I’m so glad I found you again.

I hear the words right as I tip into the land of sleep and they swirl around in my dreams, not enough to wake me or jolt me to life, but to plague themselves into the corners of my subconscious, tugging at all the things I know, or assume I know.

When I wake, it’s early, and Kurt is still tucked into my arms, a content smile on his lips as he presses his cheek into my skin. I take a moment to memorize his face and watch as his chest shifts with each breath. He’s truly spectacular. After a moment, the words come rushing back in though, like the dam being lifted, and then I can’t find it in me to sit here watching anymore.

I untangle myself from Kurt, shifting him gently off my shoulder to not wake him, and then crawl out of bed, digging through my drawers for a pair of sweatpants, and then I quietly pad out to the kitchen. When I’m there I heave myself onto one of the stools at the bar and bury my face in my hands.

I don’t even know what the words mean. For all I know he was thinking about someone else. Thinking about someone he used to be with, someone who meant a lot more. I had thought it was just him and me in that bedroom, but maybe there was another, a ghost of a past lover.

I tell myself that it’s nothing to get worked up about. Maybe he meant that he found me again after that first run in at the coffee shop where we had a conversation through glances instead of words. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s nothing I should be getting myself worked up over.

I peel myself off the stool and start rummaging through my cupboards and refrigerator. As confused as I am, it should be a little better after some breakfast. I can make a mean pancake, and I hope Kurt likes them.

I’ve got all the ingredients around the stove and I’m ready to get started when I hear the soft sound of feet touching ground behind me, and seconds later Kurt has his hands running along my sides and around to the front, hooking his chin over my shoulder, mimicking the position from last night in here.

“Do you need any help?” he asks, and I feel my worries and concerns start to trail away with the sound of his voice. He’s the only one who’s ever made me feel like I’m home and I shouldn’t be questioning him so much when it feels like this.

I let one of my hands join and twine with his as I tilt my head back and nose at his cheek, “I was going to make you breakfast.”

He chuckles, “I hope you were going to make some for yourself as well.”

I smile and allow him to press a kiss to my lips. This is how it’s supposed to be the morning after. This comfortable calm, not the worry and questions that have been bombarding me since I heard those words.

“Go, sit down,” I tell him and he lets go with a kiss to my cheek and a hand trailing over my skin. I turn and watch as he walks over to the bar stools and note that he’s found another pair of my sweatpants, and even though they’re a little short for him, he wears them anyways. It makes something flutter in my heart, and even though questions have taken over since this morning, I’m still as in love with him as I was last night.

I watch as he sits down, he looks rumpled, but so very relaxed as he rubs his eyes and then looks back at me and smiles. I shift my eyes away and start making us some pancakes, but I can feel his eyes stay on me as I move around.

After a bit of comfortable silence in which I cook and he watches, I hear him get up and move over to the fridge, pulling out some juice, and then over to the cupboards where he retrieves two glasses. He sneaks a kiss as he brushes by me and then he’s back sitting at the bar. I pull out a few plates, toss the pancakes onto one and join him, sitting across from him in the stool I left opposite him the night before.

We eat for a bit, and he comments on how much he likes the pancakes. I swell with pride at having pleased his expert cooking tastes. And while it’s calm and comfortable, I can’t help it when the questions start flowing back in and I need to know what he meant when he had been drifting into a dreamland.

“You said something last night, and I was just wondering…” I trail off, not knowing where to take this conversation. How to bring up something I’m so confused about. He quirks his eyebrow and I realize that he has no idea what he said, already too far gone to have had any conscious recollection of it. “It’s nothing, never mind.”

“No, it’s fine,” he says, his noise scrunching delicately, “I just don’t know what it was. It wasn’t something bad or embarrassing was it?”

“No, no,” I assure him and then after a moment, jump topics, “Who was it that you ran into that day?”

Now he looks lost, not following the conversation in the slightest bit, and I can’t blame him, I feel scattered enough as it is in my mind. “Who? What day?” he asks.

I wave my hand slightly, trying to act like there isn’t something bothering me and that it’s just a random question. “That day at the coffee shop. When we first met. You said you’d run into an old friend. Who was it?”

His face drops slightly and then I can see him pushing whatever emotion that just pressed forward to the back. “It was, uh,” he stutters, and he’s trying so hard to supress something, but I don’t know why, “Tina. It’s was Tina. She just moved here from Chicago, you know that.”

“Well,” I say nonchalantly, “I thought you said it was a he.”

His eyes flick down to his plate and he’s suddenly nervous. I shouldn’t have brought this up at breakfast, but I’m being hit by something important here. Like there’s something I should know that I don’t and I’m determined to figure it out.

“I must have been talking about Mike, her boyfriend,” Kurt explains. I want to believe him, I do, but he’s avoiding something and I feel like it would affect me if I knew. 

I put down my fork, “Her boyfriend? I thought you said he was special.”

His eyes dart back up to mine and he’s trying to get rid of the subject when he counters with, “Are you alright, Blaine?”

I should let it go. I should say it’s nothing. But I don’t. “You said that you were glad you found me. Again.”

Any shred of hope I had that this wasn’t something he was keeping from me falls away with his face when it drops completely, his careful mask of avoidance gone as his eyes go wide and it’s almost like I can feel him beating himself up inside. “No,” he gasps out, begging me not to ask.

I can feel myself harden. The careful comfort of the morning seeping out in shades of grey along the counters as I place my hands as calmly as possible on it. “So, what is it?” I ask, “I knew there was something about you. What is it?”

His expression is quiet as he blinks hard and mirrors my position with his hands, trying to stay as calm as he can. “I know.”

My heart stops for a moment. He can’t know. He simply can’t. I would know if he knew. My mind rejects all possible outcomes that he knows about those years of my life that I keep hidden away. He doesn’t know. He can’t know.

“Know what?” I croak out quietly, and his face lifts to stare brokenly into my eyes. No. He doesn’t know. He can’t.

Kurt leans against the bar and reaches to hold my hand, but I pull back. I’m so confused and lost and he can’t know.

But he does. And he opens his mouth and I want to shove the words back in before he speaks them. “I know about that last year of highschool,” he explains, “I know about prom.”

I shake my head and try to deflect the words. Try to get them to bounce off my hard exterior. If he knows, then he knew all this time, and he didn’t say anything. He lied to me.

But he keeps talking, and my mind tries to place a visual on the words he’s saying that I know are true but can’t remember, his voice growing hoarser with each word, “I know that you got hit in the head with liquor bottles and assholes’ boots until there was more blood than skin. I know you were in a coma. I know about all of it.”

I don’t remember any of it, but I’ve been told the story more than once. I was a junior in highschool. I went to prom with some friends that I’ve never met since. I was the victim of another gay bashing. It’s always sounded so trivial and the fact that it was always just “another gay bashing” is what made it not feel real to me. It was just another one. Another kid, another incident, another moment of my life I’ll never get back.

And it was simply another one for me, because the last thing I remember is getting beaten to a pulp, but not from this incident, from before. From a Sadie Hawkins dance in the ninth grade. The doctor had said something about how my mind reverted back to there in my memories because it was the last brain trauma I experienced. Majority of highschool wiped from existence for me. I don’t remember changing schools, like I was told I did, I don’t remember friends or homework. I don’t remember any of it.

I was in a coma for two years while everyone carried on with their lives, and that’s the excuse my parents always gave me. They moved on. They couldn’t be expected to stay in Ohio when I wasn’t even conscious. They moved on and away. And I didn’t ask after them because I didn’t know them. What was the point when they cared so little to check up on me?

But Kurt, Kurt knows. And he didn’t say anything for the past two months, and he was trying not to say anything now. I don’t know how he knows all the things I try to forget and hide away while attempting to be just a regular person. I don’t know what’s going on anymore and I feel like my whole world is reeling.

 “How… how do you know that?” I stutter out, rising shakily from my seat to pace closer to the living room. Kurt turns on his stool to face me.

He looks so broken when he answers, “Because I was there, Blaine.”

Everything stops for a minute. The clock stops ticking and my heart stops beating, if only for a moment. I hear my voice break the silence, “What?” Of all the ways I expected him to know, I didn’t consider him actually being there.

“Did you think you went to prom alone?” he asks softly, “You had a date. You had a boyfriend.”

“You.” Suddenly it all clicks into place. The old friend he’d seen that had shaken him. The looks in the coffee shop. All those things he said about senior year and how something had happened that he didn’t want to talk about. That special person. It was me all along.

His face crumbles and his voice turns so desperate, trying to get me to understand all his reasons, “God, I loved you so much and then everything got torn apart.”

But I don’t understand. As much as his voice is pleading with me, I don’t understand. Kurt was my boyfriend. I had a boyfriend and no one told me. No one showed me a picture, no one said a word, and I don’t understand why. “You were…” I trail off, trying to find some explanation for how he loved me, but he left. He left me in a coma and ran off to New York, and I don’t understand how everything I’ve been told was a lie.

 “And I just wanted to stay,” he begs, trying to explain my thoughts and I wonder how he knows just what I’m thinking, and if this came from what could have been years in highschool together, “but, your family… my family, everyone. They didn’t let me stay with you.”

“Why…” is all I can seem to get out. I don’t understand and all that’s filling my head is why. Why would he lie to me, why would my parents lie to me? Why couldn’t he stay?

 “Because I know, Blaine,” he replies calmly, even though I can see it tearing him up inside to say it out loud, “I know everything. I watched you get beaten up while trying to protect me. I watched you slip away that night. And I know that you weren’t supposed to wake up.”

I feel like I should have known it was coming, but it jolts through me when the words leave his mouth. That was something that was never said to me, but I always assumed. They said it was a miracle and wondrous news when I woke, but no one said that they weren’t expecting me to.  Immediately after the jolt wears off, anger starts pulsing through me. “So you… you decided to what?” I bite out, “Play around with my feelings now?”

Kurt looks stung and I wish I could take it back. Something about this is extremely hard for him, and I realize that whether or not he simply left since I wouldn’t wake up, his boyfriend still got beaten around and put in a coma with little to no chance of survival. I’m being angry and selfish, and I feel entitled to it, but I shouldn’t be throwing the punches at him.

“No. God, no,” he’s pleading again. Begging me to understand that there are pieces I’m still missing of the puzzle.

But I’m still angry and I’m trying to calm down. I’m pacing back and forth, my fists clenching and unclenching, “Then what were you doing? Not telling me?”

He wilts and searches my face with his eyes. That same blue that I had thought felt like opening a window, I just hadn’t realized it was a window to my past at the time. “It’s so complicated, Blaine,” Kurt says, “Please, just, can we just sit and talk about this?”

“Alright then,” I say determinedly as I stride closer and sit in the stool facing him, “Story for a story?”

His face instantly turns confused, but his pain is still there and I want to ignore it at the same time I want to comfort him. He shakes his head softly, “What?”

I look him dead in the eye and try to ignore the way his face is filled with concern, pain, and worst of all, pity. I can’t take it, so I get up again and take a few steps away, my back turned towards him. “I tell you what I’ve been told, and you tell me what really happened.”

“Blaine…” his voice is so broken that I instinctively turn back to him, only to catch the tears that have started welling up in his eyes. Everything about him is pleading. Pleading me not to ask, pleading me to not want to know, pleading to not make him relive the past he’s been trying so hard to forget.

But I can’t stand not knowing, having my past be a lie, “No. They lied to me. I want to know what happened.” I take another look at his face and try to place it in my memories from before. Try to find him in the sea of confusion and all the years I lost, “God, I don’t even know you.”

“Yes, you do,” Kurt’s voice is harsh and demanding.

I throw my hands in the air and I can feel the frustration rolling off of me and my hands curl into fists in front of me, urging to knock a hole in the wall, “No, I don’t!”

“I’m the same guy you took to dinner, the same guy you kissed under the stars!”  his voice raises and I can see how hard it is for him not to leap out of his seat. He’s trying to stay calm for me, and this should soothe me, but it doesn’t. All I want to do is scream and hit things for even the audacity of losing those years of my life, and then having false ones put back in. Kurt controls his voice, reigning in his own urge to fight, “I didn’t lie to you about anything other than that I already knew you.”

I shake my head in frustration, “Why did you do it?”

Kurt’s voice is loud again, and it’s years of his own pain that start showing through, “I had to! They obviously didn’t want you to know. They must have thought it would be easier.”

Suddenly my mother’s words from the night I first told her about Kurt come rolling back to me: I just realized that I’ve made some mistakes in my life. This was her mistake. Keeping it from me. Keeping Kurt from me and expecting that I’d never find him again. “How would that be easier?” I ask, and I can feel myself deflating. Going from angry to simply exhausted.

“Because you’d been gone so long, and I was already here, and I’d been trying to move on, I couldn’t, but I was trying,” his voice is thick with emotion and I can hear just how hard all these years have been for him. I lost it all, but he had to live through it. “They said you wouldn’t wake up. I guess they just thought it would be easier if you didn’t know.”

“But, why?” I feel myself grasping for straws, trying to understand just why my family would do this to me. Why they would choose to not give me the truth about all those years. Why they wouldn’t tell me that a beautiful boy was breaking because his heart got smashed along with my head.

 “We were just two kids in love, Blaine,” and he’s wilted now, everything in him falling apart and I realize that he doesn’t have the answers either. All these years, he’s been grasping at the same straws I’m trying to find now, making excuses after excuses. “Who’d have known what would have happened if you didn’t get bashed in the head. Who’d have known if we’d still be together. They didn’t know what it felt like to us. They just wanted to protect you.”

I feel a rush of anger sweep through me again and even as I try to keep it down, it comes barreling out anyways. My voice quiet but harsh, returning to the same question I can’t get out of my head, and asking, “And what about you? Why didn’t you say anything? Why’d you lie to me?”

“I didn’t even know you were awake!” he screams, and it’s like a slap right across the cheek. The pain and anguish on his face so evident that I forget my pain for a moment and see only his. The tears that had been pooling in his eyes breaking free and trailing paths down his cheeks.

“They didn’t want me to know anymore,” Kurt continues, his voice dropping to a less violent pitch, and it only makes his pain more visible as his face crumples. “They stopped telling me about you years ago. They didn’t want me to know, and I couldn’t handle it, so I had to stop asking.”

He’s shaking and I want to pull him in and make it stop, but it hurts too much for me. Every new piece of information I get rolling around in my head and colliding with everything I thought I knew. Kurt’s voice rises again in anguish, yelling for the sake of yelling, trying to rid the ache he’s held onto all these years, “Do you know how hard that was for me? And when I walked into the coffee shop that day and saw you? I didn’t even know you were awake!”

I have to look away when a sob rips through him. His words saying awake, but everything screaming that he didn’t know if I was alive. I don’t know how to take this. I don’t know how to deal with both our pain. I reach out blindly and my hand drags across the wall, giving me a steady hand as I sink to the floor. “That’s why you looked like you’d seen a ghost…” I whisper, more to myself than him, “to you, I was already dead.”

Kurt’s on his knees at my feet in the next moment and his thumbs are swiping under my eyes, catching tears I hadn’t been aware were escaping. “No, you weren’t,” he says fiercely, “You were never dead to me. I loved you, and I never stopped. You could never be dead to me.”

I look up into his blue eyes, tears still leaking from the corners, and all I want is for him to hold me. To protect me and tell me it’ll be okay. And so I snuggle into his chest, grasping his hands and pulling them around me until he gets the hint and wraps his body around me, sheltering me from the outside world and the pain I don’t want to feel.