Noises on the phone line. After a while I can hear Cathy's terrified voice.

"Blaine, I'm begging you, it's a sudden situation! My dad has had a heart attack and I don't know what to do with Melanie! I need someone to take care of her while I’ll be at hospital... I'm just getting into a cab, could you give me your address?"

For a moment I'm silent, but then I obediently give Cathy my address and she thanks me, full of relief, like she thought I might say no.

I'm ventilating my apartment knowing that smoke can do a lot wrong to a little girl. I'm terrified. I've never taken care of a child in my entire life, I was always the youngest one in the family. Melanie's three years old. What are the three-year-old children like? What do they eat? What do they play? Do they still need diapers? What the fuck am I gonna do?

When Melanie and Cathy appear at my door, I don't feel any more smarter. Cathy gives me little pink backpack and nervously explains when I should give Melanie a dinner. She also gives me a plastic bag with a jar full of soup. 'You'll warm it up and it's ready.' Well, at least with that she solved one of my problems. Sounds easy enough.

Finally Cathy kisses girl's cheek and waves goodbye to both of us.

“My brother is going to pick her up around five,” she promises. “I’ll let you know if something changes, but he probably will simply come to your apartment… Okay, bye, honey, be nice to Blaine and don’t cause any trouble!”

And that’s it. The door closes and I’m left alone with Melanie. She looks at me with her big green eyes, apparently expecting me to say something.

And so I do it.

“Uhm… Hi.”

Blaine Anderson. Twenty-year-old man, tongue-tied because of a little girl.

***
I hate Central Park during the winter.

Melanie’s hand seems so small in mine and for a moment I’m scared I’m going to crush it, but the girl doesn’t want me to let go of it. She’s scared I’m going to lose her, she says, and then she tells me about the incident with her grandpa, when the man lost her from his sight just for a second during some trip and they couldn’t find each other for next half an hour. The story is too chaotic to understand more, but obviously it had happy ending. Melanie finds the memory very funny, so I laugh with her, although I’m not so sure whether I’d be amused if I were her grandpa.

I check the time – it’s a little past four. It was set that Cathy's brother will pick Melanie up in a coffee house placed nearby Central Park so he don't have to go to my apartment.

Walking around the town with a little pink backpack in my hand, makes me feel incredibly stupid and the looks given me by people don’t make it any better.

“Young daddy and he’s doin’ so well!” I hear one woman’s comment.

Jesus.

I haven’t smoked since today’s morning and although I’m really trying to control myself, I answer Melanie’s questions with my jaw slightly tensed. I change my attitude when the girl hides her face in my sleeve, complaining that it’s getting colder and she would like to drink a hot tea. I look at her thin coat and I bend down to wrap my scarf around her neck.

“I already have one”, she notices. “I don’t need your scarf. And you’re gonna be cold.”

She’s very smart for a three-year-old, I think.

“I’m fine, don’t worry about it” I lie, but she seems to believe me, because she gives me a heartwarming smile. Suddenly I’m not so mad with the lack of cigarettes. And suddenly I feel a lot warmer. We keep on walking as we get closer to the Park entrance. It’s time to go, I decide. I don’t want Melanie to get a cold, my scarf won't help her much. We can wait for her uncle in the coffee shop and get some tea in the meantime.

The girl is jumping happily by my side, and the pom-poms attached to her hat are jumping with her.

“Will you tie my shoe?” she asks at some point.

I help her sit down on the bench, as she’s too small to do it on her own, and I bend down to tie the shoe. My fingers are a little stiff from the cold and they start hurting, so I clench my jaw, making a note in my head that I should buy myself gloves. How I hate winter. Somehow I manage to lace the shoe and I want to take Melanie from the bench, but she doesn't let me. Her eyes are fixed on the east part of the park, and she asks:

“Blaine, why are these two men kissing?”

I frown slightly. She points at them with her finger and I want to tell her that she shouldn’t point at someone like that, but as I turn around, I completely forget what I wanted to say.

My heart stops. My mind stops. The whole world stops.

No.

It can’t be him.

Kurt Hummel laughs lightly as he kisses the other man once again, this time on the cheek.

What is he doing here?

I’m still in shock, but slowly my brain starts to put all the pieces together.

Look at this man. He’s the one Kurt left you for. Look closely.

But the man says goodbye to Kurt and then he walks away in the opposite direction. All I can see is his black coat. It’s a very nice coat, I think. Looks good on him. Probably Kurt helped him buy it. Maybe they were together in the dressing room and…

I close my eyes for a moment, as my head starts spinning.

I'm wondering how many times Kurt snuggled into that fabric.

To my despair, Kurt’s heading in our direction. He looks at me and Melanie briefly, but he’s still too far to see me clearly and he focus his gaze mostly on Melanie. He smiles gently. Good. I take a deep breath, feeling a little relieved. Kurt looks at the couple sitting on the bench not very far from us, but he quickly looks away seeing how busy they are with each other. Clearly even the cold can’t stop them.

This time Kurt looks at me.

Directly.

And he recognizes me.

The smile freezes on his lips.

I think he mouths my name, but I can’t be sure because of the distance. I realize that I’m still squatting, and although I tied the shoe long time ago, I still keep my hands up. I blink few times and help Melanie from the bench. The girl immediately grips tightly my hand and she snuggles up against me tiredly, asking me if we can go now. Kurt doesn’t move even a bit. He looks at Melanie with his eyes wide open, like he’s trying to understand something. And I think this is when he makes a decision.

He runs up to us, hugging me tightly and wrapping his arms around my neck, practically, tackling both of us, me and Melanie to the ground. He keeps repeating my name.

“Blaine, Blaine… It’s you, it’s really you…”

No, no, no.

I’m completely stiff in his arms. I don’t move, I don’t say anything.

This can’t be happening.

It can’t be real.

For a moment I think that this is all a dream, bad, bad dream and my subconscious is simply fucking with me. Maybe I’m daydreaming, who knows.

No. Kurt is here.

He’s really here.

His warmth, his smell, his voice and his heart beating next to mine… Nothing has changed. Everything I’ve been longing for, his touch, his breath against my skin, everything that made me love him so much, it’s really here. So it has to be real.

Finally I come to my senses and I step back, moving away from Kurt’s warm arms. I think this is when he realizes that he just tackled his ex-boyfriend, because his face gets red of embarrassment. As if he realized just now that he’d broken my heart.

I feel trapped. I don’t want Kurt here. Not now. Not when I finally managed to move on. Melanie’s pulling my sleeve and she’s apparently asking me something, but I can’t hear her voice. I don’t hear anything but my heartbeat.

“You’ve settled down.”

Kurt’s words help me come back to my senses, come back to the reality. Kurt smiles lightly to Melanie and she presses her face against my jacket, hugging my leg. She’s embarrassed.

Somehow I mange to find my own voice.

“She... She’s not mine,” I mumble.

Kurt’s quiet.

I’m not sure he believes me.

For a moment I feel like running away.

“I… We… We should probably get going,” I say and I nod at Melanie. “Her uncle’s probably already waiting for us.”

“Can I go with you?”

For a moment I think I've misheard him.

What the fuck is he doing?

Can’t he see I don’t want him here? At all? Can’t he see that I’m doing my best not to make him a scene in the middle of the park? Can’t he see that I all I want to do is to run away from him?

Is he out of his freaking mind?

“Sure,” I reply.

Idiot.

The walk to the coffee shop is silent. Melanie is humming happily some song, obviously not aware of that situation and heavy atmosphere. Finally it hits me, that the girl is only three years old. What can she know about me and Kurt?

It turns out that Melanie's uncle was, in fact, waiting for us. We shake our hands. The man thanks me for taking care of the girl, he grabs her pink backpack (I'm pretty sure Kurt stifles a chuckle) and leaves the coffee shop.

Kurt and I are left alone.

I ask him if he still orders the same coffee, and nods, smiling at me. Some things never change.

Or maybe Kurt’s lying. Maybe he drinks latte now. And I would never know.

When I come back, the first thing I notice is that Kurt took off his coat. And that he’s looking like a fucking movie star. He’s wearing dark blue shirt, which in incredible way makes his eyes even bluer, and the fabric clings tightly to his chest. Of course, I do my best not to notice it.

It all reminds me about the strange, tired boy I discovered today in my mirror and I swear loudly in my mind, wondering what Kurt must’ve thought about me when he saw me.

Our conversation doesn’t go very well.

It turns out that Kurt resigned from studying, but he’s got a job in some fashion magazine which I’ve never heard of. On the other hand, it’s never been a part of my interests.

“But what about singing? And acting?” I ask him.

Kurt shrugs. “ It was pointless. I would never make it, I wasn’t good enough.”

His tone suggest that he’d been telling it more than once in his past.

“ But you never give up ,” I say quietly. Silence surrounds us for a moment. I think Kurt’s face screws up in pain, but maybe I just imagined it.

“There always has to be the first time,” he whispers.

I tell him about my job and my studies, about Mike and Tina, and Kurt tells me about Finn and Rachel in return.

The talk about other people’s relationships can lead to the one thing only.

“Are you seeing anyone?” Kurt asks.

I shake my head no. There’s no point in saying anything more than that and despite of what I’ve witnessed in the park, I ask him: “What about you?”

Something seems to change in Kurt’s eyes.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” he says eventually and I feel as if the ton of bricks just filled my stomach. “His name is Tom.”

“Oh,” I manage to say. I’ve seen the guy in the park, but hearing it from someone is always different than just suspecting something. We fall into a silence for a moment and I can feel Kurt’s judging gaze on my skin, although I don’t even look at him. “Wow.”

The silence drives me crazy.

“Wow,” I repeat. So now I’m repeating myself. Awesome. �Just wow. That’s great.”

I know Kurt doesn’t believe me, but he’s kind enough to keep that to himself. I push my hands deeper inside my pockets.

“ So…” I speak up. “Have you two already been together, when we…”

“No,” Kurt interrupts me immediately, his voice harsh. I can see something hard and bitter rising in his eyes. “We’ve met about two months later. In the coffee shop.”

In the coffee shop. Of course.

Kurt wraps his arms around himself defensively. “I know you don’t think about me in a good way, but I have never, ever cheated on you,” he whispers, his eyes focused on the table. “I never would.”

For a moment we’re both silent, because I can’t even deny his words. It’s all true, for the past three years I was sure that Kurt was cheating on me.

Then again, I’ve never thought about him as a bad person. Not really. I loved him too much.

Kurt points at my hands which still are hidden inside my pockets.

“I remember that gesture of yours. You were doing that whenever you’ve felt insecure,” he smiles gently. “That is, very rarely.”

“You still remember things like that?”

Kurt looks down. “I remember every single thing about you,” he murmurs. For a moment I think I can see the tears glistering in his eyes, but maybe it’s just a reflection. We simply stare at each other in silence, not knowing what else to say.

I open my mouth and I close it immediately.

I want to say something.

I really do, but I don’t know what.

So many times I’ve had this conversation in my head. So many times I’ve seen in my imagination. Kurt sitting right in front of me in exactly the same way he sits right now, with his arms crossed and head slightly bent down.

But when the moment comes, when I want to say something…

The words simply fall from my lips and they’re definitely not the words I’ve planned to say.

“Why did you break up with me?”

The atmosphere thickens.

I realize it doesn’t sound good.

It sounds like an accusation.

I could’ve skipped that one.

In the corner of my eye I can see Kurt fidgeting slightly in his seat. He looks a little bit frightened, just like he’s afraid of something. So he feels guilty, I think. Deep inside I snort in disbelief. It wasn’t something I expected from him.

Kurt purses his lips.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” he says quietly. “You have no idea how it is, when you’re completely alone, far away from home…”

“Oh, don’t I?” I say ironically and I feel rage pumping in my veins. For this short moment I’m seventeen again and I hold the useless phone in my hand. ‘It’s better for both of us.’ I feel stupid and naive. I feel used. ”I’m sorry. I guess I really have no idea how it is to live in a big city on your own.”

“Blaine, I…”

“Don’t you dare make any excuses for yourself.” I squeeze my eyes shut and my fingers wander to my temple, as I feel that I’m losing control. “Just do this one thing for me and take all the blame. Because you weren’t lonely, Kurt. You had me. Me! Far away, but I was right there, waiting for you! But you… You chose to abandon me.”

Kurt still doesn’t say anything, so I continue.

“Do you know what hurt the most? That I didn’t even deserve for the real break up. How much time it was left to your break? A month? You couldn’t wait? Or maybe you’ve been too scared? Too scared to look me in the eyes and say those five words that had to be said? Just five words! Five fucking words I deserved! I needed them! Because thanks to them I could’ve moved on!”

I want to say these words, I want Kurt to face them, but in the end, he’s the one saying it.

“I don’t love you anymore,” he whispers wiping the tears off with his sleeve. I haven’t even noticed when he started crying. I know I should feel bad about it, but I can’t bring myself to care.

The coffee shop suddenly falls silent.

Everyone’s staring at us and for a moment I’d give anything to run away from here, from Kurt and from my past.

Kurt’s puffy eyes finds mine and he sends me silent message with his gaze.

‘Ignore them.’

This is at least I can do for him, so I stay where I am.

When the people realize that the show is over, they slowly come back to their dropped conversations. Me and Kurt are quiet.

For a moment I consider telling him that there’s a meeting I completely forgot about and I have to go, but then I notice something. One of Kurt’s sleeves rolled up and there wouldn’t be anything strange about if it wasn’t for a purple bruise marking his usually flawless skin.

I grab his wrist instinctively and ignoring Kurt’s protests, I roll up the sleeve even farther. The bruise’s shape suspiciously looks like a hand.

When Kurt wrenches himself from my grasp, I can’t even react properly. I just stare at him with my eyes wide open.

“This is not what you think it is,” Kurt says, breaking the silence.

“And what do I think?” I ask, looking at him blankly.

“Probably that I’m… That I’m in some sort of sick relationship. Do you really think I’d let anyone to push me around?”

This is exactly what I think, but I don’t say that out loud.

“So who did this to you?” I ask him instead.

Kurt purses his lips.

“I got mugged one week ago.”

“Oh really”, I sneer.

“I’m not lying!”

“Of course.”

For a minute we look at each other in silence.

“Tom is a good guy,” Kurt says eventually. He seems a little irritated. “He just…”

“…has some troubles with controlling his anger?” I suggest.

Kurt clenches his fists and takes a deep breath.

“No Blaine,” he replies, his voice a little calmer. “I admit, Tom may be… He’s not you. Sometimes he’s a little impetuous. But he would never hurt me.”

I drop my gaze and I stare blankly at the table.

For some reason, this time I believe him.

I think about the smile Kurt had on his face before he kissed his boyfriend in the park and I clench my jaw. He loves him, I could tell. Why is it so hard for me to accept that Kurt is happy with someone else?

“You’ve changed.” I hear him saying.

“Says who?” I say and I give him a small smile to make amends to him a little. “You used your sleeve to wipe off the tears. The old Kurt Hummel would give you a lecture about this highly valuable material and the importance of having respect to the clothes you’re wearing.”

I manage to make him laugh and I don’t know why, but it makes me happy. Maybe it’s the bruise on his wrist. Maybe it’s the past finally coming up to the surface. One way or another, suddenly I find myself having much more compassion for the boy sitting in front of me.

I don’t even ask him what did he mean by “change”. I know god damn well that there’s nothing left from the old Blaine Anderson. And me and Kurt both know whose fault it is.

“Blaine”, Kurt pipes out after awhile. “I… I have to ask you something. And it’s very egocentric of me, this thought I have. Because… Because I know it’s impossible for you to… But I have to know.”

I sit in silence, waiting for him to finally get to the point. Kurt looks me in the eyes and he clutches the coffee cup with both hands.

“Do you still love me?” he asks.

My heart starts racing.

Just when the first wave of surprise washes over me, I realize how stupid is that question. Kurt must have thought the same thing, because now I can see the blush staining on his cheeks.

I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I end up simply telling him the truth.

“I’ve loved you for a long time,” I croak, looking away. “New York’s never been my dream, but I still wanted to get here, just because I knew you were there. And I don’t know what I was hoping for. For months I was looking for you and sometimes I thought I saw those familiar blue eyes somewhere in the crowd, but it was always just my imagination…”

I take my hands out of the pockets and I fix my gaze on them.

“I don’t know when I decided to give up”, I mutter. “Maybe one year ago? Or maybe at the same time I started smoking. Maybe earlier.”

“Smoking? You?”

“I’m not proud of it.”

We stare at each other for a moment until it gets too awkward and we both look away at the same time.

And this is when I realize that this is it.

I don’t love Kurt. And he doesn’t love me. We don’t belong to each other anymore. He’s not mine and I’m not his. I haven’t fully realized it until now. I don’t feel love while looking at him. No butterflies in my stomach, no pain, maybe just a little regret and anger.

Kurt suddenly seems so small sitting in this wooden chair. As if the past completely torn him down from the inside. I haven’t noticed it before. And maybe this what helps me to make a decision. I find a pen in my pocket. I usually use it to write down the lyrics that always pop up in my head in the most unexpected moments. Many times I came back home with the random key words written on my palms and wrists. Mostly I don’t even know what I was trying to say.

I reach out for the napkin and write down my address and phone number.

“Here,” I say as I hand it to Kurt. “In case you’d like to meet me some other time.”

We say our goodbyes a little coldly and I leave Kurt alone at the table.

When I get to the door I turn around for a moment to once again look at that strange boy I used to know. Despite of giving him my number, I hope he’ll never decide to meet me again.