Twenty Over Thirty || manxman

XIII - Gas Lighting & Burning Flames

One Year & Four Months Ago

The dorm Kurt shared with his roommate Richard was still his. He never slept there overnight, but he always waited there until Mick's last lecture class was finished. He still had a couple hours to go until they'd leave back to the other man's place, but for now he tried his hardest to memorize the British Sign Language orientation he was supposed to deliver in a couple days. Kurt was stood in the silence of his dorm room, dressed in a black hoody and jeans, alone as Richard had gone out to pick up some books from the library.

While he did his best to sign the paper he'd previously hand written, Kurt began to feel a bit more discomfort at the top of his right arm. It'd been there all day, and he knew what it was coming from, but standing and moving his arms continuously made it even more of a distraction. Getting the last few signs of a paragraph out, Kurt groaned and touched at his arm.

He tried to rotate it to perhaps ease a bit of the soreness, but when that did nothing to help, he gradually came out of his hoody and tossed it onto the twin sized bed. Kurt then went to a mirror hanging just beside his roommate's closet and raised his arm to examine it. There was a dark black and blue bruise at the back of his tricep, about the size of a tennis ball and the sting it radiated when stretched made Kurt wince. As he stared at the wound, he tried to remember for a moment when exactly he'd gotten it. Although his memory was a little faulty at the moment, he suddenly remembered Mick telling him he'd gotten it playing football out in the university quad.

Images of himself running and tackling for the ball entered his mind. Maybe...maybe he'd been kicked on accident by someone else.

"Whoa," Richard's voice came from the doorway, "That's some hit, where'd you get it from?"

Kurt put his arm down and turned to the lanky blonde boy behind him. He had a small stack of books in his hands that he placed on his desk. "I think I got it playing football," Kurt said, "But I'm not too sure."

"A bruise like that and you don't know where you got it?" Richard furrowed his brow and looked back at his roommate. When they first met, he was always used to seeing Kurt striding around with confidence to last a lifetime, but he had noticed the shift about two months ago, around the same time Kurt started going out with someone. Now, the dark-haired boy was a little less outspoken and spent all of his nights away from the university. Looking a little closer at his roommate, Richard narrowed his gaze behind his glasses when he noticed something else. "I think you have another one on your other arm. Do you know where you got that one?"

"What?" Kurt said, confused, and then he raised the short sleeve of his left arm. Sure enough, there was another marking, this one more yellow and closer to his skin tone since it was almost healed. "Oh, I think I got this one from falling down a flight of stairs. Just like the one on me leg."

"You have more?"

"Yeah," Kurt nodded, unbuttoning his trousers, and he pulled them down a little enable to expose another purplish discoloration on the side of his thigh. "I'm clumsy."

"Uh, are you sure no one is...hurting you?" Richard was almost afraid to ask. Kurt wasn't always the nicest of guys, so pushing into his personal life felt like something he should caution about. "I'm a Psychology major so-."

"You think Mick is hurting me?"

"Is that the guy you're dating?"

Knowing he wasn't supposed to give away who exactly Mick was, Kurt just nodded. "He told me where they came from, and I remember now, so it's nothing to worry about."

"Kurt-."

"I'm fine," the dark-haired boy said, "Now I have to memorize these signs for later, so if you don't mind..."