Blaine hated working over his vacations. Wasn’t the point of being a semi-famous artist that he got to make his own hours, work alone, and spend as much time at home having wild and crazy sex with his gorgeous husband as he wanted?

Not this time, apparently. No sir-ee. Since Sea Cliff Village Hall decided to do a complete renovation, including replacing their hospitality-grade art with original work from renowned local artists, he had been stuck in meetings and consultations all week while his husband occupied himself at their vacation home outside the city.

Kurt said he didn’t mind, seeing as they were doing some renovations of their own – a new work space for Blaine, an extension to Kurt’s studio … a nursery. Being alone gave Kurt the opportunity to match fabric samples to color swatches in peace without his husband intervening with his supposed “expert eye for nuance” and his hand down Kurt’s pants.

But Blaine had enough of forgoing afternoon sex in favor of another discussion over whether or not a Monet-inspired acrylic painting of waterlilies would be appropriate for the treasurer’s office or not. He snuck out quietly when a heated argument about abstract public sculptures for the main road islands broke out. He grabbed a blank canvas under the guise of starting a sketch and slipped away in his silver BMW. He hit the interstate and sped home, making it to their cottage in record time.

Blaine loved how secluded it was in this, their small patch of heaven. Tucked far and away from any other living souls, no one complained about the volume of their amorous activities, be it at three in the afternoon, or three in the morning.

And the quiet was ideal for finding Kurt, since he sang whenever he was alone.

Usually.

Blaine stood in the entryway and listened as he shed his jacket, his keys, and his phone, but he heard no singing. Kurt’s Navigator was parked outside so Blaine knew his husband was home. He wandered through the rooms with the canvas tucked beneath his arm, obnoxiously making as much noise as possible to alert his husband of his arrival.

“Kurt!” Blaine called, walking through the kitchen in search of his muse. “Kurt! Where are you, baby? I miss your incredible ass!”

“I thought you had to work this afternoon.”

“I am working,” Blaine explained. “I’m doing a portrait of a gorgeous man, as soon as I find him.”

“No,” Kurt chuckled. “You’re supposed to be doing a landscape for the city planner’s office.”

“No,” Blaine insisted, inspecting another empty room. “I’m painting you. Naked if I have my way.”

“You just want to have sex,” Kurt teased.

“There’s nothing wrong with that. Now, where are you? This house isn’t that big.”

“Out here. I’m installing the track lighting.”

Blaine turned the corner to the patio that they had recently added on to give Blaine a protected outdoor work space, and there was Kurt – his intrepid Kurt – braving their rickety, fifty-year-old ladder in order to install a row of lights. The chrome runner and bonnets gleamed in the midday sun, right in Kurt’s eyes, so he was installing them blind, his eyes shut against the reflected light, feeling around for the holes to put the screws in. Blaine winced when he saw the ladder shiver beneath Kurt’s weight, but Kurt seemed oblivious, balancing precariously on his toes to screw the fixture to the wall.

Blaine put the canvas down and held the ladder secure beneath his husband. “I really wish you’d let me do that. Or, at least, wait till we buy a new ladder.”

Kurt looked down at Blaine with playful blue eyes. “Blaine, this ladder’s fine. Besides, I don’t have that much more to do. It’ll only take a ---” Kurt leaned sideways. The ladder lurched, and Blaine reacted in time to keep Kurt from toppling head first into the retaining wall.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Blaine said, pulling on Kurt’s pant leg. “Get down now.”

“But I only have one screw left.”

“I don’t care.” Blaine tugged more firmly. “Get your ass down off that ladder.”

“Geez.” Kurt huffed, climbing down the rungs. “You certainly have a thing for my ass.”

“Well, it happens to be a glorious ass.” Blaine grabbed Kurt’s behind and squeezed for emphasis. “I don’t want anything happening to it.” He drew Kurt close, relishing the way his husband’s body fit perfectly against his own, as if some higher power had carved them both out of the same slab of stone.

Like they had been specially made for each other.

Kurt tilted his head and pouted in mock offense. “So, you only care about my ass?”

“Among other things.” Blaine captured Kurt’s lips, not waiting for an invitation, trying his best to kiss the pout from Kurt’s lips.

If Kurt’s whimpers were any indication, Blaine was winning.

But Blaine’s cellphone, ringing where he’d left it by the front door, called a foul on his game. Blaine had no intention of stopping, but Kurt seemed to feel that job and responsibility came before they did.

“Um, you should get that,” Kurt struggled to say, his voice muffled by Blaine’s lips pressing insistently against his.

“Nope.”

“But it’s probably city hall, wondering where their artist is.”

Blaine frowned as his husband squirmed to pull out of his arms, laughing at what Kurt called Blaine’s “grumpy face”. Blaine narrowed his eyes at his husband, his expression resolute.

“I’m going to go answer that, but just to tell them to get lost, and then I’m getting you naked.”

Blaine peppered Kurt’s cheeks with kisses to a symphony of his giggles. Then, with a heavy-handed swat to his backside, he reluctantly released his husband and ran inside to answer the phone.

Despite his frustration at having to put his sexual escapades with his husband on hold to answer the stupid phone, Blaine couldn’t help smiling. He loved his life. He loved his marriage. He especially loved the time they spent at their cottage off Long Island. He’d always be a city boy, but this place here was paradise. He loved bringing his husband here and having him all to himself. But recently he couldn’t help imagining a precious little boy or girl in the mix – one with Blaine’s raven curls or Kurt’s stunning blue eyes, who sang the same songs Kurt sang while he or she painted on a pint-sized easel at Blaine’s side.

Blaine and Kurt had been blessed with a wonderful five-year-long honeymoon. Now they wanted a family.

“Coming, coming,” he yelled at his insufferable phone, but he wasn’t exactly rushing to get it, and by the time he reached it, it stopped ringing.

“Oh, no,” he jokingly whined. “I didn’t get here in time. Whatever shall I do?”

It didn’t matter to him anyway, since no power on heaven or earth could have convinced him to leave his husband just as he was preparing to ravish him.

And to make sure they weren’t interrupted again, he turned his ringer off.

“Well, now that that’s settled …”

A sudden sharp noise pricked at Blaine’s ears. Nothing too alarming. In fact, it could have been a bird chirping. But it filled him from head to toe with dread.

He didn’t know how he could possibly feel the ladder tilt from inside the house, but he felt the sway of it as if he was standing on it instead of Kurt. After a swoop of sudden and inexplicable nausea hit him, everything happened absurdly fast. He heard Kurt yelp, a loud metallic clatter, then a horrifying crack, like pottery hitting the pavement.

“Kurt? Kurt!” Blaine screamed in panic, having the sense of mind to start dialing 9-1-1, knowing in his heart that his husband would need an ambulance. “Kurt, honey! Are you alri---?”

Blaine got his answer the second he burst through the patio door.

No, Kurt wasn’t alright.

Kurt definitely wasn’t alright.

***

It rained the day they buried Kurt.

It was such a marked change from the weeks of sunny skies and no clouds. Kurt had mentioned how they needed a good, all-day rain storm to trap them indoors, where they could snuggle together on the sofa and listen to the drops fall. Kurt was a quintessential pluviophile. He found peace in the rain.

Blaine hated the rain. He hated getting wet. He hated when his soaked clothes stuck to his skin and cold water ran into his socks. He hated sloshing inside his shoes, and the way they never completely dried. But as much as he hated the rain, he loved Kurt, and the rain made Kurt happy.

So Blaine became a pluviophile for Kurt.

Blaine stood by Kurt’s casket beside his open grave and waited in the rain. He waited while the mourners paid their respects. He waited while everyone hugged and cried. He waited until the final mourner had wondered somberly away. He waited until they lowered Kurt into the ground, and even after there was nothing left to witness, he waited until nightfall, when the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the stars came out.

Kurt’s father, Burt, returned to the cemetery a little before midnight in search of his missing son-in-law, to convince him to go home, but Blaine refused to leave. So Burt waited with him, not pressing the issue even though Blaine was sopping wet and stifling sniffles that he knew would bloom into a full-blown cold later on.

At some point, Blaine finally came to the conclusion that Kurt wasn’t going to magically return, so he took Burt’s hand and let himself be led away from his husband’s final resting place.

Blaine’s forehead burned with fever by the time Burt got him back to the summer house, but Blaine turned down Burt’s offer to stay. As much as Burt objected, as much as he put up a fight, in the end, he didn’t have the strength to battle his own grief and Blaine’s, and he left the man alone.

Blaine walked through the unlit house, straight out back to the patio, shoving aside a morbid sense of déjà vu. He sat heavily on the wicker chaise and looked up at the clear night sky, but his vision of the stars was obscured by something shiny hanging a few feet above his head.

The light fixture.

The stupid track lighting.

Blaine stared up at it in shock as it dangled on its two screws.

The fixture was there, brand new out-of-the-box, installed except for one damn screw, but because of it, Kurt was dead.

Blaine snapped.

He spotted an abandoned hoe over by the retaining wall, a few feet from where Kurt had fallen. He grabbed it and, with a renewed vigor, attacked the lights.

“Goddamned lights!” he screamed. “What the fuck did we need these for, Kurt? Why did you have to put them up when I asked you to wait!? Why didn’t you wait, Kurt!? Why couldn’t you just sit on your ass and fucking wait!?”

The sound of the hoe hitting the lights and the brick behind it echoed. The force of the blows caused the hoe to vibrate painfully in Blaine’s hands, but he only tightened his grip and struck harder.

“Fuck you, Kurt! Why did you have to put up these stupid lights!?” Blaine screamed, shattering the bulbs and sending a spray of glass falling over his hair and clothes. “I told you to wait! I told you I’d do it! I don’t need the lights, Kurt! I need you, Kurt!”

He pounded the bonnets flat, chipped away a good portion of the brick wall, but it didn’t make him feel better. He didn’t feel avenged. He could pick those lights apart piece by piece, chop them up until they became dust, but that wouldn’t bring his husband back. And why was he taking out his anger on the lights? He should turn that hoe on himself. Why the fuck hadn’t he just held the ladder till Kurt finished? He knew how stubborn his husband was, how determined he’d be to finish something he’d started. Why didn’t he take Kurt’s place and screw in the damn lights himself, get it over and done with once and for all? Those lights didn’t kill his husband, nor the ladder. And it wasn’t Kurt.

It was him. Blaine Anderson-Hummel.

He was the only one to blame.

Panting hard and with blistered palms, he dropped the hoe on the ground at his feet.

He’s the one. He did this. He killed his husband.

He destroyed his own muse.

He stumbled into the house. He rifled through the cabinets for a bottle of whiskey until his hand came in contact with one that felt mostly full, and pulled it down. Except this bottle wasn’t a spare bottle of Jack.

It was Kurt’s solitary bottle of tequila.

Blaine’s first instinct was to toss the bottle up against the wall and smash it. He looked around for an open space to hurl it when he caught sight of his paintings - a new crop of paintings he had started working on for a show in the fall, all of them featuring his muse.

All of them featuring Kurt.

Blaine hadn’t set them up in here. Kurt had. He was so proud of them that he’d displayed them. That way he could look at them while Blaine was toiling down at city hall, wasting his talents painting hillsides and sunsets.

But Blaine couldn’t look at them. They represented everything he’d had and lost in an instant. Being in their presence made him realize that he couldn’t go on this way. He couldn’t keep being the artist he was when the only subject he enjoyed painting was gone.

He didn’t want to keep existing when the only man he’d truly ever loved was dead.

He took a swig of the tequila to steady his nerves. With his body burning hot and fire in his veins, he grabbed up the paintings, every last one, and carried them outside, dropping them in an undignified pile on a patch of bare earth away from the house. He doused them with the tequila, gritting his teeth as the liquid assaulted the paint, causing it to bleed down the canvas, distorting the image of Kurt’s beautiful face, twisting it, like Kurt’s body would eventually be, decaying inside his coffin.

When the bottle was just about empty, he rummaged through his pockets for his silver Zippo.

He didn’t smoke, but he liked keeping a lighter on hand for the rare emergency. And why carry around a common plastic BIC when he could spend over a hundred dollars on something he only used once or twice a year? But that was the man Blaine was.

Frivolous.

Over-the-top.

The center of attention.

Who makes a living as an artist anyway? He didn’t even want to be a painter in high school. But when his trust fund matured and he gained control of it, he realized that he had more than enough money to live the life of a Kardashian and never work a day in his life. On a whim, he began to dally with watercolors and voila! He’d unlocked a secret talent.

But he should have gone to law school, the way his mother wanted. Or medical school, the way his father wanted. If he’d done either of those, Kurt still might be alive.

He’d give it all away, call a complete do over and live his life better, to have Kurt back.

He flipped the lighter open. With a click, a small orange flame sprang to life. Blaine tossed the lighter into the pile. The flame barely touched the heap before the whole thing went up in a blaze.

Blaine stood back and watched it burn, watched the past three months of his life go up in a pillar of smoke. The paint melted, the canvas crackled, and sparks of different colors went flying up into the sky.

“There, Kurt,” Blaine grumbled, his throat raw from screaming. “It’s done. All of it. No more muse … no more you … no more paintings. I’ve buried it all with you. I’m done.”

Weak, tired, and sick, Blaine drank himself to sleep while the love of his life and all of his paintings were devoured by flame. It seemed like too much work to trudge back to the house and climb into bed, so he lay down on the hard-packed earth next to the destroyed canvases. They maintained a slow burn, the air around him reeking of chemical smoke. Blaine hoped that it would seep into his sinuses and suffocate his brain. Or maybe an errant cinder would jump onto his alcohol-soaked clothes and he would burn to death in his sleep. Maybe a sudden temperature drop would freeze him to the ground where he lay. Either way, without Kurt, his bed wasn’t his bed, his home wasn’t a home, and Blaine wished more than anything that he could find the quickest and most efficient way to die.

Blaine had prayed that he would black out, surrender to an unconsciousness where time passed but he would have no memory of it, but he had no such luck. Locked inside sleep, he had the same dream over and over - of Kurt falling from the ladder and cracking his head on the wall. And no matter what Blaine did, no matter how fast he ran, no matter if he never went into the house to answer the phone, Kurt still died.

That was an absolute. It never changed.

Which meant that doctor, lawyer, or artist, Kurt might have still died.

At some point before dawn, Blaine heard a rustle, like footfalls on the ground, and he wrestled through the fog in his brain to open his eyes. If he was going to be mauled by coyotes or a mountain lion, he wanted to know. But what he saw was a man – and a beautiful man at that - approaching the pile as if a sick, drunk, and urine-smelling Blaine wasn’t lying a few feet away. The man bent over the burnt canvases, a shaking hand pressed to his lips, and a small, pained gasp escaped his mouth.

Blaine had an overwhelming urge to reach out to the man, to apologize for setting the paintings on fire, but for what reason, he couldn’t explain. Blaine groaned, trying to form words with his dry, sticky tongue. He rolled slightly, blinking his eyes to get a better look at his paintings’ solitary mourner, but when he opened his eyes, the man was gone, so Blaine fell asleep once again.

Blaine was awoken after sunrise by the sound of laughter breaking through the haze of his fever-induced stupor. It was high-pitched and familiar. It sounded like heaven and home and the future Blaine had always dreamed of having, starting during those days when he was completely clueless of Kurt having a crush on him. When Blaine thought back on the people he had unintentionally flaunted in front of him – Jeremiah, Rachel, and to a point, Kurt’s “nemesis” Sebastian - trying to discover who he really was, he could kick himself. Punch himself in the eye for the time he’d wasted.

All the time he would never get back.

It took him longer than necessary to realize what he’d known from the beginning, on that staircase at school where he and Kurt first met.

He wanted Kurt. He just wanted Kurt.

Blaine peeled open his eyes and craned his head in search of the laughter, fixing his gaze back on the house and the patio that he planned to tear out brick by brick by hand as soon as he was physically able. Somewhere in the midst of his pounding headache and the fog that refused to lift, he saw piercing blue eyes – blue like the sky in summer – staring back at him from behind a golden hibiscus. It was in that exact spot that Blaine had planned for his painting, the one he had rushed home to start, of Kurt lounging on a chaise in front of the outdoor fireplace, with the hibiscus plant behind him, its golden hue mimicking the highlights in his hair.

Blaine sat up too quickly to see who the eyes belonged to and his head started to swim. His stomach flipped and before he knew it, he was on his hands and knees, vomiting all over the ground.

Blaine heaved until there was nothing left in him, eyes squeezed shut as his body wrenched the past several hours’ worth of alcohol from him. As quickly as he could, he looked back at the house with watery eyes, but this time, saw nothing. He dropped his head. It felt too heavy for his neck and he let it hang, blinking the remains of hot tears from his eyes. He caught a glimpse of his hands, filthy and paint-stained, the ruined cuffs of his suit reminding him that he was still wearing it. He pictured himself, black Armani suit covered in dirt and vomit, and knew that if Kurt could see him, he would tear him a new one.

Slowly, ever so slowly, and with that thought lodged in his mind giving him an impetus to move, he crawled back to the house on his hands and knees. He felt lousy with fever, but his head began to clear. Small pebbles cut into the wreckage of his hands, but, unable to get to his feet, he continued to crawl, distracting himself by considering his options.

By the time he made it to the patio, his decision seemed pretty certain.

Blaine didn’t want to live, not without Kurt, and even though he could hear the voices of his family and friends trying to convince himself otherwise, his mind was made up.

He would settle his affairs.

He would make sure the family who had always loved him, who had always supported him, who had loved Kurt like one of their own, was provided for.

He would finish his commissions, complete his obligations.

And when the houses were put up on the market and all was said and done, he would find the quickest, most foolproof way of being reunited with his husband again.