Well I've been twisting to the sun and the moon
I needed to replace
The fountain in the front yard is rusted out
All my love was down
In a frozen ground

~~~

Some moments, happy or sad, painful or blissful, have a funny way of sticking with you.� For Blaine, most of the moments he would never forget had something to do with Kurt. The first day they met. The first time they spoke. Their first everything.
�
He also couldn’t help but remember all of Erik’s firsts with Kurt: Kurt and Erik’s first date and first fight and, most haunting of all, the first time Erik told Blaine he was in love with Kurt.
�
It was a dreadfully cold day and Blaine had just traded the chilly Evanston air for the warm room he shared with Erik. But he didn’t escape the cold for too long. Erik wanted to talk about Kurt, as always, and Blaine, ever the best friend, resigned himself to listen.� When Erik dropped the l-word, Blaine felt that same chill that permeated the campus seep into his very veins. He felt his last shreds of hope slip away as he realized that this whole Erik and Kurt thing had real staying potential. And this whole being madly and completely and unrequitedly in love with Kurt thing? Yeah, that did too.
�
Blaine made up a ridiculous excuse and left, because all of a sudden the room whose refuge he sought from the cold seemed like a prison, not a sanctuary. He felt suffocated and stifled and he had a hard time taking a breath, as if his lungs were refusing to fill, his very body protesting the news he had just received.
�
Erik was in love with Kurt. Blaine repeated it like a mantra in his head as he walked the frosty streets of the campus, his breath visible in the icy air.
�
The problem with being in love with your best friend’s boyfriend, well, one of many, is that, no matter how far you walk or how cold you get or how many times you mentally chastise yourself and swear to move on, it just doesn’t go away. You can’t escape it or deny it or forsake it, you just have to live with it.
�
~~~
�
“That is not the face of a happy man,” Drew observed, greeting Blaine with a hug and a fierce pat on the back.
�
“Ha,” Blaine replied sarcastically, “your keen powers of deduction are remarkable, Drew, really.” He grimaced as they found seats at a nearby table. The two men were meeting at their usual coffee shop at Blaine’s insistence and Drew knew it had something to do with Kurt. It was always about Kurt.
�
Drew sipped on his tea before saying, “You know I hate to say I told you so.”
�
Blaine smiled weakly and said, “But you did. You did tell me so. And I didn’t listen. I couldn’t.” Blaine stirred his coffee, continuing, “It’s Kurt. Nothing about my feelings for him has ever followed logic or reason. Or your advice.” Blaine stated grimly.
�
“So, what happened now?” Drew asked, sounding both exasperated and genuinely concerned, as he often was when it came to Blaine and Kurt.
�
The last time Blaine and Drew had met up to talk, it had been the day after what Drew fondly called Erik’s bout of verbal diarrhea. When Erik had scared both Kurt and Blaine with his wedding plans and Kurt had consequently confided his fears in Blaine, Blaine had required some serious counseling from Drew.� Drew had come to understand Blaine’s complicated relationships with Erik and Kurt, his confliction and love and pain.� And he had come to dread Blaine’s invitations to coffee, knowing they meant that Blaine was once again being dragged through emotional mud.
�
“We kissed.”
�
Drew sputtered and coughed, nearly inhaling his tea. “You KISSED?!” His eyes were wide as saucers as he went on, “You, Blaine Anderson, king of all that is moral, finally started acting in your own best interest? Bravo! I am truly proud.”
�
Blaine didn’t look proud of himself. If Drew hadn’t known that their meetings always corresponded to emotional turmoil for Blaine, he still would have noticed the signs. Blaine’s hair was tangled and greasy, he had dark circles around his eyes and at least three days of patchy stubble on his cheeks, and he was wearing his bedroom slippers. This was Blaine at his worst.
�
“I wasn’t just acting in my own best interest, Drew, I was being a selfish asshole.” Blaine sighed and pressed his palm to his forehead. “He’s dating my best friend. My best friend.”
�
“But he’s supposed to be with you.” Drew replied simply, reaching his hand over to pat Blaine’s. “It’s not going to be easy, but you’re going to have to accept the fact that life is messy.� You’re an incredibly kind person, so you’re not used to it but, sometimes, in order to get where you’re supposed to go, you have to get your hands dirty.”
�
“To get where I’m supposed to go.” Blaine repeated disdainfully. “Even if it means breaking people’s hearts and sabotaging their happiness? Well, I’m sorry, but count me out.”
�
Drew sighed, knowing perfectly well where this was going. Blaine’s moral compass pointed directly north.� The man never strayed from the straight and narrow, following the rules and doing whatever he could whenever he could to help anyone but himself.
�
Blaine looked at Drew, eyes dark and serious, “The thing is, Drew, I have the power to mess up Erik’s life. To steal his boyfriend and betray his trust. But I can’t do it.” Blaine heaved a great sigh. “I would rather him be happy than me. I would give up my chance at happiness to give him one. Just as I would do for Kurt. Just as I would do for you.”
�
Drew smiled and nodded, grabbing Blaine’s hand. “I know you would. But that doesn’t make it fair. You get one life, Blaine. Just one. And if you don’t live it, at least occasionally, you’re going to wake up one day, eighty years old with an empty house and a lonely heart, full of regret.”
�
Blaine started to respond, but Drew cut him off, “No, listen. You deserve to be happy. You, more than anyone else I know, deserve love and joy and all that shit. You do!” Drew insisted as Blaine scoffed. “And I know you can’t see it now, but Erik knows you do too. And he would never be able to live with himself if he knew he was the one keeping you from being happy.”
�
Drew finished his tea as he looked at his watch. “Listen, man. I’ve got to go. But you need to promise me you’ll at least consider it. Give yourself a chance to be happy. Please, if not for you then for me, because I’m sick of worrying about you.” Drew patted Blaine on the back, slung his backpack over his shoulders and left, shouting behind him, “You deserve it!”
�
Blaine laughed and drowned his sorrows in his cup of coffee.
�
~~~
�
Have you ever spent so much time with someone that everything, literally everything, reminded you of him?�
�
You hear a song on the radio and it’s a song he loves or hates or had stuck in his head the last time you saw him. You eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and you remember that the two of you once talked about peanut butter for a good forty-five minutes and you have no idea what was said but you just remember laughing until you cried. Or you think of your debate last week over the difference between jelly and jam (in which you firmly insisted that they’re the exact same thing. I mean, really: they’re the exact same thing). You walk to class and step on a crunchy leaf which makes you think about how much he loves that sound and how his eyes light up whenever he sees the leaves changing colors and how he get sad every time the leaves start to fall, signaling the end of his favorite season.
�
That’s totally normal, right? thought Blaine, as he pondered his arguably obsessive tendency to relate everything and anything to Kurt. That’s just what happens when you spend a lot of time with someone. You can’t help but think about them because you have a lot of memories with them. It’s natural! It’s just a best friend thing. Isn’t it?
�
�
~~~
�
“Blaine, you need to stop,” Kurt whispered softly but with force.
�
After much soul-searching and listening to a certain French song on repeat, Blaine had taken Drew’s advice.� He had decided, for once, that he needed to seize his chance: lay it all on the line and fight for Kurt. Fight for what they could have. But, being that it was one of Blaine’s plans, it didn’t exactly pan out. He had a speech prepared about soul mates and destiny and he’d picked out a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers and he’d even written a song but as soon as he’d crossed the threshold of Kurt’s room every word and phrase and chord he’d spent hours practicing slipped from his mind.�
�
All he saw was Kurt and the look in his eyes that Blaine was sure matched his own. The excitement and thrill mixed with fear, apprehension, and sadness. Because what they were doing, what they had done, wasn’t just beautiful and lovely and right. It was messy, complicated, confusing. There was Erik to think about. Blaine saw all of this with one look into Kurt’s eyes and he longed, more than anything, to make all the hurt go away.
�
So he crossed the room in quick strides and captured Kurt’s lips in his.� And Kurt had gasped and been momentarily still, but had then responded with equal enthusiasm. It was rushed and rough, so different from their last kiss. Because, this time, there was desperation and a bit of self-loathing in the mix. This time, they both knew exactly what they were doing and what were destroying. There was fire and passion and lips and teeth and soft moans until there was nothing. And it was just Kurt, pulling away and Blaine, woken from his trance, mind clear once more.
�
Kurt gently placed his hands on Blaine’s shoulders and pushed him away, dropping his hands and wringing them together, his expression guilt-stricken, his eyes sad.
�
Blaine frowned and searched Kurt’s face for a flicker of what he had seen before: for the look of love.� But Kurt’s face was unreadable, his eyes dark and distant. “Kurt, what…” Blaine started.
�
Kurt interrupted, “I love you, Blaine. So much.”
�
Blaine felt as if the ground had dropped from beneath him and that he was soaring. This must be what flying feels like, he mused as an adorable grin graced his features.� But Kurt’s face didn’t mirror Blaine’s. He still looked conflicted and not nearly as happy as he should be, given what he’d just confessed.
�
“But, Blaine, and you have to hear me when I say this: I’m with Erik,” Kurt stated firmly, his eyes sincere and full of pain as he met Blaine’s. Blaine’s face fell and his brow furrowed.
�
“Kurt, you can’t just…you can’t tell me that you feel this with Erik,” Blaine said pleadingly, taking Kurt’s hands in his. “That you’ve ever felt like this before. That this is all in my head. You just can’t.”
�
Kurt looked down as he said, “I’m with Erik.”
�
“But what we have…”
�
“I’m with Erik.”
�
“That doesn’t change…”
�
“Blaine, you aren’t listening. I love you, I do.” Kurt dropped Blaine’s hands and sighed, grabbing Blaine’s shoulders and looking in his eyes as he continued, “But I’m in love with Erik.”
�
“But we…but I…oh.” Blaine’s voice faded and Kurt squeezed Blaine’s shoulders once more before removing his hands. Blaine felt his heart pounding in his ears and couldn’t seem to focus on Kurt’s face. He blinked and shook his head, trying to understand, to think straight.
�
Kurt stepped away and said, “I think you should go,” pain written across his face. Blaine nodded wordlessly, too devastated to respond.� Kurt watched as Blaine walked away, both boys convinced they had never felt worse in their lives.
�
~~~
�
Blaine had experienced more than his fair share of pain.
�
He thought he knew pain when he fell off of the monkey bars in second grade and broke both of his arms. But the doctors and the brightly colored casts and all the attention they brought distracted him. And his body miraculously righted itself and took the pain away, because it wasn’t the worst he could handle.
�
He thought he knew pain when the whispers started.� When kids threw around “gay” and “homo” and the most taboo f-word changed from four-lettered to three.� When his friends stopped sitting with him at lunch and talking to him in class, as if he had some infectious disease. But Blaine had music and writing and his mother to rub his back when he cried. So that pain, too, went away, because it wasn’t the worst he could handle.
�
He thought he knew pain when he was thrown against the lockers and tripped while walking down the hallway. When the verbal abuse wasn’t enough so the physical abuse took over and he had more bruises and black eyes and scars than he cared to remember. But even that pain faded over time, along with the physical marks it left behind. At the time, it seemed unbearable, but it wasn’t the worst he could handle.
�
In his twenty years, Blaine had felt the worst of what life could through at him and taken it in stride.� And then came Kurt.
�
Then came the wonderful, indescribable highs, and the brutal, heart-wrenching lows. Then came the laughing and the tears, the love and the self-loathing. Then came the incredible feeling of hope and the incredible pain of rejection. Blaine realized as he walked out of Kurt’s room, after experiencing the most unbearable of dismissals, that everything he had felt before then had been nothing.
�
This pain, the pain of knowing that your soul mate, your everything, was in love with someone else, was excruciating. The pain of knowing that, in spite of everything, Kurt was choosing Erik, was the worst Blaine could ever imagine. This was the lowest of lows. This was pain.
�
~~~
�
After Drew convinced Blaine that he deserved Kurt, that he could and should seize his chance for love, Blaine had resigned himself to breaking his best friend’s heart.� He had even accepted that he might be throwing away one of the only true friendships he had ever had.� Blaine had imagined the pain and agony of explaining the situation to Erik: how they hadn’t meant to fall in love, how they had never meant to hurt Erik, how some things, like true love and fate, simply could not be controlled.
�
The one thing Blaine had taken for granted was that Kurt felt it, too: the love and the connection and the rightness of it all. Blaine had merely assumed that, after everything they had been through together, after all of the stolen glances and heart-to-hearts, that after confessions and explanations and kisses, he and Kurt were on the same page.
�
How could he have been so wrong? Had he truly been so blinded by his love for Kurt that he mistakenly assumed his feelings were returned? Kurt had kissed him back with equal desire and passion, hadn’t he? Wasn’t Kurt the one who said that nothing with Erik ever felt as right as it did with Blaine?
�
And yet, a week after Blaine decided to sweep Kurt off of his feet and found that Kurt didn’t want to be swept by him at all, Erik and Kurt were still very much together. And Blaine was still very much confused, heart-broken, and devastatingly alone.