Chapter Text
Sebastian’s phone is missing.
This doesn’t happen often. The phone is always in his hand or his pocket while he’s awake, and charging on his nightstand while he sleeps. He can’t remember the last time it’s been out of his reach for more than a few minutes, but he’s been searching his house for a long time now, and he’s waiting for a very important email response. The email hadn’t been in his inbox when he woke up this morning, or after he showered, or when he had breakfast, but it could be there now, just waiting for Sebastian to open it and read the good news. Or the bad news. He doesn’t want to just expect that it’s going to be the response he wants. He’d been too forward, probably. Maybe the email will just completely blow him off. Maybe he’ll never get a reply email at all.
Sebastian’s spent a good ten minutes retracing his steps before he realizes that the house is quiet. Too quiet.
“Jamie? Is everything okay?” he calls, peering into the playroom where his son is meant to be watching his favorite morning cartoon. Jamie’s seated on the floor in front of the television, but that isn’t what’s holding the boy’s attention. He has Sebastian’s phone gripped tightly in one hand, and he’s staring at it with the utmost concentration, his dark curls hanging over his face. He’s even biting his lip as he jabs his finger onto the touchscreen. It’s adorable, and Sebastian immediately reaches into his pocket to retrieve his phone so he can take a picture, rolling his eyes at himself when he realizes why that’s not possible. Since his son hasn’t replied to his query, Sebastian asks another question. “Remember when we talked about how this phone is just for grown-ups? Where’s your phone?” Sebastian surveys the room quickly, hoping to spot the toy cell phone Jamie likes so much.
“Wanna watch the cat video,” Jamie says, finally taking his eyes off of the screen. He holds the phone out to Sebastian. “Play it, Daddy?”
Sebastian sighs. One of the few drawbacks of Jamie spending so much time with his older cousins is that they share things with the three-year-old that Sebastian really would rather he didn’t know. Like the fact that his phone could be used to play cat videos.
“How about we go pick out something for you to wear today?” he asks as he takes the phone from his son. “Then if we have time, we can watch it before we leave for school. But not on my phone, because that’s for grown-ups.”
Jamie scrunches up his face to show his disapproval for this plan. “I wanna go to Aunt Nessa’s and play with the big bear.”
“Well, it’s Monday, so you have to go to school first. You know that.”
“I hate the school toys.”
“Oh yeah?” Sebastian asks, leaning over the couch and lifting his son into his arms. “Yesterday you said you loved them.”
“I don’t today.”
“That’s too bad,” Sebastian says as he carefully steps over the child gate and heads upstairs toward Jamie’s bedroom. “I’m sure Morgan won’t mind playing big bear with you after Aunt Vanessa picks you up from school.”
The ‘school’ that Jamie goes to is more of a glorified daycare center that offers classes for kids between two and five to learn age-appropriate preschool lessons. Jamie spends his mornings there a few days a week, along with Sebastian’s four-year-old niece, Morgan. Sebastian drops him off there in the morning, and Sebastian’s sister, Vanessa, picks up Jamie along with her own daughter when the sessions are over. Vanessa is a stay-at-home mom, with two older boys in addition to Morgan, and she watches Jamie while Sebastian’s at work. It’s an arrangement that enabled Sebastian to keep his job and avoid hiring a nanny after his ex-husband moved across the country last year. He often repeats his vow to make it up to her someday, and she always dismisses him with a wave of her arm. “My reward is the look on people’s faces when I tell them my baby brother plays the dashing Adrian Chevalier on Desire Street.”
Becoming a soap opera star had never been Sebastian’s dream, but it more than paid the bills, and he couldn’t complain about an acting job to add to his resumé. When he’d first moved to Los Angeles four years ago, he’d gotten roles in a few commercials, but Desire Street had been his first real break. It’s a new daytime soap opera focusing on the torrid affairs of a bunch of rich, attractive twenty-somethings who run a high-class escort service. It’s pure trash, of course, but Sebastian enjoys the work. The show is now in its fourth season, and Sebastian’s character has been bumped up from a secondary character to the male lead after the departure of another actor. The ratings have fallen since, but it still has a decent number of viewers, so Sebastian’s not too worried. Soap opera acting isn’t what he wants to do forever, anyway. His agent has him going out on a lot of auditions, but for now, Sebastian is content to have a steady job in his field.
“Okay, buddy,” Sebastian starts as they enter Jamie’s bedroom. “What do you want to wear today?” He puts the boy down and watches him run to the dresser.
“Spider-man!” Jamie yells, throwing out his arm in an attempt to mimic Spider-man’s web-throwing motion. Spider-man is a new obsession for him, something that, like the discovery of the ability of grown-up phones to play cat videos, can be attributed to Vanessa’s older kids, Theo and Oliver.
“You wore your Spider-man shirt yesterday,” Sebastian reminds him.
“So?”
“So you got a pretty big juice stain on it, and if you want laundry done every single day, you’re going to have to hire a housekeeper.”
Jamie looks bewildered, but doesn’t reply. He digs through his shirt drawer until he finds an acceptable Spider-man substitute, then hands it to Sebastian.
“Good choice. You need pants, too. Not shorts, it’s kind of chilly out today.”
Jamie has a little more difficulty finding the perfect pair of pants, and Sebastian uses the spare moment to give his phone a quick glance. Upon seeing that he has a new email in his inbox, his heart starts beating faster. This could be it.
Sebastian deflates when he sees that the email is from his mother. He’d forwarded her the itinerary for his trip back to Ohio for Christmas, and she had written a few lines about how excited she was to see him, even though it was such a shame Jamie would be in New York with Rob. The reminder that he won’t be spending Christmas with his son doesn’t help the disappointment he’s feeling about not getting the email he’s been so anxiously awaiting.
“Did you pick a pair of pants yet?” Sebastian asks, trying to sound as cheerful as possible.
“These?” Jamie holds up a pair of dark jeans that Sebastian knows fit him well enough as long as he rolls them up a bit.
“Perfect,” Sebastian says, smiling at his son. “Now let’s get you dressed so we’re not late for school.”
When Jamie’s fully dressed and has taken one last trip to the bathroom, they still have ten minutes before they have to leave, so Sebastian does a quick search on his tablet for cat videos. Once he finds a playlist of what seems to be a bunch of completely harmless videos of cats doing stupid things, he hits play and sets it on the living room floor for Jamie to watch. Sebastian sits on the couch and checks his phone again. No new emails. It probably doesn’t mean anything, because sometimes it takes a few more hours to get a reply, but it still makes Sebastian nervous. He had tried to be casual about his question, not put too much pressure while still trying to make his intentions clear, but maybe it hadn’t read that way. Before he can stop himself, Sebastian’s opening his sent mail folder and clicking on the email he sent before he went to bed last night, ready to re-read it for what seems like the 10th time.
-
November 21, 10:03 pm PST
To: Kurt <keh593>
From: Sebastian LS <seblawrencegp>
Subject: re: A ship worse than ‘Mack’
LOL, I wholeheartedly agree. Some people in this fandom really are delusional, but hey, that’s nothing new, right? I’m sure that post of yours will convert a few people, though. You have that kind of power!
On another note, do you remember us talking about maybe meeting up if I came to Ohio for Christmas? I know it was awhile ago, but I just finalized my plans, and I’m going to be around from December 23 until January 2nd, so if you have some free time in there, I’ll be mostly bored. I love my family, but there’s only so much I can take. Actually, there’s going to be a knock-off of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Lima Playhouse until the new year, and it promises to be hilariously terrible. Maybe you heard about it? It seems like something we’d both enjoy mocking. Anyway, my mom knows people who work at the theater, and apparently, tickets are going fast? I can’t imagine why, but if you have a free night in that time frame and would like to go, let me know, I can have her get tickets for us. We could just go get dinner or something instead, if you’d prefer. Or we could do both, if we don’t hate each other on sight somehow, which doesn’t seem likely, since I haven’t found anything about you I don’t like yet :). I won’t lie, I really hope you’re free at some point. I haven’t been to the theater (or something that resembles it, I guess that’s a more accurate description of this) since my son was born. He’s great, but I think you’ll be much more pleasant company for this particular outing.
I’m going to get to bed. I hope you slept well and have a good morning! I’ll wish upon a star that your terrible employee doesn’t offend anyone tomorrow! <3
-
In the back office of Hummel Tire and Lube, Kurt lets out a dreamy sigh as he finishes reading Sebastian’s email for the third time. He can’t help it. He knows he’s probably being a bit too romantically optimistic, but Sebastian asked him out. Sebastian still wants to meet him and he has concrete dates that he will be in the area. He wants them to see a show and go out to dinner, alone. It looks like they’re finally going to meet in person, after seven months of talking (almost exactly seven months - Kurt had looked up when he received his first message from Sebastian, just in case that information needed to be used as some sort of anniversary in the future). It sounds a whole lot like a date.
It’s not just giddiness he’s feeling as he hits ‘reply,’ though. It’s been about 11 hours since he read the email for the first time, and he’s still not entirely sure how to respond. He’d had trouble sleeping after reading it, a strong sense of doubt tempering his excitement at the prospect of finally meeting the guy he’s been flirting with online. Kurt wants to meet him, has wanted to for months, but it’s a strange situation. They’ve been careful up until now. Nothing is official yet. Despite strong implications on both sides that they have definitely crossed the friend line, they don’t even know each other’s full names. Until September, when they exchanged phone numbers so they could text, they hadn’t even known each other’s real first names, and had only called each other by the screen names they used online. Kurt doesn’t know what Sebastian looks like. He does know that Sebastian is 28, lives in LA, works as an actor, has a young son, and, like Kurt, has a shameful love for the hit teen television program Godfrey Pride. Well, a love that they probably should consider shameful, anyway.
Kurt had been watching the show since it premiered last year, but it wasn’t until he’d moved from New York back to Ohio in April that he really fell in love. He joined the online fandom almost immediately, despite not having really participated in any fandoms since his teenage obsession with Grey’s Anatomy. It was easy to fall back into it. He’d needed the distraction as he prepared to spend a year living with his parents in his old house. Moving back to Lima at 29 after spending his youth so desperate to escape hadn’t been easy, but the decision had been the most logical. Finn’s wife had gotten pretty serious injuries in a car accident and needed a lot of help , and Finn was taking a leave of absence from managing the shop to take care of her and his eight-year-old stepdaughter, Lily. He could have promoted someone within the shop, but he told Kurt he and Burt both preferred that someone in the family be in charge. Kurt knew that Finn had been trying to do him a favor by asking him to take the job. Despite graduating with honors from NYADA, Kurt had been struggling to find acting jobs, and despite working as a receptionist and moonlighting at a coffee shop, he had started to fall behind on bills. He has a savings account that hardly anyone knows about that he’s been building up for years, supplemented by some money he had inherited when his grandmother died, with plans to one day start his own wedding planning business if the acting thing never pans out, and he had come dangerously close to having to tap into those funds. Going back to Ohio for a year to save money and help out his family made sense, and as awful as being a failure who had to move back in with his parents feels, Kurt thinks it might actually be a slight improvement from the constant panicked state he’d been in back in New York. The thought that he’s giving up a rent-free home and a steady job to go back there in five months is already troubling him.
Just like it was for him in his teen years, the show and its fandom have been a necessary escape from real life. The show is centered around a bunch of high school kids, and it’s aimed at a teenage audience, but Kurt’s fallen in love with the show’s male lead, a confident gay boy named Camden. He thinks if there had been someone like Camden on TV when he was high school, it would really have helped him out.
Sebastian loves Camden, too, and that’s how they met. Kurt had written a few pieces of fanfiction for the large ‘Timden’ portion of the fandom, who desperately hope that Camden and Tim, another gay character who’s still in the closet, will eventually admit their feelings for one another and get together. Despite Kurt’s own doubts about his writing skill (he guesses it’s more a lack of other tolerable writers than any great talent of his), his writing made him popular in the fandom pretty quickly. His in-depth episode analyses are read and commented on by hundreds of people each week, and he has tons of people sending him messages. Most of them are nice, and the rude ones always come from anonymous commenters or the fandom’s known lunatics. He likes getting hateful comments, actually, because it really gives him a chance to flex his snark muscle when he replies.
“Hey, Kurt?” says a voice from the doorway, startling Kurt from his thoughts.
“I’m on lunch right now, Dan,” he replies. “Is it important?”
“There’s a lady out here who wants to talk to whoever’s in charge. I could get someone else to pretend, if-”
“No, no,” Kurt says, minimizing his email and getting up from behind the desk. “Let me guess. You were hitting on her, and she’s offended.” It’s not the first time Kurt’s had to apologize to a customer after an incident like this. Dan is a close friend of Finn’s, though, and the brother of a police officer who had apparently helped Puck and Finn out of a situation that they all refuse to share the details of. Firing Dan isn’t an option during Kurt’s year here, but the guy drives him crazy. He’s a decent enough mechanic, and Kurt has given him express instructions to not deal directly with customers, but the guy can’t seem to help himself whenever an attractive woman is involved.
“I was just saying she looked good and she should give me her number,” Dan says as he and Kurt leave the office. “I don’t see how that’s offensive.”
Kurt sighs. “Most people don’t want to be hit on every time they come to get their car serviced, Dan. This is not the place to meet women.”
“Well, where the hell am I supposed to meet people in this town?”
“I don’t know. Try the Internet.”
Dan rolls his eyes. “Dude, I’m not that desperate.”
“Well, then you can die alone, I guess. Work isn’t the place for this. Stay back here while I fix this, okay?”
Kurt’s years of experience at menial jobs in the service industry have made him quite adept at dealing with enraged customers, and his time spent working with brides-to-be in the wedding planning business helped. His training in acting is useful, too, but whenever he’s apologizing for Dan’s behavior, he doesn’t need to rely on that. There’s no pretending involved here, because he is always legitimately ashamed of what Dan’s done. It takes Kurt awhile to talk with the woman, say he understands, apologize profusely, arrange for her to get a large discount, and give Dan another lecture and strict warning to stay away from customers. By the time he sits back down at the computer in the back office, an hour has passed. His reply email still has no words, and though he knows that Sebastian’s at work by now and probably not too bothered by the late reply, Kurt feels bad for the delay. He’s usually replied to Sebastian’s emails by this point in the day, and emails with a specific question, like today’s, he usually answers quickly when he wakes up in the morning. He’s just still having trouble figuring out how exactly to word the response. He doesn’t want to sound excited and scare him off, or sound completely unenthusiastic and make it seem like he’s not interested. Dating is complicated, and every relationship he’s had since Blaine has been characterized by confusion, doubt, and discomfort in its early stages. Things are even more difficult now that the other guy is someone Kurt hasn’t met and only communicates with through written words.
Kurt thinks this relationship is worth it, though. He had never expected to find someone so much like him in the fandom for a show about high school kids. Sebastian’s gay, close to his age, and he has a degree in acting, too. In a fandom filled predominantly with females in their teens and early twenties, Sebastian feels like an oasis in the middle of a desert. While Kurt appreciates the power trip that comes with being well-known in the fandom, he’s much more fulfilled by the personal connection he’s made with Sebastian. Kurt’s glad that Sebastian had so strongly agreed with Kurt’s rant on the treatment of the show’s transgender characters by the fandom that he felt the need to private message him in hopes of discussing it further. Since that day in late April, Kurt doesn’t think they’ve gone a full 24 hours without speaking online. They even started watching the show together when it came back from hiatus in September, Sebastian watching live on the west coast after putting his son to bed and Kurt watching the version he recorded three hours earlier while they trade instant messages. He looks forward to Wednesday nights all week. Sebastian helps him get through his days working at a job he doesn’t care for in this town he despises. Kurt can’t believe they might finally have the chance to meet each other in person and see how compatible they really are.
There are issues, of course. Kurt’s in Ohio, and heading back to New York in April or May, and Sebastian lives in LA. Kurt’s done long distance relationships before, and he’d rather not do it again. Sebastian is also a single parent to a young boy, which is something Kurt has never experienced in his dating life. Most young gay guys just aren’t single dads. Kurt hasn’t asked for the full details about this part of Sebastian’s life, and Sebastian hasn’t offered them. Kurt’s not even sure the exact age of the child, only that he’s not old enough to have started kindergarten yet. The only child Kurt’s familiar with is Finn’s stepdaughter, and she was five when he met her. He’s glad Sebastian made it clear that his son would not be at their theater date, because Kurt’s not even sure how to handle young kids. Even Lily, who is old enough to mostly behave like a human being, still befuddles him sometimes. If Kurt had to deal with the peculiarities of a young child in addition to the pressure of meeting Sebastian in person for the first time, it probably wouldn’t go well. But the kid does exist, and if anything serious ever does happen between them, it might be an issue.
Kurt knows he’s getting ahead of himself. They talk online and happen to have parents that live in the same area of Ohio, and maybe when they meet, there will be no actual chemistry. Maybe they’ll just remain good friends that enjoy watching and discussing Godfrey Pride with each other.
It’s not what Kurt wants, though, so he vows to be as open as possible in his reply. He straightens his back, takes a deep breath, and starts typing.
-
November 22, 12:53 pm EST
To: Sebastian LS <seblawrencegp>
From: Kurt <keh593>
Subject: re: re: A ship worse than ‘Mack’
Hey, Sebastian! Sorry the response is a bit later than usual. Clearly you need to work on your star-wishing, because my least favorite employee has already offended someone today. My lunch got interrupted by an emergency customer intervention. The guy is a menace, I swear.
Anyway, I’d love to see you over Christmas! Honestly, besides the 24 and 25th, I’m free every night. And that show does sound truly terrible. It’s being advertised on the community board at the shop, and I’d actually been considering going just to laugh at it. It would be an honor to mock it with you (silently and mostly through facial expressions during the show itself - we’re not terrible people, after all) I’m sure you have a busier schedule that week than I do, visiting all your family while you’re in town, so please, pick whatever night works best for you, and just let me know.
By the way, have you seen the spoilers going around this morning about Brock and Matt? (I still can’t call them Mack. HOW IS THEIR SHIP NAME NOT BRATT?!)) I know we agreed to avoid spoilers, but these are for after winter hiatus so that doesn’t count, right? Okay, I know I shouldn’t have looked. If you have somehow managed to remain strong in the face of such spoilery adversity, I won’t spill, but if you have succumbed, we MUST discuss the potential of these new developments.
Okay, my lunch was cut short by the incompetence of others, and I have to get back to working on the schedule. Have a great day at work! Are we still on for tomorrow night? I feel like I’ve been waiting for this Thanksgiving episode my whole life.
Kurt
-
As soon as he finishes reading the email, Sebastian lets out the breath he’s been holding. He’d actually seen the email notification on his last filming break an hour ago, but he hadn’t worked up the courage to open it until now. He wishes he hadn’t waited. Maybe the director wouldn’t be so annoyed with him for screwing up all of his lines if he’d been able to get this weight off his chest before. It’s official, though. Kurt wants to meet him. They’re going to meet, go out, see if they click in person the way they do online. They will, though. How could they not? He and Kurt had first started talking only a few short weeks after Sebastian started poking around the Godfrey Pride fandom. It was Sebastian’s first foray into fandom since his Gossip Girl obsession started in middle school, and despite Sebastian being a nobody in this fandom and Kurt having thousands of people hanging on his every eloquent word, they had found each other and made a connection. Sebastian had turned to fandom mainly for an escape from the isolation of being a single parent, and Kurt has given him that. He has someone to talk to that he isn’t related to, someone who asks about his day and actually cares about the answer, someone he can dream about a future with.
Sebastian knows he might be getting a little ahead of himself, because no matter how well they end up getting along, they still live on different sides of the country. When Kurt moves back to New York in the spring, they’ll be even farther apart, and Sebastian’s been trying to ignore the overeager part of his brain that keeps reminding him that his ex lives in New York, too, so it wouldn’t be completely crazy to consider moving there himself in June instead of renewing his contract with the show. He just hasn’t gotten to experience the giddy, light feeling of a new relationship in almost a decade, and the thought that he could have some sort of real future with the wonderful guy he’s grown so attached to in the past seven months is thrilling.
“Hey, Smythe, we have to run that scene again!” calls the director. “Think you can remember your lines this time?” His tone is teasing, but not cruel. Sebastian hardly ever screws up, so he knows today’s flubs aren’t going to get him in any real trouble.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Sebastian says, pocketing his phone. “I’m ready now. I won’t screw it up this time.”