With every loud day and brightly-lit night in New York, Kurt kept watch over his phone, waiting every second for it to ring or vibrate with a call or text, hear Blaine's voice telling him that of course he would love to be his boyfriend, and when he returned to Ohio for Thanksgiving with his family and the wedding of the year for the glee club he would fall into those already familiar arms and kiss him until the world fell away.

"I still can't believe you asked a prostitute to be your boyfriend," Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time in the two weeks they'd been home. Kurt rolled his eyes, even though she couldn't see him due to being halfway through her morning yoga. "And you should be doing this too, if you want to keep young."

"I'd still be asleep, like the smart girl Santana is, if you hadn't woken me up with your stupid soothing yoga music," Kurt complained, sipping sulkily at his coffee. "And you better believe it, Rachel, because I asked him and I happen to be in love with him."

"Oh please, you've met the guy twice and had sex with him the same number of times, you cannot possibly be in love after that," Rachel retorted, giving Kurt a disdainful look as she tried not to slip.

"And I'm speaking to the girl who saw Finn Hudson once in the corridors and claimed to be so in love she was ready to elope," Kurt snapped irritably. "You're supposed to know how you feel after a kiss and I went a lot further than that with Blaine. Five times, not two. I know I'm in love with him, unlike you with Finn three years ago."

"You thought you were in love with Finn too," Rachel hissed, bringing up a very old and still painful memory. "Anyway, Blaine is never going to be your boyfriend. He has sex with strangers for a living and I know you, you'd want him to quit his job. You could never cope with a boyfriend who regularly cheats on you, even for money. And what if he wouldn't quit his job? You'd be lonely and cry all over me and play your 'Woe Is Me' playlist over and over again until Santana threatened to fling herself out of the window."

"Rachel, if you don't shut up and let me have my lie-in I really am going to throw myself out of the window," Santana put in sleepily from the doorway, where she stood with a duvet around her shoulders. "I'm going back to bed, don't wake me up. I have razor blades in my hair."

Kurt and Rachel rolled their eyes simultaneously at her very untrue threat, both having seen her in the shower, accidentally in Kurt's case and apparently accidentally in Rachel's. Kurt tucked his feet beneath him and continued to fill his veins with caffeine, making him more alert by the second and conscious that it was absurdly early and he didn't have work or any designs to finish that day. It would just be yet another day when he stared at his phone and awaited an alert of anything, ignoring Rachel's many sing-song calls of, "A watched kettle never boils!"

A month passed by and soon they were returning to Ohio, Santana spending the entire plane ride complaining about staying with her siblings for the entire two weeks they were there and the dress she was being forced to wear for the wedding. Kurt blocked her out, checking his phone until it complained with loud buzzing that the charge was low and he was forced to stow it away.

Finn met them outside the airport with a hug for Kurt, a luggage trolley for the whining Santana and an awkward sort of half-smile for Rachel. After dropping Santana off at her house with loud complaints and greetings shouted from the open windows in Spanish, and spending fifteen minutes helping Rachel manoeuvre all her luggage from the back of Finn's car to her front door and exchanging pleasantries with her dads, they reached home.

"You're half an hour late even by Finn's idea of your arrival time," Burt grumbled as he helped Finn swing suitcases out of the backseat, at least until Kurt caught him and yanked the luggage away, admonishing him for exerting himself with his heart. "What happened to you two?"

"Oh, we had to drop off Santana and Rachel, and Santana's oldest younger sister has an enormous crush on Finn and insisted on talking to him for ages and we had to stand on the doorstep chatting to Hiram and Leroy for ten minutes," Kurt explained, dragging his suitcase up the drive and enlisting Carole's help to shove the thing up the steps to the door.

"I thought you might want to know," Carole murmured as they watched Finn huffing and puffing as he hauled suitcases up the stairs, having claimed that he could do it himself with all his military training, "that last week a boy dropped by here. Although I can hardly call him a boy, he looked older than you. Anyway, he was looking for you and I said you'd be back here in a week and to try again then." She winked at him, adding, "I have to say he was very good-looking. I can see exactly why you were pining over him."

Kurt retired to his bedroom once Finn had unblocked the staircase, wrapping the pristinely white duvet around his shoulders and staring unseeingly at the table at the bottom of his bed, covered in silver-framed photographs of happy times, the most recent of him, Finn, Mike and Puck in their red graduation robes, toasting the camera. Finally, after endless weeks of waiting and wanting and wishing and hoping, his phone buzzed in a single text.

When you're back in Ohio, come to the Dalton building. I need to see you -Blaine. Kurt couldn't help the slightly giddy smile that crossed his face as he grabbed his phone and rushed out of the house, past a knowingly smirking Carole making dinner in the kitchen and ignoring Burt and Finn's simultaneous enquiries of where he was going, who he'd be with, what time he'd be back and why he was going out in the first place.

Want and need and love and lust in equal measures already crackled beneath his skin when he pulled up in front of the old-fashioned building, the enormous oaken doors imposing and almost terrifying. When he pushed them open, he found a foyer filled with handsome men and beautiful women, crossing the polished floors with heels tapping against the wood and talking loudly, to each other and into phones.

Kurt grabbed the arm of the least scary-looking man who passed him and murmured, "I'm looking for Blaine Anderson. Um, my name's Kurt Hummel, and if you know where he is I really need to find him."

"I'm Seth Pitson," the boy, who looked awfully young to be in the place, said politely, shaking his hand and smiling, eyes shining joyfully. "I know where he is, let me take you to him."

"Thank you, thank you so much," Kurt said gratefully, following the shorter boy as he expertly wove a route through the crowds to an apparently deserted room. Seth pushed the door open slowly, quietly, wincing very obviously every time the aged hinges creaked slightly, and Kurt's breath caught in his throat when he saw Blaine, standing with his back to them and gazing out of the window at the frosty grey day, still impossibly gorgeous.

Seth vanished without a trace into the crowds, leaving Kurt to close the door gently behind him and cross the room. He considered the gesture for several infinitely long seconds before he laid his hand gently over Blaine's shoulder, squeezing as he whispered, "Blaine, it's me. You texted me and said you needed to see me."

Without a word, Blaine turned and pulled Kurt into a long kiss, flipping their positions to push him back against the wall a little too hard, almost violent in his kiss, thrusting his tongue straight past Kurt's teeth without preamble. "Please," he whispered against Kurt's mouth. "Let me."

"Yes," Kurt hissed without knowing exactly what he wanted, only knowing of the craving sparking through the pit of his stomach as Blaine's mouth ran hot up and down his neck, his hips pressing Kurt's back against the wall. One of his knees knocked between Kurt's, spreading his legs wide enough so Blaine could press his thigh up against the bulge in Kurt's jeans.

They ended up stretched out across one of the leather couches, most of their clothes scattered across the floor, Kurt only in his underwear and Blaine in unfairly tight jeans, Kurt's legs around Blaine's waist to keep their bodies pressed perfectly together and tongues twisting and gliding around each other, fast and desperate. Twin cries echoed against the high ceiling and they slumped down against the cushions, sweaty skin sticking to the leather as they just lay together, holding each other, panting heavily.

"I can't be your boyfriend," Blaine murmured, turning away from Kurt as he tugged his shirt back on. Kurt looked up in shock, scrambling across the slippery cushions to wrap his arms around Blaine's torso, kissing at the skin beneath his ear. "Kurt, stop it. I can't do it, I can't quit my job and leave all this behind just to be with you. I barely know you."

"You've seen me naked," Kurt whispered, blinking back the tears that prickled unbidden at his eyes. "You've seen me come. You've made me come. You've seen me and kissed me and held me and heard me at my most vulnerable. Blaine, please think about it more. I love you." The last three words, he never meant to say. A single tear traced a glistening line down his cheeks as he rocked against Blaine, trying to calm himself down.

"You can't, I can't, we just can't," Blaine babbled helplessly. Was it Kurt's imagination, or was Blaine's voice as choked with emotion as his? "Sweetheart, I can't just be with you. This is my life, this is what I know. I can't change my whole life for you. I won't."

"I want to be with you," Kurt near-sobbed, burying his face in the back of Blaine's neck and clinging tighter to him. "I could cope with you working like this, I promise I could. I love you."

"No you don't, Kurt," Blaine said firmly, disentangling his arms with a heavy sigh. "No one falls in love in eight days. No one wastes their time pining over a whore, waiting for them to call or text. Don't get hooked on me. Go out, find someone who'll love you the way you deserve, and don't think about me."

Blinking away the tears of anger and grief, Kurt shrugged his shirt back and took off, shoving his feet into his shoes as he ran out of the building and back to his car, slumping over the steering wheel and crying into his hands, already missing the warmth of expert hands on his skin and chapped lips moving in perfect synchronisation with his own.

Somehow he ended up outside Santana's house, honking the horn to summon her. After years of friendship with Puckerman, she was perfectly used to it. It only took a minute before she hopped into his car and took one look at his devastated, tear-stained face. "Well somebody got turned down today," she remarked. "I could've warned you, Porcelain."

"I can't help it, San," Kurt sobbed, breaking down once more. Santana sighed softly and slipped an arm around him, pulling him closer to her. "I just fell in love with him, and I just want to be with him and have a boyfriend and be happy and I just want everything with him."

"Kurt, Kurt, calm down," Santana murmured soothingly. "I promise you, you are an amazing guy and you're gonna find someone else really fast. I know a ton of gays, I'll set you up with one when we're back out in New York. You can get some hickies on your neck and a lot of tender fucking under your belt."

Kurt laughed through a sob and laid his head against her shoulder, crying into the wool of her hand-knitted jumper. He couldn't help thinking, as Santana whispered to him in the same way one would comfort a crying baby, that the wrong arms were around him. All he wanted was Blaine holding him close, pressing him into the mattress, claiming him with languid kisses that never seemed to end. He just wanted to love, and be loved in return.