“Offsides! Offsides! NOOOOO!”

The thump of Blaine's ass hitting his seat was echoed by hundreds of others all around them. The bench shuddered, forcing Kurt's attention up from the Vogue in his lap. “What happened?”

“Finn got knocked down,” Rachel said from his other side.

“Sacked,” Blaine corrected. “He was sacked. Because the officials are COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT!” He was shouting again, but then so were most of the other people in the McKinley stands.

“So I shouldn't wave this?” Kurt indicated the little pennant he held in the fingers of one Italian-leather-fingerless-glove-clad hand.

“Not this time.”

Kurt lowered his eyes back to his magazine and flipped a page.

“Why are you even here?” Rachel leaned close to whisper in his ear.

Kurt turned and scooted closer to her on the bench. Not that it mattered. Blaine's attention was completely absorbed in the game. “Blaine has this whole thing about me not missing normal high school milestones because of him. And since there's no way we can go to the homecoming dance together, he decided we needed to come to the game instead.”

Something must have happened on the field because Blaine and a few hundred other people groaned in unison.

Kurt glanced up at Blaine and lifted the pennant and his eyebrows.

“Not yet,” Blaine said with a sigh.

An extra-cold gust of wind smacked into Kurt's face. He left the pennant in his lap long enough to adjust his Himalayan wool scarf higher around his neck. In his opinion, the opportunity to show off beautiful outerwear was the one saving grace of football.

“I don't understand,” Rachel said. “Does he think you'd be going to football games and dances if you'd never met him?”

“You have no idea how often I've asked him that. At this point it's just easier to indulge him.”

“I still don't see why you can't go to the dance.”

There was a collective gasp around them and Blaine leaned forward to the very edge of his seat.

“Because he's still terrified of any kind of display in front of the faculty, or the students, or the freaking janitors for all I know . . . I'm a little amazed he's even sitting with us.” That was uncharitable, but it was cold and the bench was hard and Blaine couldn't hear him anyhow. The crowd noise around them was swelling again.

Rachel shook her head. “If Finn tried to . . .”

An explosion of sound drowned her out. Blaine and everyone else surged to their feet; the bench under Kurt's ass bounced with the sudden loss of weight. He squinted out at the field where someone in a McKinley uniform was running full-speed toward the goalposts, with an entire team of opponents hard on his heels.

“Kurt! Now honey! Wave it now!” Blaine reached down to grab Kurt's hand and pull him to his feet and he didn't let go but clasped their fingers tight together, raising Kurt's hand along with his own as the boy on the field dodged defenders on his way to the goal.

Kurt didn't even notice the Vogue slipping from his lap and dropping down between the bleachers to the ground below. He held tight to Blaine's hand, his pennant whirling like a wind sock in a tornado. When the player crossed the goal line and the stands went crazy, Blaine caught him up in a hug, then Rachel spun him around and hugged him, and from somewhere hands pounded his back, leaving him so breathless and pleasantly dizzy that when they sat back down he slipped his hand through Blaine's arm for balance without even thinking about it. Blaine, still focused on the game, squeezed Kurt's arm and leaned closer, instinctively offering his body for stability.

A poke in his side drew Kurt's attention to Rachel, who grinned at him and mouthed honey?�with a knowing glint in her eye. Kurt knew he was smiling stupidly, but he didnt care.

So maybe outerwear wasn't football's only saving grace.