“Hello, darling. Good day?”

He turned from her to the fridge, opening it more for something to do than to find something to eat. “Fine. Had a French test, there was lasagne for lunch, Warblers practice.”

“Did it run late last week?”

“What?” He turned with a carton of orange juice in his hand, frowning at her as he grabbed a glass from a cupboard and poured himself some.

“You were back later than usual. Practice doesn’t normally go on that long. You’re home practically early today.” Her voice was soft, emotionless. She carried the vase to a table in the hall.

“No, it finished on time,” Blaine called out to her. He took a gulp of juice as she came back and tried to think of something he could have been doing for hours every day that wasn’t spending time with his secret faerie boyfriend. “I went for coffee with Wes and David a lot last week. David’s…uh, having relationship problems. It took a while.”

She nodded, pursed her lips just the slightest bit, and held out a delicate hand for his now empty glass. He handed it to her, watching her carefully as she washed it and returned it to the cupboard.

“You’ve been late a lot lately,” she said at last. “You barely get home before your father does. You don’t, sometimes.” She wasn’t quite making eye contact with him, but was staring at his forehead while lifting a hand to stroke her fingers through his hair.

“I-I’ve started to do work at school,” Blaine said, trying not to let his voice shake. “I can get distracted at home. I don’t – I don’t want to get behind.”

Her gaze shifted and she stared into his eyes for a couple of seconds. Blaine tried desperately to hide his nervousness, to bury any thoughts of Kurt deep inside where she couldn’t find them. Her lips parted a little and he knew he’d failed. She patted his cheek, gave a tight smile and stepped away, turning back to the doorway.

“Your father will be home soon,” she said as she walked away. “Put on an ironed shirt before then.”

Blaine watched her climb the stairs, all his muscles tense, fingers gripping the edge of the granite countertop with skin squeezed free of blood from the pressure. He heard her bedroom door close and pushed himself up, breathing heavily. He hadn’t known it would be this hard. He looked down at himself, seeing the tiny stain of blue on his trouser-leg from that time Kurt had pricked his finger with a pin while trying a new garment on Blaine that wouldn’t wash out; the way his newly polished shoes shined because Kurt insisted he couldn’t go another day with scuffed toes. His boyfriend was all over his body, screaming out to be noticed. Blaine wanted so much to just let it happen: he wanted to tell his parents he’d fallen in love with a boy, with a faerie boy, and that that was where he was every afternoon, evening and weekend.

He started to unbutton his shirt as he climbed the stairs. He threw it into the wash basket and took a new one from the cupboard, making sure it was fully pressed before hanging it on his door. He’d put it on when his father got home.

He lay back across his bed and threw an arm over his eyes. He couldn’t keep it up, he was sure. He came back from seeing Kurt so happy, so ready to tell the world about them, only to have to hide it. It wasn’t just for him – it really wasn’t. There was part of him that was afraid of telling his parents he was in love with a boy that he couldn’t deny. His main concern, however, was how it would affect Kurt. If he started to tell people, word of his existence would get out, just as it had with Quinn. He hated that he had to keep Kurt locked up inside him and couldn’t slip him into conversation. He wanted his friends to be able to tease him and ask him questions to make him blush. He wanted his mother to give him a knowing smirk when he came back with his hair out of place and gently push him up the stairs to tame it before his father saw.

He wanted some sort of proof that his relationship with Kurt – that the boy himself wasn’t just his imagination. He wanted going outside together, going on dates. Sitting in coffee shops and having to worry about whether they’d be accepted by those around them or not. Holding hands in public, kissing in the street, ignoring all scathing looks they’d receive in return. He almost wanted that experience of having people he didn’t know judge him just so he’d have any kind of experience at all.

He thought back to Kurt. He saw the other boy’s smile and imagined making him laugh where other people could see. He thought about flirting when they shouldn’t just because they wanted to.

Images of Kurt laughing quickly changed to ones of Kurt kissing him, then of Kurt above him, pressing him back into the bed with his hips, throwing his head back and moaning.

Blaine sat up. Something twisted in his stomach and he pulled his knees up to his chest. He knew he should be happy about what he and Kurt had done and rushing to do it over and over and over again, but there was something pressing around his heart and gripping it with fingers he couldn’t pry away. It had been too soon, it had to have been. He had been ready for it and Kurt had said, had assured him he was fine with it. But what if he’d been caught up in the moment? What if the other boy was lying in his room now, curling in on himself with regret Blaine had triggered? He felt like he’d taken advantage of Kurt’s exhaustion and trust in his boyfriend and perhaps, just perhaps, his faerie nature.

Blaine had thought more about faeries since he met Kurt than he had ever predicted he would. He had ached for weeks over how people could be so blind and so heartless; lain awake for hours wondering how Kurt was strong enough to deal with a lifetime of this when Blaine couldn’t even survive a day; wondered time and again just how the story had been changed to something so impure in comparison to the truth. A thought had presented itself, one that Blaine had tried to push away, but it kept coming back. He’d gone over and over it in his head and thought out all the reasons for it to be true. He’d compared it to what he knew about Kurt and all the things he had learned about the other boy since the first time they kissed. Now Blaine couldn’t stop the thought from becoming his own mental reality.

What if Kurt was more receptive to physical contact? What if all faeries were? If it were just built into their anatomy with the purpose of furthering humanity, just as Kurt had said the faerie gene mutation was, then was it such a jump to have been made from love to lust?

He had become convinced that this was the truth despite how much he tried to stop himself. Because of this Blaine couldn’t stop feeling guilty for what he had done. It didn’t matter that Kurt had initiated it: Blaine shouldn’t have let it continue. If it had been any other relationship it wouldn’t have happened so soon, Blaine was sure. He had taken from Kurt when he shouldn’t have. He had given in when he should have refused.

He had left Kurt to sleep with a message of love inked on the inside of his wrist on Friday night and returned to his dark house, climbing the stairs as quietly as he could and curling up in his bed. It was only when he woke up the next morning that what they had done really sank in. He sent off a text to Kurt with shaking hands, saying he had too much work to see him that weekend. The reply had been confused, but it didn’t seem like Kurt was too worried. Blaine had barely been able to concentrate on his mostly fabricated schoolwork: he had a cyclical thought pattern – what he and Kurt had done, how amazing it had felt, how he’d like to do it again, no he absolutely should not, he had taken advantage, what had he done? And back again, round, order barely ever varying.

He let his body tip to the side so he was curled in foetal position. He put an arm under his head and gripped the skin of his forearm with his teeth to stop himself from crying. He wasn’t supposed to feel this way. He should be happy about it and he was – he’d loved it. He just felt that he’d done wrong by Kurt. Even if Blaine’s theory wasn’t correct, neither boy had ever been in a relationship before and Kurt had never thought he’d be able to be. They shouldn’t be pushing things like this.

Blaine’s phone rang on the covers beside his head and he picked it up, only noticing it was Kurt as he accepted the call. He held the device to his ear, feeling sick again.

“Hi,” Kurt said, “how are the assignments going?”

Blaine could almost see the look on Kurt’s face – that bright, hopeful, totally in love one that made him want to kiss the other boy forever. “Hey,” he said in soft reply. “They’re fine.”

“Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Blaine traced his forefinger in circles on his covers.

“You just sound…despondent.” There was a pause, an intake of breath. “We haven’t talked since Friday, not properly. Are you…are you upset with me? About what we did?”

“I’m not upset with you, Kurt.”

“What about the other thing?”

Blaine pressed his face into the bed. He couldn’t lie. He couldn’t just go ahead and say it was fine, everything was just perfect, because it wasn’t. He turned his head to the air again. “I’m worried.”

When he didn’t elaborate, Kurt spoke again. “Why?”

“Do you think it was too soon?”

Blaine heard a sigh and the sound of his boyfriend sitting on something, probably his bed. “No, Blaine, I don’t. Not for me. Please don’t worry about that. Unless…unless it’s you. Oh, Blaine, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make you—”

“Kurt, no. No. You didn’t make me. I’m just – I wish – I feel like I’m doing this wrong.”

“What?”

“This. Us. Everything. I don’t know what I’m doing and I feel like I’m messing it up. We shouldn’t have gone so far so soon, Kurt: it’s not normal.”

“Nothing about us is really ‘normal’, Blaine. Are you…?” Blaine could hear Kurt sigh in frustration at his inability to find the right words. The other boy was always so eloquent, so situations like this were infuriating. Blaine knew Kurt was trying to choose his words and he could hear the struggle it was causing.

“Kurt, tell me what you’re thinking. It won’t hurt me.”

Kurt stayed silent for another moment and Blaine was sure he was biting his lip. “Why do you feel like you have to protect me? I’ve been sheltered my whole life, Blaine. I don’t need you to do that. I don’t want you to. You make me feel, well, normal and like everything we do is right. I can’t go in circles with you, building trust on my end when it’s not there on yours.”

“I trust you, Kurt,” Blaine broke in, voice clearer than it had been since the beginning of the conversation. “Don’t ever think that I don’t. That’s not the problem, I promise you. It’s all me, Kurt. It’s me and my stupid need to do everything right all the time. I want to be the perfect boyfriend who doesn’t push you. I wanted to be the perfect best friend who didn’t show his true feelings for you because I thought there was nothing you could do about them. I want…I wanted to be the perfect son for my parents. I wanted to be straight and boring and normal for so long, Kurt, but you saved me from that. I trust you more than anyone else because you know all the parts of me and you still love me. Sometimes it scares me because my everything is open to you, but then I remember that I have that from you in return. You know me inside and out and that means I shouldn’t worry about trying to be perfect for you but it doesn’t. It makes me want to try harder and…” He broke off, voice caught in his throat.

“Blaine,” Kurt whispered in a voice so plaintive that it made Blaine sob. “Oh, Blaine, you…I just want you. I want you however you are. You did nothing wrong, okay? You didn’t push me or hurt me or ruin our relationship. I still love you.”

Blaine sniffed and curled his knees closer to him. His bare skin was cold now and he knew he would start to shiver soon. “I love you.”

“I know. I need to see you tomorrow. I just want to hold you.”

“I needed you so much today,” Blaine said, voice less shaky now as he breathed more steadily. “I think my mom knows I lied to her about what I do after school. It’s awful, Kurt. She just looks at me with these dead eyes, like she’s not even a person any more. She’s been like this since I came out and I just want to hate her, but I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Kurt said, voice still full of pain for the other boy. “I didn’t know—”

Blaine heard his front door open and close and the click of his mother’s heels on the wooden floor of the hallway. There was the hum of his parents’ voices through the floor of his room.

“Kurt, I have to go. My dad’s home.”

“But, Blaine—”

“I’m sorry. Don’t worry about me, please. I’m just…it’s been a bad day. I’m fine. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Kurt said. Blaine could hear the resignation in the reply.

“I promise I’ll come over tomorrow. Bye.” He hung up, dropping his phone onto the bed and rushing to pull on the shirt he had set out while trying not to wrinkle it. He buttoned the cuffs and pulled open his bedroom door.

“—he was lying to me, darling, I’m sure he was. I don’t know what he’s doing, but if he won’t tell us outright I think it’s—”

Blaine let his feet fall heavily on the stairs. His mother’s voice stopped immediately and she turned to him with another of those smiles when he reached the bottom step. He turned his eyes from her to his father. “Hi, Dad. How was your day?”

“Tiring,” he replied with greater ease than Blaine had expected. He pressed a hand to the small of his wife’s back, guiding her towards the dining room. “I’m starving.”

Blaine followed his parents to the table, not listening to his mother’s chatter about what she had prepared. He sat down and dished his food without really noticing what he was doing. He spent the meal mostly in silence, eating while his parents talked around him and wondering why being in love had to be so complicated.