Chapter Eleven – I Love You More When I’m Missing YouWhen Blaine woke the next morning, he didn’t get that moment of bliss before you remember everything that has passed the night before and reality slams into like a particularly violent bully. From the second he opened his eyes, he remembered, and he couldn’t help but cry as the tortured way Kurt displayed himself last night flashed behind his eyes.Kurt had been so angry last night, angry but broken, clinging to those moments of rage like Blaine was sure he clung to his sanitized and somehow impersonal New York life, because anger and aloofness were as far away Kurt could get from small town Ohio and the way it pervades every aspect of because you have to let more people in and when you let them in they break your heart and leave you bleeding.Yes, Blaine thinks as he looks down at the tear-stained cheeks of the boy he loves, he knows Kurt, knows him like he knows every second of his favourite songs, and the way the sky lightens bit by bit before sunrise. Blaine knows Kurt, because he loves Kurt and loving someone is to them like no one else.But in the same way, he doesn't recognise this Kurt. The one he had made in his head so he wouldn't be alone and so dreadfully guilty for the last ten years wasn't like the real version, ad he wasn't sure if that was good or bad yet.Carefully and quietly, Blaine rolled out of bed without waking Kurt. He needed his sleep, an after everything they had been through, Blaine felt he owed him more sleep and a warm coffee when he woke up, at the very least. It wasn't a long walk to the nearest Starbucks from his apartment, and if Kurt had been awake when he left, Blaine probably would have gone to that one. But today, he needed more time to think, to just walk in the brisk air, on the streets that were full but not to the point of running into people. The sun wasn't even fully up yet, and Blaine felt somehow suspended in time. He needed it. Because there was something that weighed heavily on his mind, something that scared him and made him wish that maybe he had never seen Kurt at the bar, because then he could have kept living his life, not blissfully ignorant but at least pleasantly unaware.Unaware that having Kurt back was just as painful as it had been when they were sixteen. For ten years he had been building up the moment when they would see each other again, and as time went on with no sight of Kurt’s gorgeous eyes, Blaine’s expectations simply grew.Time hadn’t dulled the pain of letting Kurt walk out of his life that night, but it had built on his feelings for him, the ones that were only freshly realised when he had made the decision to let the door close behind Kurt. It was true that absence made the heart grow fonder, Blaine thought. Well, ‘fonder’ wasn’t quite the right word. Absence makes the heart grow more and more swollen with love until you are so obsessed with a memory that the real thing feels false.He stops dead, in the middle of aimlessly wandering a street he never goes on. Because that was it, really. He couldn’t get a grip on this Kurt because he wasn’t the one who lived in his head. He wasn’t the one Blaine had been pining over and destroying himself piece by piece to find. He wasn’t the Kurt that he’d been in love with for ten really really really bloody long years.Obviously he was the real Kurt, Blaine could definitely see that. There was far too much symmetry in last night and the night Kurt raged at Blaine, only to end up on his knees, begging to let him stay. Blaine could see that there was a direct and somewhat disappointing connection from point A to point B and that in the ten years they had been apart, Kurt didn’t seem to have grown.The Kurt in his head never had to plead with Blaine. In all of his imagined scenarios, no matter how he planned them to end, Blaine had always been the one apologising and his reasons would come out in a torrent, mingling with his sorrys and his declarations of love in bright and new colours. Sometimes he imagined that Kurt would silence him with a kiss. Other times he calmly told Blaine to leave, as was only fit.Maybe it was his own way of karma, of cancelling out that one night, but Blaine had always imagined it to be Kurt sitting quietly on the bed and Blaine tearing out his insides and leaving them for Kurt.To have had revert back to the reality last night hit him hard, now that he had time to think of something beyond his heart breaking at every new mark Kurt had unveiled.He didn’t want to see proof that he had Kurt almost as much as, if not more than, he’d hurt himself. Maybe that made Blaine a coward (and secretly he thought it might, thought that’s the true reason why the Kurt of his imagining was so apathetic and hard) but right now, it terrified him.He was tired of hurting Kurt. They’d been back in each other’s lives for one day and had already broken each other to shards. It was too much. Blaine was fine with breaking his own heart, he was pretty used to it by this stage, but until right now, having a panic attack on a crowded New York street, he hadn’t realised the only reason he could breathe and survive was that he’d convinced himself there was a whole (previously wounded but healed) heart residing in Kurt’s chest. That was the only heart he needed.But he had broken it back then, and in one night back, he had burst open the old scars and made Kurt’s wounds bleed fresh.He couldn’t.He’d meant it then, and he meant it now. Blaine physically could not do this to Kurt, not again, not when he knew that Kurt wouldn’t put himself together in new and fantastic shapes and ultimately be all the better for leaving Blaine.Blaine wanted to run, wanted to abandon his apartment with the love of his life sleeping in his bed, and just leave. Leave so he wasn’t given another opportunity to fuck everything up, to destroy the person he loved more than he loved all of existence. He could do it, easily. He had never made ties here in New York for that reason. Blaine didn’t need an exciting life, he just needed one that would be best for Kurt.While he thought this, he realised he’d been walking, his feet automatically guiding him to the Starbucks, reminding him that, epiphanies aside, his body still needed caffeine, and Kurt’s would too.He ordered without thinking, remembering Kurt’s order easier than his own and left the store, the cups points of warmth in his hands.He would have to go back, obviously. Whether or not he ran after that was irrelevant. He had to go back and wake Kurt. Blaine was going to leave him again, but not without an explanation. Maybe if he took the time this time to tell Kurt, to make him understand, then he’d be okay. Or at least better.He had to minimise the damage he’d cause before wiping himself out of Kurt’s life forever.
Kurt was still asleep when Blaine nudged open the door with his foot and placed the coffees down on the table near the door.He crept over to him and just watched him. There he was, just Kurt. Not crying, or yelling. Just peaceful and asleep and so beautiful. Blaine could imagine that this was his Kurt, the unbroken and strong one. The one who hadn’t let one stupid fight ten years ago make him into a different person. Who had learnt and grown up and lived his life like he always should have.This was the Kurt Blaine adored and wanted.But, when he looked closer, there were tear tracks on his cheek, and something fisted angrily in his hands.It was his Dalton tie; Blaine realised with a jolt, worn and old and creased beyond belief. The one Kurt had slipped off him the night they kissed, right before Blaine had bolted. It was the one he had wrapped around Kurt’s arm the night he had found him bleeding. It was everything. Their school years. The best and the worst.Blaine had been filling the gaps with the perfect Kurt.Here was Kurt. The same Kurt he left ten years ago at Dalton. The same Kurt who was the closest thing he had to a brother, then his best friend, then the man who made him realise he was gay, and the love of his life.Blaine didn’t really wanted Perfect Kurt, with his whole heart and unblemished body.He wanted this one, the one who held to a tie like he couldn’t breathe without it, the one who was covered in scars.The one who yelled and screamed and cried and loved like no one Blaine had seen before.The Kurt that Blaine loved.The Kurt that Blaine would always love, whether he was in bed with him, or over the other side of the planet.The Kurt that Blaine knew would die if he left again. And this time, Blaine couldn’t be sure he would survive it either.He got it now. He understood why the universe had thrown them back together for one last go around. Because they had the power to make one more chance into a forever, and it started with Blaine explaining what had happened that night in his head.He softly woke Kurt up.“We need to talk.”