Blaine comes to a halt so quickly as we round the corner that I slam straight into his back. And yes, technically, running in the halls in the dorm building is against the rules, but it’s far from diligently enforced. And we have places to be. Well, one place. And we hadn’t planned on making any stops on our way there.

The halls are usually pretty deserted at this time of the evening – everyone’s either still out, or tucked up in their dorm room already, watching a DVD or studying. But just our luck, tonight is the night when Jeff just happens to be wandering around. And I like Jeff, I really do, but I rather had my heart set on ravishing my boyfriend back in his room, and this is wasting valuable time.

Jeff grins at us. “In a hurry, guys?”

Well yes, yes we are, as a matter of fact. So much so that we abandoned dinner to come back here early. But there’s no way I’m actually going to admit to that. “Not at all,” I say, hoping the lightness in my voice doesn’t sound too forced. “Some people just don’t know how to walk places like a normal person,” I add jokingly, squeezing Blaine’s hip in apology. If my hand stays there to stroke along the edge of his pants, well, I can’t be held responsible. If we hadn’t been stopped we could have been naked by now, or at least getting there.

“Great,” Jeff says, apparently taking my reply at face value. “Maybe you could do me a bit of a favour?”

My heart sinks. Asking Blaine for a favour is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. In all the time I’ve known him, all the months we’ve been together, I can’t actually think of a time I’ve seen him refuse a favour for a friend. (Or a stranger, for that matter.) We could be stuck here for hours. And we don’t have all that long before my curfew.

Our plans seem this close to going up in smoke entirely.

“I was just on my way down to ask Nick,” Jeff continues. “But since you guys are here…”

As I knew he would, Blaine nods. “Sure, what do you need?” There’s a note of tight resignation in his voice, though, that I hope I’m not just imagining. I know he was looking forward to actually having some time together in his room as much as I was. As I still am. Dammit.

“It finally arrived,” Jeff grins, bouncing a little on the spot.

I know I’m just looking at him blankly. He’s probably told me at some point in the past what it is he’s talking about, and he’s almost certainly told Blaine, but my mind is a blank. Again, not my fault. (A whole lot of blood might possibly still be rerouting itself to my brain from another key area. I can’t be expected to remember trivial facts right now. Not about Jeff, anyway.)

Blaine leans back into me a little and tips his head up. “What did?”

I’m guessing my excuse can probably extend to Blaine, as well.

“My poster,” Jeff replies, a ‘duh’ expression plastered across his face. “My map of Middle Earth? I’ve been waiting for it for weeks.”

And now he mentions it, I do recall him talking about it a few times during study sessions and movie nights. It just hadn’t really registered as important.

“And this requires our help because…?” I ask. The arrival of a poster doesn’t seem like a two person job to me.

“It’s huge,” he says, throwing his arms out wide. “Practically big enough to cover an entire wall in my room. I need someone to hold the other end.”

I can feel my hopes starting to lift a little. Hanging a poster shouldn’t take long. Bit of blutac, five minutes and we’re done. We can go back to the original agenda for this evening.

Keeping this in mind, I see no reason to resist when Blaine nods, tells him ‘No problem’, and tugs me down the hallway by the hand.

What I couldn’t have anticipated is Jeff’s indecisive perfectionism when it comes to poster placement. It’s too high, then it’s too low. It’s a little too close to the window. The right side looks a few millimetres higher than the left. I understand wanting things to look perfect, but this is ridiculous.

I’ve lost count of how many times the poster has been moved or adjusted, and time is ticking on. I pull my phone from my pocket to check what time it actually is – nearly half past eight already. It was barely seven-fifteen when we gave up on eating a nice dinner and came back here.

I can’t help but start calculating how much time we have left as I watch Blaine shuffle across the desk to make yet another modification to the positioning of an edge. Curfew at eleven (it’s a school night after all), half an hour’s drive home, ten minutes from Blaine’s room to the parking lot… really not much time at all. Sigh.

The only positive I can take from this situation is that Blaine’s ass looks really amazing in his jeans as he clambers between the bed and the desk to affix sections of poster, occasionally bending over to fix the bottom edge. And, except when I’m called on to give my opinion on how the poster looks (absolutely fine, just like it did twenty freakin’ minutes ago, and can we not be done already?), I am free to ogle to my heart’s content.

“Perfect!” Jeff’s exclamation from beside me – and when did he even move? – startles me out of a short but pleasant daydream about all the things I could be doing with that ass if I could just get it out of those admittedly gorgeous jeans.

Blaine bounces down from the desk to the bed to the floor and comes to stand next to us. The poster looks almost identical to where it was the last three times I was asked for my opinion, but if Jeff is finally happy, I don’t care. “Looks great,” I say encouragingly, mentally crossing my fingers that he doesn’t change his mind and decide there’s something still wrong.

“It does,” he agrees with a wide smile. “Totally worth the wait.”

Blaine’s hand wraps around my back and I can’t resist leaning into it just a little. “Definitely puts your stamp on the room,” he says.

Jeff nods. “I wasn’t actually expecting it to be quite so massive, but I like it.” He turns to us. “Thanks for all the help, you guys. I know you probably had plans.” I see him check his watch and visibly startle. “And this took a bit longer than I thought.”

“No problem, really,” Blaine assures him. “Happy to do it.”

I love the boy, really, I do. But just occasionally I wish he wasn’t so nice. He says things like that and it actually sounds like he means it. He does mean it. The people he cares about always come first with him, which is a good thing, it is. Except for times like this, when we haven’t had any proper time alone for weeks and we’ve just spent half of the time we should have had helping someone else.

Jeff steps forward and half-wraps an arm around each of us in turn. “Still, thanks.” He looks balefully at the stack of books that had been moved from his desk to the chair so Blaine could stand on the desk. “I have a trig assignment still to finish off for tomorrow, so I should let you guys go.”

Yes.

We both nod. “I’m sure I’ll see you soon,” I say.

Blaine pulls me a little closer. “And I’ll see you at breakfast,” he smiles.

I’m not sure my I’m-so-disappointed-we-can’t-stay-and-chat-longer face is really all that convincing as we all say our goodbyes but quite frankly, at this point, I’m beyond caring.

Jeff’s door closes behind us, and I turn to Blaine to suggest we make the most of what time we have left. I don’t manage to even get a single word out. Blaine’s cheerful and helpful demeanour has vanished in a flash to be replaced by the hot eyed desperation of the boy who’d made out with me in my car for ten minutes tonight before we’d decided his room would be much, much better.

I only have a brief moment to take this in before I’m being crowded against the wall, Blaine swaying into me with his whole body – he knows what that does to me – and kissing me fiercely. It’s wet, and sloppy, and I don’t even know if he checked to see if the corridor was empty but none of that matters right now. Not when I finally, finally have his lips back against mine, his need as evident to me as my own.

“My room,” he mutters breathlessly when he pulls back, his nose brushing my cheek. “Now.”

Which sounds like a perfectly excellent idea to me. I nod, pushing off the wall and forcing him to step back enough that I can move.

We trip all over each other as we make our way to the end of the corridor, where his room is. The urge to drag him back against the wall on the way and just kiss him is strong, but I know that if we do that we’ll never get to his room, and that’s not an idea to be stomached. It’s probably a good thing we were already on the right floor and don’t have to navigate any stairs, or one of us could have been in for a serious injury.

It takes him far too long to dig his room key out of his pocket when we get to his door; my fingers are aching to touch him, to get at all that beautiful skin he hides under his uniform or under cardigans or under adorable polo shirt and bow tie combinations that only Blaine could pull off.

My back is against the wall again almost the moment the door slams shut behind us, Blaine pressed against me, his lips on that spot on my throat. I know I have to be quiet – the walls at Dalton are surprisingly thin considering how much it costs to board here – but it’s hard; Blaine knows what I like, and he’s not wasting any time on the warm-up.

“I was ready to kill him,” he growls against my neck. “If he’d wanted that thing moved one more time…”

“Oh God, I know,” I breathe out, pulling him closer. Knowing that the whole process was killing him as much as it was me just fans the flames already burning hot in the pit of my stomach. “Next time.” I have to pull his face up so I can see his eyes for this, not least because I can’t think let alone speak when he does that with his tongue. “Next time I don’t care who or what it is, we are coming straight here no stopping.”

“Fuck yes,” he murmurs, and then I’m being kissed again, hot and dirty and mind-blowing. He tastes so good, he always does, I can’t get enough of it. He pushes closer, moulding his body to mine, tangling our legs and just, yes. I can feel him hard against my thigh, his hip brushing just right against where I’m hard too.

And I need more.

His polo shirt is already open at the neck from our time in the car, so it’s easy to just tug at the bottom, pull it up to expose all that wonderful warm skin. It’s less easy to stop kissing him for long enough to get it over his head, but it’s worth it. No matter how many times we do this I can never get over that expanse of skin, knowing it’s mine to touch, knowing he wants me to touch, knowing just how to touch to drive him crazy.

My fingertips tingle as I trace a familiar pattern across his back – sometimes the touch of fingertips is so much sexier than I imagined it could be a year ago. There’s a soft moan, and I can’t entirely be sure if it started from Blaine or me, muffled between our lips.

My shirt is suddenly slipping from my shoulders, Blaine’s hands burning against my collarbone as he nudges the edges apart; I didn’t even notice him unbuttoning it. Then we’re skin against skin and any control I thought I had is lost.

From there it’s a frantic race to get out of the rest of our clothes; I need all of him, now, and he seems to need me just as much. And there’s kissing, always kissing, never enough kissing.

The wall is cold against my back, but the heat of Blaine against my front, skin-to-skin everywhere, is far more important, far more overwhelming.

I twist just a little, the friction sending shivers right through me, and then our hips align just so and…no, this will never not be the most perfect feeling in the world. Blaine’s cock against mine, hard and wanting and… just… perfect.

Blaine’s mouth leaves mine to press sloppy, panting kisses across my cheek and I have to bite my lip; I want to moan out loud, I want to shout to the universe that this amazing boy, this amazing feeling, is mine, but I know I can’t. Not here.

My hips rock up almost of their own accord, the slide a little rough but incredible. Blaine crowds in closer, the pressure increasing and sending bolts of pleasure through my veins, curling my toes. It’s too much and not enough all at the same time.

The combined girth of our cocks together is too much to get my hand around, but I grasp what I can and the tight friction, barely eased by the pre-come now leaking freely from both of us, is nearly enough to tip me over the edge immediately.

Blaine’s hand joins mine on the other side, and all bets are off, control is abandoned. We find a sort of rhythm, sloppy and uneven but absolutely, perfectly right, hands and hips and the hot, slick slide.

My free hand roams wherever I can reach, every inch of his body perfect under my fingertips. I can’t get enough air to keep kissing him but I try, I will never stop trying.

Blaine brushes a finger over the head of my cock and that’s it, I’m gone. Fireworks burst behind my closed eyelids and I’m falling over the edge, lost in a sea of ecstasy. Every nerve in my body is humming.

I can dimly hear Blaine murmuring my name into my neck as he follows me over, the hot splash over my hand, his fingers tightening to the point of pleasure-pain on my shoulder.

When I come back to myself, I’m on the floor, slumped against the wall with Blaine half on top of me, pressing soft, absent-minded kisses to my shoulder.

“God, I love you,” I whisper against his temple. I know its cliché, but some clichés exist for a reason; every time we do this, that’s the most important thing I’m left with, that’s what fills my heart to bursting. I am so, so in love with him, and everything we do is trivial compared to that.

“I love you too,” he whispers back. The words thrill me every time, even after all these months together, after hearing it innumerable times. I have this, I have him, and he has me, and there’s so much in the future I can’t wait to share with him.

I close my eyes, rest my head on top of his and just let myself drift for a few moments, let myself glory in all that I have.

But reality, as always, has to invade, shattering our perfect bubble. The alarm on my phone goes off, the one I’d set just in case we fell asleep after, the one that said I needed to get up now, get cleaned up and dressed and leave. I can just reach my pants without dislodging Blaine, and I scramble to pull it from my pocket, silencing the loudening beeps.

“I don’t want to go.”

I don’t even realise I’ve said it aloud until Blaine nods against my chest. “I don’t want you to go either.”

I know I have to. If I don’t go now I’ll miss my curfew, and my dad will be mad, and I could end up… I don’t know. If Finn’s punishment the last time he was late is anything to go by, grounded. Grounded and unable to see Blaine this weekend, which I don’t even want to contemplate.

But for now, just for one minute more, I’ll stay.