they pressed.
Maybe it was the Warblers’ innate cult-like devotion to each other, or maybe it was that Blaine inspired the same kind of protectiveness in all of his friends that had led Sebastian to add rock salt to a slushee in an attempt to keep Kurt away from him, but even after the breakup, every move Sebastian made was the wrong one. No one seemed to consider the possibility that things could work out and be okay, so Sebastian never did either. The prophecy eventually fulfilled itself.
“Oh my god,” Nick said again, and Sebastian briefly considered grabbing the wheel and driving them both off the road. “Sebastian, how long has this been going on?”
Sebastian didn’t dignify that with an answer, just glared at Nick out of the corner of his eye.
Nick flipped his blinker on and merged across two lanes of traffic so fast that Sebastian reflexively pressed his foot into the floor mat in front of him, forgetting that he didn’t have control of the brakes.
“I was going to take the long way to make you suffer,” Nick explained, “but I think we should go now.”
They pulled up to the curb in front of a duplex on a quiet side street less than 10 minutes later. Sebastian reached for the door handle, but Nick hit the locks.
“I’m not going to be that guy,” Sebastian said firmly, referencing the accusations that had been rattling around in his head since Nick had first made them months ago, hoping Nick would understand the underlying promise. I’m not going to break his heart on purpose.
“I believe you,” Nick said, and unlocked the door. “Now get out of my car, you smell like Delta Airlines and desperation.”
“The desperation is all you,” Sebastian said, but without any real bite. “You’re going to have to replace the seats, you’ll never get it out of the upholstery.”
Nick laughed and Sebastian climbed out of the car. “Hey,” he said before Sebastian closed the door behind him, “once a Warbler, always a Warbler, right?”
Sebastian would never admit it, but that was better than any apology Nick could have offered.
He barely registered walking up the path to the house. The momentum of the previous 24 hours carried him to the front door without his conscious input, he couldn’t stop now even if he wanted to.
He didn’t want to.
The door opened before he could even reach forward to ring the bell, and there was Blaine, somehow looking even better than he had at Christmas. He finished shrugging on his jacket while Sebastian stared, wishing more than ever that he hadn’t listened to all of the people telling him not to make a move.
Sebastian had never in his life let other people tell him what to do, he was an idiot for starting with this.
“Nick called me on his way to the airport,” Blaine explained, and Sebastian looked back over his shoulder just in time to watch Nick drive away, giving him the middle finger through the window.
“My bag is in his car,” Sebastian said stupidly, turning back to Blaine. He was leaning against the doorframe, making a good show of looking casual. Most people might have even believed it, Blaine was as good at performing offstage as he was on it, but Sebastian knew him well enough to spot the act.
And that was it, wasn’t it? He knew Blaine. He knew how Blaine overcompensated for his insecurities with bravery, how he had the kind of blind faith that made him throw himself over furniture or at people even when he wasn't sure he could stick the landing, how he gave everything to those he cared about, 100%, even if it meant having nothing left for himself. Blaine raised an expectant eyebrow at him and Sebastian knew, with remarkable clarity, that they would be okay no matter what he said next, because Blaine knew him too.
It was terrifying.
It was like nothing else he’d ever felt.
Fuck it.
They were going to have to talk about this, but that was a problem for later. For now, he grabbed Blaine by the lapels of his coat and kissed him like he should have months ago. Blaine made a small noise of surprise but didn’t pull away until someone called for him from inside the house.
“Yo, is someone here?”
Sebastian moved Sam Evans to the top of his shit list.
Blaine was still close, their mouths only a few inches apart, and something hopeful started to grow in the space between them.
“If we leave now, I can be buying you coffee before he notices you’re gone,” Sebastian offered.
Blaine grinned, stepping back inside just enough to grab his keys off a hook next to the door.
“Let’s go for a drive.”