“Blaine, what the… What are you doing here?”, Kurt hisses down as soon as the window is open.

“Could you come down? Just for a moment?”

And what is Kurt supposed to do? Leave him out there? Careful not to wake Finn, Carole or his father, he walks down the steps and to the hall. And when he opens the door Blaine is there and what Kurt sees makes him gasp. So Kurt doesn’t really think before he pulls Blaine inside, closes the door and drags him along to the kitchen. He turns the lights on and makes a halt under the pendant lamp.

“What have you done?” The bruise covers half of Blaine’s face and he has a small cut with clotted blood under his left eye. “What happened?”

“Nothing, it was nothing. I-“

“Blaine.” The sound of his name silences the boy. “Tell me what happened.”

Blaine sinks down on one of the chairs by the table, but Kurt remains standing.

“I ran into a bunch of guys I used to know before Dalton, and they were not very happy to see me.” The half-crocked smile on Blaine’s face makes his eyes look cold as ice.

“You look awful.”, Kurt says.

“Yeah? You should see the others.” He looks up at Kurt and the smirk is there, but something isn’t right, it is not the same. A crack seems to have appeared in his fa�ade.

“What do you need?”, Kurt asks without hesitation. Blaine seems to be taken aback by the question and Kurt can’t help but wonder why the boy is there, in his kitchen, if he wasn’t planning on asking for help, why he had come to him.

“Hummel, I can’t-“

“What do you need?”, he asks again, arms folded over his chest. Blaine sighs, rubs his eyes, and then looks up again. But he doesn’t meet Kurt’s eyes, they are focused somewhere over his left shoulder.

“I can’t go home like this, my father… I just need somewhere to sleep and I couldn’t… I’m just so fucking tired.”

“You can sleep here. ”, Kurt says immediately. “My dad can’t know though, but it’s okay.” He doesn’t know why he says it, he shouldn’t be inviting a criminal to a sleepover, especially not this criminal, but he does.

“Your motorbike…?”, he asks, pushing his doubts away.

“I parked it down the street.”

Twenty minutes later Blaine sleeps on a mattress on the floor, but Kurt is awake. Blaine Anderson, a convicted murderer, sleeps in his room and if Kurt wants he can reach out and probably be able to touch him. And there is something with Blaine he realizes, something else than that unnerving feeling that pulls him in like a magnet. There is something beneath that cocky attitude and arrogant smirk which makes Kurt ache with something he has never really felt before. And it isn’t with fear his chest tightens, it is something else.