Blaine Anderson learned he was sick when he was eight years old.

Blaine worshipped his big brother, Cooper, and all his friends. They were sixteen. Big kids. So cool. Cooper drove a shiny black car their parents bought special just for him. His friends were always over the house, playing video games in his bedroom and basketball in the driveway.

Blaine would play with his toys or his keyboard in his own room, extra loud and with the door open, every time Cooper’s friends came over, hoping one day they might invite him to hang out with them.

His dream came true on a fateful April afternoon. “Hey, Blaine!” he heard Cooper yell from the neighboring room. “Get in here!”

Blaine threw his Transformers on the floor and ran to Cooper’s doorway. “Yeah?” he said excitedly.

“C’mere. And shut the door.”

Blaine bit down on his bottom lip, trying but failing to hide his grin as he closed the door behind him. He didn’t bounce up and down when he sat on the edge of Cooper’s bed, even though he really, really wanted to. He couldn’t act like a little kid in here.

Down on the floor, Cooper’s friends were gesturing toward something in a magazine one of the boys was holding. “Man. I would totally do her,” he said to the other. Blaine watched their lips curl into tight, funny-looking smiles. Blaine liked looking at boys’ lips. They were so pretty: pink, sometimes wet, all different shapes and patterns.

“Blaine, your big brother’s about to give you your first taste of heaven.” Cooper slid a magazine across the bedspread toward him. “Check this out.”

Blaine recoiled in disgust at the picture Cooper placed in front of him. It was a lady with long, blonde hair, and she was naked – crouched on the ground with her legs spread, smiling straight up at the camera. “Ew! Gross.”

“Whaaat?” Cooper turned the magazine back toward himself to gaze at the picture again, then looked at Blaine, incredulous. “That’s hot, Blaine.” 

Blaine wrinkled his nose and shook his head rapidly. “I don’t like her.” He shifted his wide eyes up to Cooper’s face, eager curiosity getting the better of him. “Are there…are there any boys in that magazine?”

And his world fell apart.

Three pairs of shocked eyes were suddenly on him. Blaine squirmed under the intensity of their hard, quiet gazes. Why were they looking at him like that?

One of Cooper’s friends was the first to break the silence. “Dude. I think your baby brother’s a fag.” He and the other boy burst out laughing. But Cooper just kept staring at Blaine.

Blaine was too scared to move; he was too scared to ask what they meant, or why they were laughing. He swallowed hard and looked up at his brother again, hoping he wasn’t in trouble.

“No, there’s no boys in here, Blaine,” Cooper finally replied, his voice cold and flat. “Guys don’t look at pictures of other guys naked. That’s sick.”

“Oh.” Sick.

Cooper waved a hand in the air, as if to shoo him away. “Go on, get out of here. Go back to your room, stupid.”

Blaine ran back to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him and flinging himself onto his bed. Hot tears burned in his eyes as the memory of Cooper’s frosty stare, set against the sound of mocking laughter, tumbled around his head.

Cooper thought he was sick. Because he wanted to look at pictures of boys.

But he liked boys. Was he not supposed to?

Something heavy and prickly settled in Blaine’s stomach. It felt like the time last year when he’d wet the bed and his mother had scolded him while she changed his sheets in the middle of the night.

Sick. Sick. Sick.

Blaine curled into a ball and hugged himself tightly, squeezing his arms so hard he cried out in pain. The stinging made him forget about Cooper, about boys, for just a moment. He clenched his fists around his skin again, and again, and wailed his shame into his pillow. 

Cooper’s friends taunted him mercilessly after that. “Hey, faggy!” they’d say with vicious sneers, mussing his thick, curly hair so hard it made his head hurt. Then they’d walk away, leaving a broken little boy in their wake.

Cooper never joined in with his friends’ bullying. But he never stopped them, either.

***

When he was fourteen, Blaine came out to his parents. He wasn’t going to let his brother – that jerk with his crisp Ivy League degree and his perfect girlfriend – embarrass him anymore.

“That’s ridiculous, Blaine,” his mother scoffed when Blaine sat them down in the living room after dinner one evening. “You’re a good-looking boy. You belong with girls, not with…other boys. That’s…”

Sick.

“Go finish your homework, please,” she said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “We’re not talking about this anymore.”

His father said nothing. Just like Cooper.

A month later, Blaine went to a school dance with his friend – the only other gay guy he knew. They didn’t even dance together; they just lingered along the edge of the basketball court, drinking punch and cracking jokes about their awful piano teacher.

Not two hours later, Blaine was lying face-down on cold, hard asphalt, rocks and glass shards embedding themselves like daggers into his cheek. The pain of a steel toe kicking bloody bruises down his spine was no match for the agony of knowing that they were right. All of them.

When Blaine came to, he was in a hospital bed; his parents hovered over him with wary, tight-lipped expressions. Their silent judgment weighed so heavy in the air that, for years afterward, Blaine wished those bullies had finished him off.

Blaine never said another word about being gay. He bottled up his sick desires, capped them tightly and hurled them into a vast, dark ocean that he promptly turned his back on – though he could still hear the waves crashing menacingly against the shore behind him.

His parents sent him to prep school after that. At the Dalton Academy for Boys, he was Blaine Anderson: charming do-gooder, excellent scholar, enviable a cappella singer whom the girls at Dalton’s sister school drooled over.

He let them.

Blaine had sex with a girl for the first time when he was sixteen, at a Warblers house party, after getting lost in a blur of vodka shots and a joint shared among five of them in his friend Wes’ basement. She had long, blonde hair, just like the lady in the picture Cooper had shown him when he was eight. As Blaine pounded into her, his orgasm hitting him like a splash of frigid water to his face, he wondered if his brother would be proud.

When he was eighteen, he escaped to New York City – Fordham, for business school. “It’s not Columbia, but I suppose it’s good enough,” his father remarked as he signed the check for Blaine’s first tuition payment.

At Fordham, he was Blaine: the hot musician with the captivating smile that lured every female within a mile radius. “Chick magnet,” his jealous roommate muttered each time he stumbled through the door at three a.m. Blaine would always chuckle, even as he ached to rake his fingernails over his crawling skin.

It was too easy to pick up girls. They were all over him as he jammed on the piano in the lounge or the tavern, crooning wistful lyrics about love and loss. He’d choose one like an apple at the grocery store, reaching for the pretty, shiny ones and ignoring those with rotten spots. But he didn’t crave any of them – not like how his mouth watered for the ice cream in the aisle he never let himself walk down.

Yet he kept trying; he was always searching for something, anything that might offer a cure to his sickness.

***

It’s been sixteen years, nine months and two days since Blaine learned he was sick. He’s kept a running tally in his head of the days since that sunny Saturday in Cooper’s bedroom, dredging up the details each morning as he wakes from a restless night’s sleep to live a lie another day.

Sixteen years, nine months and two days after his world shatters, Blaine sees a glimmer of light shine among the broken pieces.

The man stands behind the register at the corner coffee shop down the street from Blaine’s office – his day job in sales that he fucking hates; another piece of fiction in the sham that is his life.

“Can I help you?” Apathy rides on the mellifluous tone of the man’s voice. He keeps his head down, not bothering to initiate any sort of personal contact with his customer.

“Uh…” Blaine falters; his usual coffee order evaporates from his mind as his eyes trace the smattering of freckles across the man’s cheekbones. “M-medium drip. Please.”

“That it?”

“And a…raspberry biscotti?”

The man finally picks his head up. “Four seventy-three.” Blaine notices his eyes – hazy blue, like the sky on a summer day – twitch wider when they lock with Blaine’s. 

Beautiful.

They’re both still for a moment that inexplicably feels like forever, yet far too brief at the same time. Blaine snaps out of his trance when the man quirks a graceful, expectant eyebrow.

“Oh.” Blaine digs into his pocket for his wallet, pulls out a five-dollar bill. “Here. Keep the change.”

He watches the man’s mouth – Blaine’s never stopped liking boys’ lips – curve upward in a small smile, betraying his seemingly indifferent air. “Thanks,” the man says softly, somehow audible over the din of the café. 

The warm, nervous fluttering in Blaine’s chest rapidly morphs into a cold, hollow pounding of heart against bones as he exits the coffee shop. He tramps through the frigid January morning, gulping his coffee; his tongue and throat protest in vain against the scalding liquid.

“Morning, Blaine!” he hears all around him when he enters the office. His co-workers’ smiles and nods indicate that he’s responding appropriately, but the drum of his pulse in his ears is too loud to let his own words register in his brain.

He makes a beeline for the bathroom, locks the door with trembling fingers, and howls the silent scream he’s mastered over the past sixteen years, nine months and two days. He tears at his trim jacket, his dress shirt; sharp red streaks bloom across the starch white fabric as his soul tries to claw its way free from his body.

Sick.

The pain makes him forget about lips and fists and shame. In a few minutes he’s smoothing his jacket sleeves over his bloodied arms, clearing his aching throat with a handful of cool water from the tap. And then he’s Blaine Anderson again: suave, dapper ad salesman, target of covetous female glances that he answers with a beckoning smile.

He’s in control. Always in control.

***

But the man at the coffee shop plucks Blaine’s control out of his clumsy hands and rips it to shreds. Blaine can’t, won’t stop his feet from carrying him back to the café every morning before work.

“So, umm...” Blaine starts, four days after their eyes met for the first time.

“Kurt,” the man supplies.

“Kurt.” Blaine’s mouth curls around the word. It fits nicely. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. Are you new?”

The man – Kurt – nods. “I started last week. I just moved a few blocks from here.”

“Where’d you move from?”

“Chelsea? I was living with my stepbrother and his wife. My best friend.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It was.” Kurt lets out a bitter sigh. “Until they kicked me out.”

Blaine’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Why’d they do that?”

“She got pregnant,” Kurt answers dully. Blaine’s only response is a wince. “Yeah. No kidding. An unplanned pregnancy isn’t going to help her chances of nabbing a starring role on Broadway.”

He gives Blaine an appraising, not-at-all-inconspicuous once-over. “One perk of being gay, I suppose,” he quips, tossing his head. “Don’t have to worry about that!”

A firestorm of thoughts assaults Blaine’s brain as gay, Kurt’s gay clicks over and over in his mind. He wonders if anyone’s ever called this beautiful man faggy, or sick, or beat him till his ribs cracked and his spirit broke.

Blaine swallows hard against the bile that threatens to rise up from his stomach. “Right,” he answers, his voice quivering as he fights to keep his composure. “So, do you have roommates now? Or do you live alone?”

“No roommates.” Kurt rolls his eyes self-deprecatingly. “I tend to think I’m better off alone.”

Blaine huffs out a humorless laugh. “I know the feeling.” He can sense Kurt’s curious gaze on him, but he doesn’t meet it with his own frenzied one.

“S-see you tomorrow, Kurt,” is his brusque farewell as he retrieves his coffee and escapes his truth for the warm woolen blanket of lies he’s knit: once comforting, now suffocating and fraying.

***

“Sooo…” Kurt says in lieu of a greeting the next morning, mimicking Blaine’s tone from the previous day.

Blaine can’t stop his smile. “Blaine.”

“Blaine.” His own name sounds honeyed and beautiful, beautiful when Kurt speaks it. “Where are you always off to at 7:48 a.m.?”

Blaine must look confused, because Kurt chuckles at him. “You come in here every morning at 7:48 on the nose,” he explains.

“Oh?” 7:48. 7:48. 7:48. “Yeah. I guess I’m pretty punctual.”

“Lemme guess.” Kurt squints as he studies Blaine’s checkered tie, peeking out from his thick black overcoat. “Businessman?”

Blaine nods, and Kurt continues. “Something…high-end.” He gestures to Blaine’s coat with his chin. “That’s Michael Kors.”

“Ad sales.”

“Ah.” Kurt nods smugly. “I have excellent powers of observation.”

Blaine’s gaze meanders down the length of Kurt’s graceful neck. His skin is smooth and creamy white; the porcelain tone is stark against the navy lines of his apron, tied in a taut bow around the back. “I’ve observed.”

***

Blaine comes to learn that Kurt’s from Ohio, too; that they both sang in neighboring show choirs during their high school years.

“Maybe we competed against each other!” Kurt exclaims in wonder. “Wouldn’t that be so funny?”

That night, Blaine falls asleep in bed surrounded by albums from glee club competitions of years past, photos haphazardly torn from their pages in his feverish search for any glimpse of a beautiful, blue-eyed boy.

***

When Blaine enters the café at 7:48 the next morning, Kurt’s watching for him from the register. The smile that blossoms on his face is like medicine that eases Blaine’s sickness.

But it’s only for a few minutes. When he’s gone, the elixir wears off, and the withdrawal that follows is worse, so much worse than ever before.

***

Thirteen mornings after they first meet – Blaine’s kept count, right alongside sixteen years, nine months, two weeks and three days – Kurt has Blaine’s coffee ready when he walks in the door.

“I made this one special for you,” he says, his voice soft and sing-songy in a way Blaine’s never heard it before. “On the house.”

“Thanks, Kurt.” A tiny burst of joy trickles down from his smile to his heart, suffocating the incessant pangs of sick and fag and wrong that stab him there every other moment of every day.

Kurt nervously bites down on his lower lip, and Blaine can’t tear his eyes from the tiny pearls of white digging into luscious pink skin. “Don’t throw that cup away, now,” Kurt says coyly. And with a wink, he turns to take another customer’s order.

As Blaine walks out of the café, he absently peers down at his cup, smooth and warm in his hands. The tiny script, written in black ink on white paperboard, immediately catches his eye.

Kurt
646-555-2421

Blaine sips his coffee slowly, so slowly he can barely taste it, as he blindly makes his way to his office. He sits in front of his computer, unseeing but for the four letters and ten digits branded into the cup on his desk.

It takes him hours to finally finish his coffee – long turned cold, like the icy panic flowing through his veins. He brings his cup to the kitchen and fills it with water, gulping down cupful after cupful so quickly he’s left gasping for air.

When he returns to his desk, cup in hand, his arms are loaded with sticky note pads in every size and color he could find. Squares of yellow and green and orange and purple begin to paper the walls of his cubicle, the edges of his computer monitor, all with the same message scrawled madly across.

646-555-2421

As his coworkers flit about – confident ad salesman Blaine Anderson a tiny cog among them – Blaine fills his cup with water again and again and drinks desperately. He pictures the thin line of Kurt’s lips as he licks water droplets from his own; he imagines the wetness he tastes is Kurt’s saliva. His cum.

Sick.

When Blaine gets home that evening, he sits in darkness and types Kurt’s number – 646-555-2421, long since committed to memory – into his phone. He doesn’t enter his name along with it; instead, he keys in the one word he always thinks of whenever he sees Kurt: Beautiful.

The next morning, 7:48 comes and goes. But Blaine doesn’t return to the coffee shop.