Chapter Three

Ben doesn’t mention it for a few days. Instead, he chose to dwell privately on it and attempt to work out what he sat there and observed. It was obvious that there were still feelings, certainly from Blaine, probably from Kurt, and yet Blaine claimed it had been over eight years since their high school relationship had ended.

Ben had kissed three people during high school. Two boys and a girl. He remembers her name and he remembers the boy he lost his virginity to but not the other one. And if he ran into any of them there would be no tension. Ben thinks Blaine could be lying, that maybe there was a messy break-up or some sort of abuse. He speculates wildly for three days and then asks Blaine.

Much to Ben’s dismay, Blaine just shrugs it off and says that at the time, it had hurt to break-up with someone he was so committed to.

Ben pushes for more and asks Blaine what he isn’t saying. He gets angry, and in turn Blaine gets defensive. He hardly ever fights with Ben, and never ever like this. So while Ben yells at him in their New York hotel room, Blaine just grimaces and nods along to every accusation, unwilling to admit to the truth, not out loud, not to someone else, not when he has pushed it so far down inside him for so long. He won’t say it and then Ben is threatening to leave, and Blaine feels his heart clench, but it is nowhere near as bad as he remembers heartbreak feeling and that terrifies him.  

So, he tells Ben all of it. That he and Kurt were soul mates and somehow they lost each other. That he fucked it up and because of that they missed out on having something special that probably could have lasted forever. And that is what matters most, isn’t it? The fact that somehow they lost each other.

Ben looks like he’s being slapped as he stops by the door and stares at his boyfriend, at the way Blaine’s cheeks flush red, and his tears spill over when he blinks and sighs. Blaine continues, “Soul mates are meant to find each other when they need each other, when they’re ready, and sure, maybe I needed him in high school, and I think he needed me but…” Blaine trails off, opens his eyes and feels the room spin. “Now I need someone for forever because I am ready for that. I am not some seventeen year old kid who doesn’t know how to want for myself, let along how to get it. Now I am so, so ready. I’m ready for the next step. I want the forever, the kids and a house and a family and a future.”

He crosses the room, moves closer to Ben who is staring at him like he doesn’t know him. Blaine wraps both hands around Ben’s and stops himself from saying what he is thinking because he hates that he is thinking it and Ben doesn’t deserve that, not at all.

Blaine wants all of that, and that day, having coffee with Kurt, he realized that Kurt, right now, would be perfect. But instead he has Ben, who is great and who is everything, but who isn’t quite Kurt.  

Swallowing, Blaine kisses Ben’s mouth and it’s messy and too wet with tears. It takes a moment too long, but Ben kisses him back.

Then, Blaine lies through his teeth. “Don’t ask me about him. He was just a silly high school boyfriend, and it hurts now because it hurt so much back then.”

Ben doesn’t want to say yes, but he does, and then they drop into the bed and kiss each other until neither one of them is thinking about Kurt.  

~~*~~

It’s three in the morning when Blaine slips from his bed and onto the floor. He sits there with his laptop on his knees and his ears trained on the even breathing of Ben as he finds Patrick’s email address and types quickly. Patrick is the only one that knows the whole story, and Blaine feels that he may be the only one who could understand just a small portion of what’s going on in his heart.

Blaine ends up on the brink of tears again, but he manages to get his thoughts on the page and out of his head, convincing himself he is right. Because he knows that even if he had Kurt, if he had always had Kurt and he hadn’t cheated and he’d somehow managed to make it through the rest of his senior year he wouldn’t be the same person he is today. Without losing Kurt, he would have never had his heart broken, and he never would have learned how to slowly put it back together. Everything happens for a reason, right? And he is stronger and better and happier because of it.

He is nothing like seventeen year old Blaine. Seventeen year old Blaine would not be in New York working for the DAs office and happy.

Not that any of it matters. He just gets the thoughts out and into the ether, hitting send and then crawling back into bed.

He has Ben. He loves Ben.

~~*~~

Then he loses Ben. Or maybe he lets him go, he’s not sure which. One day he’s in love, properly, fully in love and he’s so sure Ben is as well because when it’s over, it is heart-breaking and angry and messy.  

In the end, Ben cares more about it than Blaine, probably because he’s never had his heart broken before, but maybe simply because it’s really nothing like the months-long destruction Blaine went through his senior year.

They scream at each other two hot summer nights in a row and Ben accuses him of everything he isn’t. Blaine stares back with empty eyes and wonders if he’ll ever be as happy as he should be. Ben all but chases him out of the apartment on the third night, into the humid New York streets, and Blaine wonders where to go.

He has a credit card and cashed up parents and he has colleagues so he isn’t hopeless. He sits in a diner and lingers over his food and ends up shooting Rachel Berry a message via Facebook. She’s the only other person in New York he knows even though he hasn’t spoken to her in half a decade.

That’s how he ends up standing in the front hall of her Upper East Side apartment, dripping water onto her carpet and apologizing over and over as she looks him up and down before dragging him in for a hug.

“It’s good to see you,” is all she says.

She lets him talk until four in the morning and then she gives him the spare room. He hasn’t mentioned Kurt at all, only Ben and Stanford, but he begs her not to tell Kurt anything even though he can’t justify why. She tells him she doesn’t even think Kurt knows he’s in New York. And then she frowns.

Blaine goes back to his apartment two days later and stands in the hallway with his arms crossed defensively as Ben clenches his jaw, snaps a goodbye, and carries his last box of things down to the cab. Ben goes back to Memphis and Blaine only hears from him one more time: an email asking him to mail home some CDs.  

And that’s that. Blaine gets a smaller, dingier apartment further from work. Patrick sends him back a two-page email that basically amounts to ‘I told you so’ without specifying exactly what he’d told Blaine in the first place. Rachel forces Blaine to have dinner with her a few more times, making sure he is okay. And eventually he loses contact with her, forgets about Ben and throws himself, all too happily, into his work

~~*~~

Blaine is sitting drinking a long black and staring out the window of the Starbucks around the corner from the courts when he sees him. He chokes on his coffee and feels his heart start to hammer and his skin come alive.  Beside him, Emma pats him on the back and laughs at him as she asks if he’s okay.

By the time he looks back out the window Kurt is even closer, walking briskly with two women trailing him with their arms full of bags and folios. He’s talking to them but of course Blaine can’t hear him. He imagines it’s a long list of instructions for workr12;materials he needs, new sketch books maybe, details for a show or a magazine spread, perhaps even details about his upcoming line of…  somethingr12; or whatever excitement they have planned for today.

Blaine smiles, because  from what little he gleaned from the conversation they’d had so many months ago, he knows Kurt is doing exactly what he is meant to be doing and doing it damn well.

Emma is saying something beside him and he hums in the affirmative, hoping it will do as he watches Kurt walk right by him, just across the road, and then around a corner and out of sight.

“You ready?” Emma interrupts wherever his thoughts were about to veer.

Blaine blinks at her and Emma smiles. “Trial?” she reminds him.

Blaine checks his watch and sighs because he is exhausted and it’s not even 9am, but this is what he loves, and he is good at it and happy.

“Let’s go do this,” he says, sounding far surer of things than he is. They pick their laptops up from beneath their chairs, down the last of their coffees, and make their way back to the courthouse.